The Current Discussion: What's the next likely target of Russia's reassertion of power?
The Kremlin's next step in its confrontation with the United States could be the establishment of some sort of military alliance with Cuba and Venezuela. One possibility is the reopening of an electronic surveillance base designed to spy on U.S. communications, similar to "Lourdes," the huge espionage center that operated near Havana until a few years ago, when Putin himself decided to close it. That facility now houses a university center for computer sciences, from which at least 100 advanced students, all members of the Communist Youth, participate in an intense propaganda war waged on the Internet in favor of the Cuban dictatorship and Marxist ideology.
Nor is the idea of a Russian military base in Venezuela harebrained. As reported by the German news agency DPA, President Hugo Chávez mentioned that possibility during his recent trip to Moscow, although he later denied saying it. To Chávez, that would be another way to strengthen his power as the leader of what he calls "21st-Century socialism," a Third World political family whose principal foe is the government of the United States.
Shortly before Chávez's trip to Russia, another report circulated that had every characteristic of being a trial balloon launched by Moscow to gauge Washington's reaction: long-range Russian bombers would once again include Cuba in their routine military exercises. Let us not forget that Cuba is 90 miles south of the Florida Keys.
The Medvedev-Putin team may be tempted to respond to Washington near its borders, as Nikita Khrushchev did in 1959 after the United States set up nuclear missiles in Turkey and other regions that shared borders with the now-defunct Soviet Union. The way Moscow today reads the expansion of NATO and the installation of antimissile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic is not that the former satellites are preparing to fight Iran and the Islamic terrorists but that the main purpose of that military alliance is a potential confrontation with Russia.
Perhaps the U.S. State Department's most important objective for 2008 is not how to wage another Cold War against Russia, but how to avoid it. After World War II, in the face of the Soviets' imperial spasm (they were then intent on conquering the world) the policy of containment instituted by Harry Truman made sense -- it helped save Berlin, Greece, South Korea, and maybe Finland and Austria -- but Russia today does not give signs of having the same imperialist appetite it had at that time.
Beginning in 1946, Western Europe, devastated by war and understandably fearful of the Soviet Union, saw in NATO and the U.S. nuclear umbrella a way to prevent Moscow from overrunning it. Today, that perception of danger does not exist in the European capitals, except in the central European countries that in the past were satellites of Russia. For the United States, presenting a united front against Moscow would be a huge task. It would make a lot more sense to initiate an intense diplomatic negotiation to build bridges and prevent a conflict that seems to be the result of wrong calculations, rather than a spirit of conquest.
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