Russia is a superpower no longer, so what is behind President Putin’s bold actions toward Hamas, Iran, Eastern Europe and China? Russia will play a critical role in geopolitics and globalization in the 21st century. No longer a superpower, it is still a superplayer.
by Cecil E. Maranville
A self-confident Vladimir Putin took a reporter's tough question head-on last February. The question had to do with whether Moscow was using its control of natural gas supplies as a political tool. The reporter was referring to the Russian company Gazprom, which forced Ukraine to accept a huge price increase in January. Because the Kremlin owns a controlling interest in the giant oil and gas company, Gazprom's policies are Russia's polices.
Russia wants membership in the World Trade Organization, which would not look favorably on what amounts to Russian imperialism, meddling in the Ukraine to hobble its pro-Western government.
But rather than step back from that impression, Putin shot back to the reporter's question: "We still have plenty of nuclear rockets, too!" (Owen Matthews, "Russian Nukes Redux," Newsweek International, Feb. 13, 2006). Such bravado would hardly comfort the WTO. He added that new Russian missiles were capable of out-maneuvering any missile-defense system. The last comment was for Washington, as the United States is the only nation with such a system.
Putin's speech played well to the Russians, with whom he remains popular (he won his second term with 70 percent of the vote; his closest rival received only 14 percent), but it's all for show. In reality, the new missiles are only in the development stage, and the rockets and submarines needed to launch the missiles are themselves nearly past their period of usefulness.
A decade from now, according to Russian security expert Dr. Aleksei Arbatov, "Russia is likely to have just 500 warheads...to America's 2,000 state-of-the-art nukes" (ibid.).
