News 14 Jan

This about Politics, tagged , , , was written by for on January 14, 2008

President Putin’s visit to Bulgaria to bring pipeline deal, NPP contract

A new company is being created, in which Russia will own a 51% stake, to build a pipeline to carry Russian oil via the Bulgarian Black Sea port of Burgas and Greece’s Alexandroupolis on the Aegean, so as to bypass the congested Bosporus. It will pump 35mn metric tons a year, though capacity can eventually be increased to 50mn.

Atomstroyexport, Russia’s state nuclear equipment monopoly, has also been awarded a contract, estimated at 6bn $, to build two reactors for Bulgaria’s second nuclear power station in the town of Belene. According to Foreign Minister Lavrov, more agreements could be signed on Putin’s visit to the country, timed to coincide with celebrations of the 130th anniversary of the liberation of Bulgaria from Ottoman rule by a force led by Russia’s Tsar Alexander II.

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Towards a New Russian Century?

This about Futurism, tagged , , , , was written by for on January 11, 2008

EDIT 11/27/08: Since writing this, I have come to realize that peak oil is real and will play a major role in any future scenario, and far sooner than the other three themes I highlight here.

The twentieth century was, above all, a Russian century. Granted, Germany was the most important challenger Great Power in the first half of the century, while in the second the United States begun to assert itself on the world stage. Nonetheless, Russia, under its Soviet incarnation, was the key focal point of world history. It is hard to imagine a movement like Nazism arising in Germany, or indeed fascism in general, without the spectre of communism hanging over a country. Similarly, the US was only brought permanently out of its traditional isolationism by the Truman Doctrine – their pledge to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures”, or, in other words, to contain communism.

This article will be about Russia’s place in the world in around 30 years time. In particular, will it be able to reclaim its former mantle as a superpower? Does it have the potential to usher in a new Russian century?

Firstly, we must define what a superpower is. Let us assume that it is a state with a leading position in the international system and the ability to influence events and project power on a worldwide scale. Furthermore, it must be strong on multiple planes of power – not only in the military sphere, but also in ‘softer’ areas like the economic base and cultural influence.

(Chinese political scientists have developed a metric for state power called Comprehensive National Power. There is no generally agreed-upon method by which different components of power are weighted and totalled. Nonetheless, virtually all of them have the US leading the pack, with Russia, Japan, China, France, the UK and Germany following behind in a cluster.)

Today, the world’s only country with the whole plethora of attributes – economic, technological, political, military and strategic – that make a state a superpower is the United States. Nonetheless, there are important trends at work that threaten to undermine this full-spectrum dominance. We have identified the three most important of these as economic (re)convergence, exponential growth in IT and global climate change.

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