İnternational Herald Tribune de okuduğum bir yazı hoşuma gitti. Onu buraya olduğu gibi kopyalayacağım. Yukarıda da gazetenin linki var. Sesli olarak da haberleri dinlemek mümkün İHT de. Bunu çok büyük bir kolaylık olarak takdir ediyorum. Özellikle gözleri görmeyen veya gözleri ile ilgili problemleri olanlar için hoş birşey.
Başlık bu yazının içinden alınmış düşünceler: Cold War II. Gerçekten bittiğini zannettiğimiz bir 'filmin' tekrarı gibi.
Yine de Amerikan ve İngiliz gazeteciliği başka dildeki birçok benzerlerinden daha iyidir.
Yazıda mesela olan şeylerden ve şimdiden, gerçeklerden bahsediliyor. Almanca yazıların çoğu bir kere zaman problemlidir. (yani o anki problemler yerine tek taraflı, eklektik tarihi bir bakış açısı sunulmaya çalışılır) Artı süregelmekte olan bir şemaya uydurmaya çalışan daha tutucu bir tarzı vardır. Artı 'essentialist' (özcü, zaman ve yer ötesi) bir tavır takınmayı severler.
Bu da her türlü düşmanlığı uzatmak veya olmayanları da icat etmek için birebirdir.
Mesela birçok gazete herşey ideolojik bir savaşmış veya kültürler arası bir savaş varmış gibi göstermeye çalışırken, dümdüz basit gerçekleri yazmayı ihmal etmek bazılarının hoşuna gidiyor.
Bu yazıda gayet güzel bir şekilde Amerika ve Rusya arasında Avrupa ve Asya da yer alan bazı ülkelerin hammaddeleri için bir yarış olduğundan bahsediliyor. Ki bu doğru ve gayet mantıklı.
('The two countries are now openly competing for influence in Europe, in the Caucasus and in Central Asia, where access to natural resources and military bases has become paramount for both. ' )
Alman gazeteciliğinde 'Biz daha üstünüz, barbarlar bize saldırıyor.' tezi hala hakim ve bu beni hasta ediyor. Sanki Asya nın enerjisine muhtaç olan Avrupa değilmiş de, Avrupa zaten üstün ve autark bir yapı olarak dünyanın her tarafına 'iyilik' getirip, hammadde 'götürme' ayrıcalığına kayıtsız, şartsız sahip bir entite imiş gibi bahsediliyor. 'Çaktırmadan' sömürmek hayalleri hala...
Bu yazı ayrıca benim bazen bu blogu yazarken düşündüğüm 'World for Dummies' gibi tahayyülerime de uyuyor. Bunu pozitif bir şekilde düşünüyorum, alaycı olarak değil.
Russian-U.S. ties hit new low
By Steven Lee Myers
Friday, February 16, 2007
MOSCOW
The good news about President Vladimir Putin's acerbic assault on
American foreign policy in Munich last weekend is that the bad old days of global ideological confrontation — of blocs and proxy wars, dissidents and
spies, arms races and mutually assured destruction — will probably remain in
the dustbin of history.
The bad news is that Cold War II could
be just as messy.
For all the talk of strategic partnership and even personal friendship between
Putin and President George W. Bush, the relationship between Russia and
the United States has reached its lowest point since the Soviet Union collapsed a decade and a half ago. And with presidential elections in both countries coming in 2008, it is unlikely to get better, since candidates rarely score
points at home by being conciliatory abroad.
The two countries are now openly competing for influence in Europe, in the Caucasus and in Central Asia, where access to natural resources and military bases has become paramount for both.
The Bush administration's plan to build ballistic missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic is viewed with outright hostility here. So is NATO's flirtation with Georgia and Ukraine, both former Soviet republics that Russia considers, rightly or wrongly, part of its historic sphere of influence.
