RÚSSIA

[Bolovo]

Russia test launches RS-18 ICBM















O míssil estava guardado a 31 anos...

[Oziris]

Fale o que for dos russos, mais uma coisa é fato. Tem que respeitar o urso.

Ninguém gostaria de enfrentar um míssil desse.

[]'s

[vmonteiro]

que pena, perdi um momento historico da punição desse senhor PT, fracamente ja era hora de cortar suas pernas.

[Paisano]

vmonteiro, esse seu comentário é de uma infelicidade...

Punição a um usuário não é e nunca será motivo de alegria ou comemoração.

Muito pelo contrário.

[Adriano Mt]

É impressão minha ou todo PT é problema ?

[cabeça de martelo]

Para mim...não!

Ele excede-se de vez enquando, é bastante anti-Espanhol e vê os Russos com muita desconfiança. Mas tb é uma autêntica enciclopédia e tem o melhor site destes temas na língua Portuguesa.

Vmonteiro não cante de galo que muito ainda pode acontecer...

[Wolfgang]

Putz, o PT é um grande cara. Texto claro, profundo... Ele pode até exceder-se algumas vezes, como diz nosso Hammer Head, mas no geral, posso afirmar com certeza que a perda dele por um dia que seja, é irreparável.

[Penguin]

WORLD AFFAIRS
The Realist Resurgence
Russia is weaker than it looks, which is why NATO's soft-power strategy can still prevail.


By Christopher Dickey, John Barry and Owen Matthews | NEWSWEEK
Published Oct 11, 2008
From the magazine issue dated Oct 20, 2008

High over the Bering Sea where the black Arctic sky bends toward Alaska, Russian Tu-95 Bear bombers moved in for the kill last week. In rapid succession, cruise missiles dropped from beneath them like deadly spawn, fanning out toward their targets. Eleven thousand kilometers away in the warm waters south of Florida, a Russian naval squadron approached, carrying more megatons of nuclear weapons than the Cubans ever dreamed of during the missile crisis that brought the world to the edge of annihilation in October 1962. The Russians' goal: to link up with the military forces of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, who has cast himself as the successor to Fidel Castro in leading hemispheric hostility to the United States of America.

Geopolitical thriller writer Tom Clancy could set this scene. Flashbacks would provide the context: Moscow's punitive invasion of little Georgia last summer; its tanks and missiles parading in Red Square last May; its coffers filled with hundreds of billions of dollars paid by Western Europeans addicted to Russian gas and oil; and the vows of former KGB operative, former president and now Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to use this war chest for an ever more powerful military machine. Clancy could make it all sound like, well, the eve of World War III. But State Department spokesman Sean McCormack last month made the latest Russian operations above the Arctic and in the Caribbean, dubbed "Stability 2008," sound more like a joke. Sneering at the weakness of Russia's fleet en route to Venezuela, McCormack said, "We'll see if they actually make it there. Somebody told me they had a tugboat accompanying them in case they break down along the way."

All is not what it seems in the new cold war, if such a thing exists—and most leaders in NATO insist emphatically that it does not. The world is too interdependent, they say, to allow that sort of global standoff. Russia is not the Soviet Union. And the Western powers don't want to be drawn into a game of bluff that will only inflate Putin's prestige. "One cold war is enough," U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Putin to his face at a conference in Germany last year. In Washington, where policy fell prey to political fictions for much of the Bush administration, the mantra of the moment is "realism." For too many years the White House looked at the world through a crude, dialectic lens—"with us or against us," "war or appeasement." Since Gates took over at Defense in late 2006, he has demanded from the waning administration "a pragmatic blend of resolve and restraint." U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, for her part, talks about a "uniquely American realism." It has an idealistic tinge favoring friends and allies who share Western democratic values. But, that said, Rice's brand of realism readily allows an autocratic Russia, or for that matter China, to be accepted as competitive on some issues and embraced when cooperative on others.

The approach harks back to the days 60 years ago when University of Chicago professor Hans J. Morgenthau led what came to be known as the realist school of international relations. "Foreign policy must be conducted in such a way as to make the preservation of peace possible and not make the outbreak of war inevitable," he wrote. Moderate, reasonable, focused on clearly perceived national interests, he warned against "the crusading spirit," insisted on looking at the political scene from the viewpoint of other nations, and advocated compromise on any issue not absolutely vital to a country's well-being.

Such views have always been a hard sell with the U.S. public. Especially after an incident like the invasion of Georgia, Americans tend to hanker for definitive confrontations and conclusions that smell like victory. To talk about responding with what Gates calls "nonmilitary tools of national power"—what others call "soft power"—sounds soft, period. (You won't hear the phrase cross the lips of any presidential candidate.) But when you have the preponderance of power, you can husband your resources and still contain your adversary.

