The old empire strikes back
Saturday, 25 August 2007
Syed Fattahul Alim
The era of two superpowers and with it the discourse of global power balance is over. In absence of that balance of power in a bipolar dispensation that kept the world in a state of suspense for half a century, the scenario of international politics and power has changed in a qualitative fashion. With only one great power of that cold war era left to flex its muscle, the world is now witnessing a fractured view of the reality through a sham imitation of the grandeur of bygone days. It is, as it were, the past is being re-enacted as a charade in the twenty-first century, though the condition of that time is no more in existence.
The consequence of that global imbalance is evident everywhere on the surface of the planet. As expected, the emerging world is becoming more and more unpredictable and unexplainable. New kinds of war have engulfed the world. These wars have no particular frontier. It is as if the big mirror has cracked into a thousand tiny mirrors which are producing a distorted and fractured image of the big reality. The war on terror, the rise of the extreme and militant right, a new culture of branding communities and states and spreading hate campaigns targeting one another in an orchestrated fashion and so on are all the syndromes of this splintered era.
While the lone superpower is trying to retain the bygone era of superpower rivalry through engagements with elusive enemies and frontiers, the other superpower that fell from its grace after the political implosion of the 1990s and has been licking its wounds since is dreaming to regain its past glory. Despite the fact that it has lost its ideological authority and military superiority, the renewed dream of revival is based on the money earned from sale of gas and oil. Since it was once a global leader in both civilian and military aircraft-making as well as space science, the old empire is attempting to stage a comeback riding on that old treasure trove of know-how about military technology.
On that score, the other day, Russia organised an air show at Zhukovsky on the outskirts of Moscow titled MAKS-2007. Luke Harding of the Guardian reports on that air show in the following words.
" Vladimir Putin announced ambitious plans to revive Russia's military power and restore its role as the world's leading producer of military aircraft yesterday.
Speaking at the opening of the largest air show in Russia's post-Soviet history, the president said he was determined to make aircraft manufacture a national priority after decades of lagging behind the west.
The remarks follow his decision last week to resume long-range missions by strategic bomber aircraft capable of hitting the US with nuclear weapons. Patrols over the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic began last week for the first time since 1992.
Presidential aides hinted yesterday that Russia could shortly resume the production of Tu-160 and Tu-95 strategic nuclear bombers, now that the aircraft are again flying "combat missions". The bombers would be used as a "means of strategic deterrence", a presidential aide, Alexander Burutin, told Interfax.
Mr Putin said Russia would also resume the large-scale manufacture of civilian planes. "Russia has a very important goal which is to retain leadership in the production of military equipment," he said.
The new emphasis on Russia's revived military prowess comes against a backdrop of deteriorating relations with the West. Mr Putin has denounced the US's missile defence plans in Europe, scrapped an agreement with Nato on conventional armed forces, and grabbed a large, if symbolic, chunk of the Arctic.
Yesterday a senior Russian general warned the Czech Republic it would be making a "big mistake" if it permitted the US to use its territory. Yuri Baluyevsky, Russia's military chief of staff, said Prague should hold off any final decision on the shield until after next year's US presidential elections.
"I do not exclude that a new administration in the United States will re-evaluate the current administration's decisions on missile defence," he said, after a meeting in Moscow with the Czech defence minister, Martin Bartak.
Speaking at yesterday's MAKS-2007 international airshow, Mr Putin said: "Russia, as a state that has acquired new economic capabilities, will continue to attach special importance to high technology and development."
Analysts, however, took issue with Mr Putin's claim that Russia was already the leading producer of military aircraft. However, they acknowledged that Russia had developed some impressive "technologies".
These include a new S-400 missile and aircraft interceptor system, similar but better than the US Patriot, and a lethal new supersonic cruise missile, the Meteorit-A.
"They have some very good kit," one industry observer said.
Russia also used yesterday's air show - held at Zhukovsky, a former Soviet airbase on the leafy outskirts of Moscow - to show off its latest generation of jet fighters.
These include an upgraded Sukhoi jet, the SU-35, which has a new engines and a new radar system, and a revamped "vector thrust" MIG, the MIG 29-OVT. "They are good aircraft. The MIG can do a very lovely flip," the industry observer added.
One analyst said Mr Putin did not want confrontation with the west but was determined to restore Russia's strategic parity with the US.
"Russia wants balance. It wants a strategic balance with the US," Ivan Safranchuk, a Moscow-based expert on defence, told the Guardian.
"Russia wants to do this as cheaply as possible. But with the Bush administration withdrawing from arms control treaties, Russia is saying it is also ready to keep the balance at a high level of cost."
Asked about Russia's resumption of long-range bomber patrols, Mr Safranchuk said: "It's significant. For 15 years the political leadership was constraining the military on this. Now it isn't."
In the 1960s and 1970s the Soviet Union produced more civilian planes than any other country in the world apart from the United States.
