Russia is reasserting itself in Asia

By Joel Brinkley

America’s competitors and adversaries are certainly not greeting President Obama with open arms. During his first month in office, many have given him the stiff arm.

Pakistan made a deal with the Taliban to give it a huge swath of territory in the middle of the country for a new safe haven.

North Korea is threatening war with the South.

Many in the Arab world who had welcomed Obama are now attacking him because he did not denounce Israel’s invasion of Gaza.

Iran launched a satellite into space, demonstrating that it has the ability to construct an inter-continental ballistic missile to match up with the nuclear weapons it is apparently trying to build.

There’s more, but none of it can match the sheer gall behind Russia’s open challenge to Washington. As only the most glaring example, earlier this month Russia suddenly offered to give Kyrgystan, its former satellite state, $2.15 billion — if Kyrgystan agreed to evict American forces from an airbase there.

The United States uses the Manas Air Base to ferry troops and cargo to Afghanistan. The facility, the Pentagon says, is critically important for the war effort — as Russia unquestionably knows. Russia and Kyrgystan are trying to deny that the two decisions are related, even though they came in serial fashion on the very same day: Russia offered the aid. A few hours later, Kyrgystan issued the eviction notice.

Hostile intent

As if that were not enough to prove Russia’s hostile intent, a few days later a Kyrgz lawmaker announced that the parliament would not vote on the base-closure proposal until Russia delivered the first $450 million tranche of aid.

Imagine the outrage if the United States suddenly offered to give Kazakhstan, another Central Asian state, $2 billion — if, in exchange, the Kazakh government terminated Russia’s lease for its space launch center in Baikonur. A hurt, angry outcry would sweep the globe.

Even with all the anti-American sentiment everywhere these days, most people worldwide know America to be a decent, honest state. For all the justified criticism over the invasion of Iraq, the United States is now beginning to pull its troops out. For all the international anger and hatred of George Bush, the American people elected a man who is his antithesis.

The world expects better of America. Not so for Russia. The response to the Kyrgz bribery episode was muted, unremarkable. No one expects much that’s worthy of admiration from Moscow. That’s a sorry situation for an important state.

Soon after Russian President Dmitry Medvedev was caught bribing Kyrgyzstan, he announced that Russia is, as he put it, “ready for full-fledged cooperation” with the United States and other states in Afghanistan. But then, Medvedev listed the conditions for this generous offer: NATO will have to stop accepting new membership applications from Eastern European and Central Asian states. The United States must abandon its missile-defense plan.

This “offer” came at the end of meeting with Russia’s regional allies at which they agreed to form a joint military force, to counter NATO.

The real message behind all this, it seems, is Russia’s determination to show Obama that Russia controls Central Asia. If Washington wants to make deals and arrangements there, it needs to come to Moscow, not Bishkek or other regional capitals.

Typical hypocrisy

Well, the hypocrisy there is typical for Russia. For the last couple of years, Russia has been buying influence in Latin America — and bragging about it. Central and South America are as much America’s neighborhood as Central Asia is Russia’s. As an example, in Ecuador last fall, Nicolai Patrushev, secretary of the Russian Federation Security Council, said with no reticence that his country wants to collaborate with Ecuadoran intelligence “to expand Moscow’s influence in Latin America and offer a counterweight to the United States.”

Obama, and George Bush before him, have seemed so determined not to open a new Cold War ... that they have let the Russian leaders walk all over them.

X Joel Brinkley is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for The New York Times and now a professor of journalism at Stanford University. McClatchy-Tribune.