That was the point Sean McCormack was making about Russia's rickety fleet. Moscow is not the threat that it wants to appear. With more than 5,000 nuclear warheads and its status as the world's largest energy exporter, it cannot really be called a paper tiger. Not militarily and not economically. But in both respects it is a pretty dysfunctional bear. "The Russian military is still a lot more bark than bite," says Alexander Kliment, an analyst at the consultancy Eurasia Group. During the cold war the West used nuclear weapons as an equalizer, backing up an inferior conventional force. Now that's what the Russians are doing. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the country has invested most of its defense money in maintaining its nuclear weapons, while conventional forces were left to decay. "Now it's 20 years later," says Kliment, "and the better part of the Russian Navy is rusting in dry docks." The country has a single aircraft carrier, compared with a dozen in the American fleet. Russian troop strength at 1.2 million is about a quarter of what it was in 1986 and morale is low. "A Russian soldier has fewer rights than a Russian prisoner," says Valentina Melnikova, the head of the Union of Soldiers' Mothers. One Army lieutenant, who despaired after repeated attempts to point out the disastrous condition of his barracks, recently made a rap video (to an Eminem tune) showing the decrepit plumbing and filthy corridors, then posted it on YouTube. The lieutenant was ordered to transfer to Siberia.

Putin has been promising huge new infusions of cash to solve some of the military's problems, and on the financial front his government wisely built up an enormous reserve of some $600 billion in foreign currency over the past nine years. But those monies may be needed now to stave off economic disaster, not re-create the old war machine. Russia's fortunes are tied directly to the volatile price of oil and gas, which is headed down sharply as the world economy slows. Russian markets started hemorrhaging capital even before the confrontation in Georgia, then took massive hits when the shock waves from the global credit crisis started rolling over the country in September. The Moscow bourses had to stop trading several times in September. Last week they dropped 21 percent in a single day. Even before the current crisis, the scale of Russia's $1.3 trillion economy was roughly on a par with Mexico's and Brazil's, well behind China's (at $3.3 trillion) and the United States' (at $13.8 trillion).

The second salient point appreciated by today's realists is the role NATO and the European Union played transforming the old Eastern bloc into a collection of increasingly prosperous democratic states and, yes, steadfast allies who share U.S. values. In the 1990s NATO was at a loss to justify its original hard-power reason for being. If the Western Europeans' rationale for the alliance after World War II was "to keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down," the fall of the Berlin Wall put an end to that game. There weren't going to be any European wars of the kind NATO was created to fight so it would have to adapt to small conflicts elsewhere. The catchphrase in the halls of Brussels became "Out of area or out of business." And soon enough, those little wars were found: first Kosovo, which was a quick, relatively clean victory in 1999, then Afghanistan, a fight that has gone on for seven years and is getting uglier by the day.

The story of NATO's soft power was different. The collapse of the Soviet Union had left a vacuum in Central Europe, and NATO rushed to fill it, not with troops, but with ideas about good governance and democratic societies. To vulnerable new regimes, the alliance held out the tantalizing prospect of membership with guarantees of defense under Article 5 of the treaty. But that came at a price. According to Ronald Asmus, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for Europe, in the 1990s "the administration consciously used potential membership in NATO as a 'golden carrot' to encourage the countries of Central and Eastern Europe to consolidate political and economic reforms, resolve minority issues and border disputes and establish civilian controls of the military." The expansion of NATO was "values driven," not militarily driven, Asmus said. As the EU expanded its membership, too, the borders of "the West" were pushed east from the Elbe by 1,600km. Not a shot had been fired, not a brigade deployed. Soft power had triumphed.

But success brought its own complications. Analysts as distinguished—and as tough—as former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz now regret the lack of attention paid to the Russians' pride in the 1990s when the country was poor and its people often felt humiliated. "What they have sought, sometimes clumsily, is acceptance as equals in a new international system rather than as losers in cold war to which terms could be dictated," the elder statesmen wrote jointly in an op-ed piece earlier this month.

NATO tried to discourage its new partners from embarking on campaigns to build up conventional war-fighting capabilities that might look provocative to Moscow. War with Russia, no matter how weak the Kremlin had become, was not what Brussels wanted. In fact, the American administration was looking for NATO's new members to fill useful niches for its far-flung "war on terror," whether in Iraq or Afghanistan. But the aspirants inevitably saw their training in a different light. Ultimately, their grudges were against Russia.

