Cornucopia
Page 110
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The idea that Western democracy - as preached by illuminated idealists, philosophers, do-gooders and the like - could take root in the Middle East was stillborn. Grafting Western notions of secularism, rationalism and, above all, democracy was an impossible task. The Arab Spring had withered: Egypt had reverted to military dictatorship; Libya was torn by civil war; and Tunisia, from where hope had sprung, was struggling as its tourist industry had all but collapsed after terrorist attacks had left dozens of tourists dead.
The Noble Peace Prize awarded to Tunisia’s National Dialogue Quartet was symbolic of the Arab World’s lost cause. The divisions of the Arab world were a vestige of WWI; the ill thought out division of the Ottoman Empire; the creation of the State of Israel; and the world’s voracious appetite for oil.
The West’s vision of democracy had led the fight against totalitarianism and dictatorship, which had been long and bloody: Korea, China, Vietnam, Soviet Russia, Afghanistan, South and Central America and now the Middle East, but in terms of auto-determination those wars had borne little fruit.
Certain had successfully transformed their economies, others had reverted to neo-authoritarianism, as for North Korea it had become the worst example of a dynastic tragicomic state, its leader a more terrifying version of Charlie Chaplin’s Herr Hynkel.
The George Bush’s invasion of Iraq, based on flawed intelligence related to weapons of mass destruction, concocted by his administration, had led to a decade of bloodshed and a war that transformed centuries of simmering discord between the two great pillars of Islam into a bloody confrontation: the Sunnites led by Saudi Arabia and the Shiites by Iran.
The division of the Arab world had been secretly agreed in May 1916, as WWI raged. Sir Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot were appointed by the British and French governments respectively to decide the fate of the Ottoman empire, which had sided with the Central Powers.
Russia would get Istanbul, the sea passages from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean and Armenia; the British Basra and southern Mesopotamia; and the French a slice of the Lebanon, Syria and Cilicia. Palestine would become an international territory.
After the defeat of Germany and its allies the map underwent a number of changes, however the principal of the Sykes-Picot carve-up remained with the seeds of future conflicts: the irreconcilable promises made to Arabs and Jews, the cause of a quasi permanent conflict between Israel and the Arab world.
The patchwork of the Middle East’s conflicting populations was visible in the Syrian civil war where hundreds of thousands of its citizens died and millions fled, seeking shelter beyond their borders, as the butchers of ISIS wreaked terror and Russia jumped into the fray.
Russian warship fires cruise missile
Russia’s spectacular and unexpected intervention in Syria boosted Putin’s image as a post-Soviet hero at home as the war in Ukraine ground to a halt and the euphoria over his annexation of Crimea faded. Russian warships launching cruise missiles from the Caspian provided a welcome diversion from the bad news on the economic front, the result of sanctions, falling oil revenues and a devalued rouble all which were starting have their effects.
Were the doomsters always wrong? Throughout history there had always been prophesies of things to come and in particular those of mauvaise augur, including those of Michel de Nostredame (Nostradamus), Moshe ben Maimon (Maimonides) and the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, not forgetting those of every religion known to man.
Bad things really did come to pass and in every civilisation. One needed to look no further than Assad’s Syria to find a modern day example. Death and destruction had been wreaked in that small country on a scale not seen since the Wars of the Crusaders. For centuries a delicate balance had been preserved between the multiple factions of Syrian society by its rulers, more especially the Ottomans. Syria as a nation state was new, arbitrarily determined by the Sykes-Picot plan. Damascus, however, it had been at the centre of regional politics for centuries and as such its peoples had known relative peace and prosperity.
Suddenly, in an unforeseeable wave of revolt, it was torn asunder by an unimaginably barbaric conflict, a mosaic of conflicting interests in civil war that pitted one community against the other, igniting religious hatred, political chaos, reducing the country to a rump of its former self with Damascus and its suburbs surrounded by rebel held fifes.
What had provoked the frenzy of killings: the barbaric beheadings and torture of Syria’s citizens, the barrel bombing of cities, towns, hospitals and schools?
The brutal breakdown of human society was never far away when extremist forces were set in motion. Beyond the strife torn Middle East was the Ukraine and nearer home the spectre of the possible collapse of Greece.
Unlikely? Why? Less than twenty years previously the Balkans had been torn apart by a terrible civil war. The stakes were high as Brussels and Berlin played a deadly, drawn-out, game of poker with Athens, the result of which could leave the south-east corner of Europe prey to political adventurers of all kind.
HARD TIMES
Almost immediately after his disembarkation at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport, John Francis spotted the signs Russia’s deepening economic crisis. There was a discernible hardening of faces, recalling times past when Russians’ struggled to survive during the chaos of the Yeltsin years and a reminder of his first visit to Moscow at the time of Leonid Brezhnev, then a city veiled in secrecy and fear, when few ordinary Russians dared exchanging glances with strangers.
That Russia was running out of money had alerted rating agencies, prompting them to issue a stream of alerts warning lenders and investors alike of the country’s fast deteriorating public finances.
Behind the visible war in Syria, in which Putin had embroiled his country, was a war of stealth led by Saudi Arabia and its Sunnite allies, in which the principal arm was oil. By flooding markets with low cost oil there was no prospect of short term recovery for Russia, and beyond Saudi Arabia’s role was America’s shale oil industry, a deadly arm if used to undercut prices and prevent Russia from borrowing on world markets at affordable rates.
To pay for his war Putin gambled his country’s foreign exchange reserves, a desperate ploy considering the government’s huge budget deficit, which had reached alarming proportions as oil and gas revenues dwindled after having accounted for half of the government’s budget during the boom years when oil reached one hundred and more dollars a barrel.
In its desperation the government squeezed oil and gas companies to bridge the gap, a move that would surely hobble their investments for the development of new fields, a souvenir of the short-sighted policies during Soviet times.
Bloated defence spending had driven Brezhnev’s Russia into a dead end and Putin’s government with its immoderate ambitions was heading down the same road spending billions on sophisticated military aircraft and missiles for its armed forces.
The idea that Putin could wave a magic wand and relaunch Russian manufacturing was ludicrous, there was no way Russia could compete with China, the USA and the EU. The USSR with its empire and satellite states had not succeeded in building a competitive economy and a dramatically reduced CIE had no chance, unless it regressed to autarchy, a Soviet style economy producing shoddy, but costly, consumer goods, cars, computers and all the rest.
As it was its non-oil exports had fallen by a quarter in 2015, despite a fifty percent devaluation of the rouble, as had investment levels.
The Russian economy economy was shrinking at an alarming rate. Even before the ongoing crisis long term forecasts had projected a decline in its economy given the country’s structural difficulties, and especially its declining population. On a comparable scale in dollar terms its economy was half that of France, smaller than that of Texas, or the size of Spain’s. The idea that Russia was a self sufficient world power to be reckoned with was risible … if it wasn’t for its nuclear arsenal.
Visiting Ekaterina’s family Francis learnt rea
l incomes had fallen nearly ten percent and food prices had jumped almost twenty percent, a disaster for the average Russian family, confirmed by the words of a former deputy economy minister, who remarked if things continued in the same direction the average family would soon be spending half of its income on food.