Equally hostile is the American view of Russia's arms sales to Syria, Venezuela and, most worrisome of all, Iran. Russia last month provided Iran with $700 million worth of TOR-M1 antiaircraft batteries whose likely target in the event of conflict would be American fighters and bombers, just as Russian antitank weapons, originally sold to Syria, were used against Israeli forces fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon last year, prompting diplomatic protests from Israel.
The areas in which Putin and Bush have cooperated closely — terrorism and the spread of nuclear weapons — suddenly seem like sources of confrontation as often as collaboration. The deal this past week with North Korea to suspend its nuclear programs offers hope of collaboration, but a declaration by Russia's top general that Russia could withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty — negotiated by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 —
portends the opposite.
"There was an equilibrium and a fear of mutual destruction," Putin said in his Munich speech, delivered at an annual trans-Atlantic security conference. "And in those days one party was afraid to make an extra step without consulting the other. And this was certainly a fragile peace and a frightening one, but as we see today, it was reliable enough.
"Today it seems that the peace is not so reliable."
Russia and the United States are no more likely to go to war than before, when their nuclear arsenals assured a perpetual standoff, as they still do. But potential flashpoints abound. And, as in the Cold War, it would not take much for simmering tensions to become a grave breach, even a violent one.
Last September, for example, someone in South Ossetia, the Russian-supported enclave in Georgia, fired on a helicopter carrying the Georgian defense minister on the same day that a U.S. Senate delegation that included John McCain, an Arizona Republican, was flying around the region.
"Can you imagine if they had shot down John McCain's helicopter?" Andrew Kuchins of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington said.
Putin's speech, which prompted comparisons to the one by Winston Churchill in 1946 that gave
the world the phrase "Iron curtain," almost certainly reflected Russia's newly rediscovered swagger
on the world stage.
It could become as much a historical marker. Buoyed by soaring energy prices, Putin's Kremlin has become more assertive about its role in the Middle East, in Asia, in Europe — and inevitably that means tripping over American interests in those places.
Putin was also airing long-simmering grievances about the heavy-handedness of American foreign policy that began under President Bill Clinton and continued under Bush. A constant refrain here has been the United States' chronic disregard for the country's feelings on issue after issue since the 1990s — from the expansion of NATO to the alliance's war against Serbia — when Russia
was simply too weak and chaotic to do anything about it.
"The West has not reckoned with the quick revival of Russia," said Alexander Rahr, a Russia expert at the German Council on Foreign Relations. He stopped short of predicting Cold War II but said, "We can surely speak of the emergence of a cold peace."
After reaching out to Bush in the first hours after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Putin and others here have expressed dismay at what they view as a string broken promises: an unfinished war in Afghanistan, with a growth of heroin production that inevitably makes its way through Russia, and even worse the seeming permanence of an airfield in Kyrgyzstan that had been touted as temporary. Then there is the war in Iraq, which Russia vehemently opposed and which Putin warned would be catastrophic for regional peace, presciently in the end.
American officials have expressed equal dismay with Putin's unmet promises on democratization and an "energy dialogue" that was supposed to expand opportunities for American oil and gas companies but died with the Kremlin's campaign to impose state control over natural resources.
Putin spent the week after his Munich speech in the Middle East, including Qatar, another major producer of natural gas, expressing interest in a "gas OPEC" that could coordinate policy and prices for Europe and the United States.
"That is what worries me about a new cold war: Both sides feel betrayed," said Sergei Rogov, director of the Institute for the Study of the U.S. and Canada.
Rogov said that the two countries now disagree on economics, politics, military matters and, most important, values. The latter includes distinct worldviews: Russia's desire for multinational solutions that give it a voice versus American unilateralism that, especially under Bush, disdains the constraints of international treaties and obligations. Increasingly they seem to be talking past each other.
The most ominous development, Rogov said, would be a breakdown in cooperation on nuclear non-proliferation. To turn the tide of nationalistic ambitions to acquire nuclear weapons will require both countries to agree, as they did with North Korea but have yet to do with Iran's nuclear programs. "If we fight, politically not military," he said, "who will be minding the store?"
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