Georgia became a case in point of this simmering animosity—and of Morgenthau's dictum to "Never allow a weak ally to make decisions for you." Though the little country in the Caucasus was not a NATO member, U.S. military trainers were teaching local troops basic tactics for counterinsurgency operations. In a stunning miscalculation, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, paying too much attention to talk of "common values" with the West, made the decision to attack South Ossetian rebel positions, which caused the Russians to move in to relieve their allies. NATO stepped back, not forward, which was the unpalatable but prudent thing to do. Moscow's military, whatever its shortcomings, then rolled over the Georgian troops like a lawn mower over an anthill.

Since then, the realists have stayed their restrained course, and events have strengthened their hand. Immediately after the fighting began, the United States, NATO and the EU demonstrated openness to compromise with a sensible Russian government—a role President Dmitry Medvedev quickly adopted—but they showed contempt for the flailing bear. Gates told a conference at Blenheim Palace, where that bulldog of a realist, Winston Churchill, was born, that Georgia would be rebuilt with $1 billion of U.S. money to help it get along. Its ties to the West would be strengthened. But "Russia faces a decision: to be a fully integrated and responsible partner in the international community, which we would welcome, or … to be an isolated and antagonistic nation viewed by much of the world as little more than a gas station for Europe."

For now, the Medvedev faction, at any rate, seems to have made its choice: reintegration, not isolation. Last week Russian troops withdrew from the checkpoints they'd established deep inside Georgia and pulled back to the contested enclaves where they were before last summer's war. But the tensions are likely to continue at least as long as NATO's expansion goes on, and the encirclement of Russia, politically if not militarily, progresses. In every direction Moscow looks, its neighbors (and former provinces and satellites) have signed Individual Partnership Action Plans that are the first step toward joining the military club in Brussels. Since Georgia signed up in 2004, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Moldova and Kazakhstan have, too. They are a long way from the North Atlantic, but right in the middle of the Near Abroad.

Since the fighting in Georgia, NATO is also finding it harder to fudge its commitments to new members. Paris, London and Washington may claim they do not see the Russians as their adversaries, but the Baltic states sure do, and they are pushing for concrete ground defense plans that they've never had from NATO before. All the while, despite Medvedev's moderation, hawks on Russian state television continued to trumpet the military might demonstrated by the Stability 2008 exercises. The machos in the Kremlin seemed determined to show that if the United States and NATO could play around in Russia's backyard, Russia could play around in America's. So the fleet led by the Kirov-class guided missile cruiser Pyotr Veliky (Peter the Great) continued toward Caracas. And so, by last report, did the tugboat.

With Barrett Sheridan in New York and Anna Nemtsova in Moscow

[Penguin]

The anti-West



An axis in need of oiling
Oct 23rd 2008
From The Economist print edition

Russia, Iran and Venezuela have been making common cause. A plunging oil price may stay their hand, but the West should still watch out

Illustration by Claudio Munoz
IT WAS one of George Bush’s catchier turns of phrase—the “axis of evil” consisting of North Korea, Iran and Iraq. How evil, or even menacing, they really were is debatable. And it was not much of an axis: Iran and Iraq hated each other. North Korea exported nuclear know-how, but probably no more than other countries such as Pakistan, a supposed American ally.

Of late another trio, bound together by dislike for America, and confidence based on surging energy revenues, has appeared: an “axis of diesel”, as some have named it, comprising Russia, Iran and Venezuela. At least before the present financial crisis, the trio had been hobnobbing happily. Russia has sold billions of dollars’ worth of arms to Venezuela and blocked Western attempts to slap tougher sanctions on Iran. The Kremlin is also selling air-defence systems to the Iranians.

Yet in this case, too, the idea of an “axis” is exaggerated. Each of the trio has different aims. Venezuela wants to create an anti-American block in Latin America. Russia likes the idea of challenging the United States in its backyard: a suitable response to what it sees as American meddling in Russia’s own neighbourhood, where its president, Dmitry Medvedev, claims “privileged interests”. But Russia’s backing for Venezuela is constrained by its ties to other countries in the region, such as Brazil.

Similarly, Russia likes to play the “Iran card”, signalling to Mr Bush that he may have to give ground in, say, Georgia if he wants help in the Middle East. But as far as any outsider can say, the Kremlin does not want Iran to have a bomb.

So the common interests of the three countries are mostly tactical, not strategic. The same applies to China, which is a co-founder, along with Russia, of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, a loose security club. Having snubbed Russia over Georgia, China’s top priority is not gloating or spoiling, but salvaging the world economy, including that of America, which is a crucial outlet for its goods.

