Back to the G-7!
For the past year, Russia has held the presidency of the “Group of Eight,” or G-8, the exclusive club of powerful nations which together account for about two-thirds of the world’s economic productivity. What a strange turn of affairs! For the G-8 is supposed to represent the interests of economically modern liberal democracies, and Russia is neither economically modern nor a liberal democracy. Moreover, in its foreign policy it is increasingly acting against the interests of the other member states. The time has come, therefore, to reevaluate Russia’s membership in the G-8, and if necessary to revoke that membership in order to preserve the integrity of the G-8, to prompt change on the part of Vladimir Putin, and to signal the gravity of the issue in advance of the 2008 Russian presidential election.
Following the fall of the Soviet Union, the Western powers began gradually integrating Russia into the G-7, which then consisted of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan, and the United States. This effort at integration was primarily a gesture of good-will and an intended stimulus to liberalization, rather than a decision based on the economic and political realities of post-Soviet Russia, which were, internally, still in great flux, and never more than shakily aligned with the West.
Now, under Putin, Russia has backslid on the gains it did manage to make during the 1990s, and has become increasingly willing to abuse its energy resources to manipulate its immediate neighbors and aggregate power to the executive. Flush with oil revenue, the Putin regime has badly undercut the rule of law at home, imprisoning or silencing dissidents, and reversing the process of political decentralization begun in the 1990s. As a necessary consequence, it has thereby compromised the process of economic modernization that depends on governmental transparency, an independent legislature, and a fair legal system. Intellectual property rights, fair and free trade practices, and science-based standards for economic policy have all suffered. In foreign policy, the Putin regime has waged an unconscionable war in Chechnya; has sought to influence politics in Ukraine, the Caucasus, and the Baltic states; and most recently has effectively annexed offshore oil fields in the Sakhalin Islands area. Today, Russia lines up more closely and consistently with China and Iran than with its G-8 “partners.” The Alexander Litvinenko radiation poisoning case, even if not directed by the Kremlin, has the fingerprints of the Russian government, or elements within the Russian government, all over it, and the Kremlin’s investigation into Litvinenko’s death is about as convincing as O.J. Simpson’s search to find “the real killer.” But maybe this sensationalistic case, by virtue – or vice – of its sensationalism, will be what it takes to begin to bring Westerners to their senses.
For the Europeans, in particular, have been singularly reluctant to confront Russia over any of its growing list of misdeeds, given their dependency on Russian oil (a dependency, incidentally, which the elder President Bush sought in vain to warn against), and given their profound aversion to conflict. The United States, for its part, now finds itself ensnared in a misguided conflict in Iraq that has drastically weakened its ability to exert influence in other geopolitical spheres.
But there are still options for taking a principled stand on behalf of important Western values, and sometimes we need to choose confrontation over conciliation. That doesn’t always have to mean military action, of course, but it does mean standing up for something once in a while rather than allowing economic “interests” to lead us around by the nose. And G-8 membership is a perfectly legitimate issue on which to hold ground. Russia didn’t really belong in the G-8 in the first place, and now that under Putin it has slid backward into authoritarianism and economic gangsterism, what’s the point?
A number of Congressmen from both sides of the aisles – most visibly John McCain and Joe Lieberman, but also quite a few others from both the Senate and House – have called for the United States to take a harder line on Russian membership in the G-8. This is not exactly a “progressive” position, but perhaps it should be, for the big losers under the Putin regime have been the Russian progressives themselves.
Printer-friendly version