How to Treat Your Friends
// The price of the question
What should or should not be done with Venezuela? Developing economic cooperation with countries – even in the long-term – should be done, and Venezuela is no exception. But it should be done not for the sake of a political alliance with its president, but for new markets. Did they calculate the profit margin on their new projects? And recalculate them after the crisis hit? Ask the gas and aluminum industries one more time if it is still logical to move to Venezuela, rather than somewhere closer? If the answer is yes, sign. And in several years, when the government is giving account of itself before the State Duma, it can boast of its successes.
Military cooperation needs to be developed as well. Let’s not be hypocritical. The buyers of Russian weapons are no angels, and the Americans do not sell them to Sunday school teachers either. Russia does not have many hi-tech products that are in demand on the international market. But buyers should be warned that, if the one of the products finds its way into the hands of drug dealers, relations will be instantly severed.
And the visit of the Peter the Great to Venezuelan waters is also a good thing, just like the flight of the “White Swans” over the far-off Caribbean basin. If a country has such weapons, they should be tested on long-distance routes. It tests the equipment and trains the crew, maybe even in joint exercises with fine Venezuelan sailors. But we will also remember that real military cooperation between the Russian and Venezuelan fleets is only possible in the imagination of those hawks (of whom we have very many) who dream every night of a new Caribbean or an operation to liquidate NATO forces in the Black Sea. There has to be a clear line between raising the flag, as every military fleet does, and rattling the sabers, in a region where we are not dominant.
It is also a good thing to diversify foreign ties. To show that we have friends on the continent that the Americans had considered their backyard is good. But it cannot be forgotten that stimulus for the friendship is real but negative – to create a geopolitical counterweight to the U.S., which many regimes in the region are now quarreling with. The motivation for our former little brothers in the socialist camp to make friends with the Americans is even bigger. Of course, it is to spite Moscow, but there are also politics, economics, values and ideology. Without “soft power,” the geopolitical union will be shaky, and Russia has not gained in soft power, even as the George W. Bush administration was squandering that country’s.
What should not be done is to fawn over Chavez and Fidel Castro and pull tricks like enlisting him into the Don Cossacks (no one warned them that he is Catholic?). Playing to the vanity of a person with dictatorial traits leads to nothing good. If the Bourbon King of Spain was irked into non-regal expression “Why don’t you shut up?”, think of the words we will be using when the cooperation reaches a dead end.
Boris Makarenko, chairman of the Center for Political Technology
All the Article in Russian as of Nov. 10, 2008
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