The “diesel” trio did gloat at first over the West’s meltdown. But they overlooked one of its effects: a plunge in oil prices, and hence their own revenues. This unwelcome news is likely to sharpen distinctions between them. Fyodor Lukyanov, a Russian foreign-policy pundit, says his country will have to prioritise. “Trying to achieve everything won’t fly any more.” The focus, he thinks, will be more on nearby countries and less on Latin America, not least because Venezuela will have less cash to buy Russian weaponry.

Indeed, the end of the oil boom may spell doom for that country’s populist leader, Hugo Chávez. Oil has been his political oxygen. When he took office in 1998 the price was $11 a barrel. It peaked in July at $147. Since then it has halved. Oil accounts for 90% of exports and more than half of government revenues. At home it has paid for what he calls “21st century socialism”: chiefly a torrent of central government spending, up from 22% of GDP in 2001 to 32% now. Mr Chávez also spends freely from the off-budget National Development Fund (Fonden), while Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), the state oil company, has been required to divert part of its investment budget to social spending.

Oil has also financed an anti-American alliance. More than a dozen countries in Central America and the Caribbean receive a total of some 300,000 barrels per day (b/d) of Venezuelan oil on easy terms (of which 93,000 b/d go to Cuba). Venezuela has spent heavily to support Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega and the opposition FMLN in El Salvador.

The price of cold turkey
For each $10 drop in the oil price, the government gets $5 billion (1.4% of GDP) less in revenue, according to LatinSource, a consultancy. Mr Chávez said this month that an oil price no lower than $80 was “sufficient”. But the economy is already deteriorating. Oil-dependency has risen; nationalisation, bullying and meddling have deterred private investment; a fixed and overvalued exchange rate has stoked imports. In 2006 growth was 10.3% and inflation 17%; the latest growth figure is a 7.1%; inflation is 36%. Foreign debt is up from $30 billion to $44 billion. The cost of credit has risen. Opaque statistics make it hard to gauge Mr Chávez’s room for manoeuvre. Fonden may contain some $15 billion; central bank reserves are about $27 billion. But the underlying trend is clear.

A devaluation risks setting off a downward spiral of inflation and rising poverty. As Mr Chávez scales back spending he will have to choose between losing influence abroad or losing popularity at home. Already he has quietly cancelled a promise to build an oil refinery in Nicaragua.

On the face of things, Russia looks better placed than its two friends to resist shocks; before the turmoil, it had built up the world’s third-biggest stash of currency, at more than $500 billion. However, the Kremlin has been spending heavily to prop up the rouble, bail out banks and plug holes in its budget. Apart from falling oil prices, a big cloud on the Russian horizon is falling oil output, a trend that looks hard to reverse without massive investment—and there are many other things Russia has pledged to invest in, from an expanding military to its own creaky infrastructure.

Compared with Mr Putin, Mr Chávez is less involved in the global financial markets and even more prone to blame everything on an American-driven fiasco. “There’s a spectre going round the developed world that was of its own making,” he said this month. “Like Frankenstein [sic]…it went around the world and then went back to his maker.” The first test of whom Venezuelans blame will come in local and state elections on November 23rd.

Thanks to sanctions, Iran is the axis member least exposed to the world economy. But the oil price fall will hit it hard. Some 80% of Iran’s government revenues come from energy. A drop in income is unlikely to make Iran slow down its nuclear programme, or end support for Israel’s armed foes. The nuclear efforts date back 20 years, predating the oil-price rise. But a sagging oil price will hurt the domestic economy and compound the woes of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Unlike Russia, which had prepared for a rainy day, Mr Ahmadinejad has been investing Iran’s oil money in a different future: his own. Energy subsidies alone are about 12% of Iran’s GDP; and energy revenues prop up the government budget. Inflation is at least 30%, up from an official 20% in February. The former central bank chief, sacked for resisting populist spending policies, has accused Mr Ahmadinejad of “looting” the bank’s assets. Merchants recently went on strike in several cities, including Tehran, over higher sales taxes.

Even before the oil price fell, some senior Iranians had criticised Mr Ahmadinejad for stoking confrontation with the West and making it easier for the United Nations to impose sanctions. Yet a falling oil price puts more pressure on Iran’s economy at a stroke than have several years of international sanctions.

The main aim of the “diesel” countries will now be to try to prop up falling prices. Iran and Venezuela, both members of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), have called for it to cut output. Iran’s energy minister insisted defiantly this week that “the era of cheap oil is finished.” The cartel’s members are sufficiently worried about the falling price to have brought forward their next meeting by three weeks, to October 24th.

