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August 31, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 7
Yeltsin re-elected in 1996, lifting his ratings from 8% to 54% by using the whole box of dirty elec- toral tricks and then boasted about it in a Time magazine cover story “Yanks to the Rescue – the secret story of how American advisers helped Yeltsin win.”
Putin went on to equate the US funding of pro- democracy NGOs as attempts to build a pro-US democratic force that would act as a fifth column inside Russia. He finally introduced a law forcing NGOs that took foreign grants to be ladled “for- eign agents” in July 2012, which was about the same time as he started the modernisation of the army, which marks the point of no return in the decaying relations between Moscow and the west.
The annexation of the Crimea followed two years later, immediately followed by a big push to set up a Russian payment system and so break Washing- ton’s potential chokehold over executing financial transactions using cards via SWIFT. The Mir (Peace) payment system was launched in April 2015, a move the Germans are now intending to copy.
Like Nuland saw Yanukovych, Putin sees Merkel as a person he can do business with. The per- sonal chemistry between them is not strong, but they are both pragmatists, both totally on top of their game and both acting from a very clear idea of what is in their national interest. And the bot- tom line is a multipolar world built on negotiation, debate and compromise that is what Putin has been pushing for all along.
“We also need a new Ostpolitik, that is, a European Ostpolitik that also shows new ways to cooperate with Russia in the interests of all European countries — and not merely those chosen by Russia, given the dangerous silence between Washington and Mos- cow,” Maas said. “It must take into account the needs of all Europeans... and it must find a balance between security interests, economic cooperation and col- laboration on cultural and academic matters.”
Indeed, Maas’s agenda of an independent military power and independent payments systems, and the calls for a Europe led by a Franco-German alliance that has the same clout as the US could have all been taken from Putin’s own playbook. And Russia will have to play a role in any future multipolar order.
“We are striving for a multilateral alliance, a network of partners who, like us, are commit- ted to sticking to the rules and to fair competi- tion,” Maas concluded. “Our common response to “America First” today must be “Europe United!””
Of course these changes and these new bod-
ies are not going to come overnight. It is going to be a long slow process, full of twists and turns, reversals and idiosyncrasies. But merely adding three billion socialists to the capitalist world has unleashed tectonic forces that can’t be contained. It is perhaps, as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”