Tuesday, May 17, 2011

US flexes muscle in the Black Sea

The United States agreement to deploy missile interceptors in Romania in return for two military transit bases on the Black Sea region has the Russian strategic community up in arms as US anti-missile defenses would break the regional power balance. There is historical poignancy that the Black Sea ceases to be a Russian “lake” – since the Biblical times, in fact. The geopolitics of a wide arc leading all the way from the Balkans to Central Asia will never be the same. In the "chronicles of the new great game", it's no coincidence Moscow is also reviving the Soviet-style "mutually beneficial partnership" with Iraq.Read my article in the Asia Times.

1 comment:

Aristarch said...

"Lavrov might have intentionally drawn attention to the nature of his mission to Iraq when he joked at the press conference with Zebari that he hoped the letter he delivered to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki from President Dmitry Medvedev wouldn't "find itself at WikiLeaks"."

Thank you for pointing out this interesting phrase by Sergei Lavrov. It could be worthy of von Metternich, for it has not one, not two, but three semantic layers. Bravo to Mr. Lavrov! He manages to get his point across without leaving the constraints of the politically correct, Western-friendly discourse that's imposed on him by President Medvedev.