But Saudi Arabia, OPEC’s biggest producer, which would be responsible for the biggest share of any reduction in output, has not yet endorsed the idea of a cut and will not want to do all the cutting itself. It can withstand lower prices better than most, since it can balance its budget at an oil price of just $49 a barrel, according to the IMF. Iran and Venezuela, by contrast, need about $95 to make ends meet, according to Deutsche Bank.

Those fiscal straits will make Iran and Venezuela reluctant to forgo revenue by making cuts of their own, setting the stage for a row over quotas with Saudi Arabia. Yet the Saudis will not be unhappy to see Iran, a regional rival, squirm. What is more, says Leo Drollas of the Centre for Global Energy Studies, a consultancy, they are unlikely to agree to big cuts for fear of further blighting the world economy. There is also the question of whether the cartel will stick to whatever agreement it reaches. In the past, cash-strapped members have frequently cheated.

In sum, Iran, Russia and Venezuela are all likely to be left short of cash—and facing a diminution in their international clout. “Never confuse brilliance with a bull market,” goes a Wall Street saying. The leaders of the oily trio may have thought high oil prices were an adequate substitute for good governance. In many quarters, the difference is now painfully clear.

[thicogo]

Russia test launches RS-18 ICBM















O míssil estava guardado a 31 anos...

Gente uma curiosidade, que tipos de combustiveis dos ICBMs e lançadores russos e chineses usam?
Por que em comparação aos lançadores e misseis ocidentais que produzem muita fumaça no momento do lançameto, e os russos e chineses não!!!

[LeandroGCard]

Gente uma curiosidade, que tipos de combustiveis dos ICBMs e lançadores russos e chineses usam?
Por que em comparação aos lançadores e misseis ocidentais que produzem muita fumaça no momento do lançameto, e os russos e chineses não!!!

Os mísseis ocidentais utilizam todos combustível sólido, e por isso lançam uma quantidade enorme de fumaça ao serem disparados. Já os russos ainda mantêm um certo número de mísseis, como o próprio SS-18, que utilizam combustível líquido estocável (baseado em combinações entre compostos de hidrazina e de ácido nítrico), e este tipo de combustível gera bem menos fumaça. E pelo que sei todos os mísseis chineses de maior porte também utilizam combustíveis deste último tipo.

Atualmente considera-se que mísseis IRBM e ICBM de combustível sólido sejam o estado-da-arte em termos de sistema de armas, pelo fato de poderem ficar muito mais tempo estocados prontos para o lançamento com muito menos supervisão que os de combustível líquido, que são tremendamente perigosos. Por isso no ocidente todos os mísseis agora utilizam combustível sólido. Mas motores-foguete de combustível sólido de grande porte (digamos, com mais do que 1,5 ou 1,7 metros de diâmetro) são mais complicados de desenvolver e construir que os de combustível líquido do mesmo porte, por isso estes últimos são preferidos por países que estão começando na área (Coréia do Norte, Irã, etc...), e no caso da China são mantidos como base do programa de mísseis provavelmente para não desviar recursos no desenvolvimento de uma tecnologia totalmente diferente da que eles já dominam. Mas na Rússia todos os novos mísseis de grande porte também já utilizam combustível sólido.

Leandro G. Card

[Carlos Mathias]

O TOPOL-M, que vai ser o míssil padrão na Rússia, usa comb sólido.

[Rui Elias Maltez]

Para mim...não!

Ele [o PT] excede-se de vez enquando, é bastante anti-Espanhol e vê os Russos com muita desconfiança. Mas tb é uma autêntica enciclopédia e tem o melhor site destes temas na língua Portuguesa.

Vmonteiro não cante de galo que muito ainda pode acontecer...

Subscrevo por inteiro.
Rui

[Paisano]

Para mim...não!

Ele [o PT] excede-se de vez enquando, é bastante anti-Espanhol e vê os Russos com muita desconfiança. Mas tb é uma autêntica enciclopédia e tem o melhor site destes temas na língua Portuguesa.

Vmonteiro não cante de galo que muito ainda pode acontecer...

Subscrevo por inteiro.
Rui

Tenho a mesma opinião.

O problema do PT é ser "anti" em excesso, beirando o fanatismo, e tal atitude em 99,99% das vezes contradiz o Regulamento do Fórum.

Sinto ter sido obrigado a punir o PT, mas, como já escrevi anteriormente, fiz e tenho a minha consciência tranqüila.

[dalmofm]

Se eu dissesse dos brasileiros metade do que o pt diz dos russos (e dos espanhois, outro exemplo) "gostava" de ver as reacções.[/quote]




Também vejo um "Q" de Xenofobia no PT...
Seria um prazer saber qual a opinião dele a respeito dos brasileiros!