After the collapse of communism, Russia's impoverished government rastically cut spending on its aircraft industry. Factories producing military lanes fared better than those building civilian aircraft, mainly because of buoyant sales to India and China. But Russia started to fall behind the west in the design of advanced fighters and other military aircraft.
Mr Putin is now determined to make Russia the world's third-largest manufacturer of passenger jets - after the United States, with Boeing, and the European Union, with Airbus.
Russia's passenger airlines own about 2,500 ageing aircraft - of which just 100 are western-made models - although they fly one-third of all Russian passengers.
Last week Russian officials said they planned to build 4,500 civilian aircraft by 2025, while the Kremlin has pledged £125bn to boost the civilian industry.
As part of the plan to boost significantly Russia's civilian aircraft industry, a new state-controlled organisation, the United Aircraft Corporation, has been created.
It is led by Sergei Ivanov, Russia's hawkish first deputy prime minister, who sat next to Mr Putin during yesterday's air show - and the leading candidate to succeed him after next year's presidential elections.
Max Delany of Moscow Times says: As expected, the opening day of MAKS brought a raft of deals, including the sale of Sukhoi jets to Indonesia, an agreement for a joint venture between U.S. giant Boeing and domestic manufacturer VSMPO-Avisma, and even plans for trips to Mars.
In soaring temperatures, industry representatives from almost 40 countries crowded into the events at more than 75 pavilions, eyeing up aeronautical hardware and a host of potential deals.
Amid much backslapping, the first deal of this year's event was struck between state-run arms exporter Rosoboronexport and Indonesia for the sale of six Sukhoi fighter jets worth $300 million, Rosoboronexport chief Sergei Chemezov told reporters.
The memorandum of understanding came on top of a previous $200 million deal for four Sukhoi jets, signed with Indonesia in 2003, and could see Sukhoi deliver three Su-30 and three Su-27 fighter planes.
Sukhoi, part of the recently formed, state-run United Aircraft Corporation, is also looking to push its flagship civilian Superjet-100 project at the show. The company announced Tuesday that it had received a commitment from the state-owned Development Bank to fund potential international sales of the jet.
Elsewhere on the first day of the biennial event, leasing company Ilyushin Finance confirmed that it had clinched a series of eye-catching deals, estimated to be worth a total of almost $600 million.
The company, also part of UAC, signed a contract with airline Rossia for 12 short-range An-148 regional jet aircraft and a memorandum of understanding for one Il-96-300 passenger plane, Ilyushin Finance spokesman Andrei Lipovetsky said.
The Il-96-300 will be used by the presidential administration, Lipovetsky said.
Lipovetsky did not offer any details on the value of the contracts, but it is understood that the Il-96-300 would cost around $75 million and the An-148s a little more than $20 million each.
Ilyushin Finance also wrapped up a firm contract with Avialinia-400, a company owned by billionaire Alexander Lebedev and linked to his start-up carrier Redwings, for six Tu-204 midrange craft thought to be worth a total of $250 million, Lipovetsky said. Delivery of the planes will begin in 2008.
In a long-anticipated move, U.S. giant Boeing gave a boost to domestic manufacturers when it inked an agreement with VSMPO-Avisma to create the joint venture to produce titanium components for Boeing's 787 Dreamliner jets, said Sergei Kravchenko, head of Boeing in Russia.
The creation of the new company, Ural Boeing Manufacturing, which will be based outside Yekaterinburg and headed by Boeing employee Gary Baker, was first proposed in April 2006, Kravchenko said.
Neither the value of the proposed venture nor the required investment for the 8,900-square-meter plant, which will be built in the Urals town of Verkhnyaya Salda, was revealed.
Amid the more extravagant announcements made Tuesday, was the revelation that the Federal Space Agency is to join forces with the European Space Agency to build a shuttle for flights to outer space.
The old empire of the Soviet era will never return. So will not the concept of parity in power balance as sought by the present Russian leadership. Nevertheless, the Soviet Russia that collapsed in the early nineties of the last century did leave fearsome vacuum in the global power equation. Had the West, especially, the US behaved responsibly, it could help avoid the anarchy and senselessness the world has been witnessing recently. It is expected that the present Russian leadership understands this reality and would chart out its dream of revitalization accordingly.
The era of two superpowers and with it the discourse of global power balance is over. In absence of that balance of power in a bipolar dispensation that kept the world in a state of suspense for half a century, the scenario of international politics and power has changed in a qualitative fashion. With only one great power of that cold war era left to flex its muscle, the world is now witnessing a fractured view of the reality through a sham imitation of the grandeur of bygone days. It is, as it were, the past is being re-enacted as a charade in the twenty-first century, though the condition of that time is no more in existence.
The consequence of that global imbalance is evident everywhere on the surface of the planet. As expected, the emerging world is becoming more and more unpredictable and unexplainable. New kinds of war have engulfed the world. These wars have no particular frontier. It is as if the big mirror has cracked into a thousand tiny mirrors which are producing a distorted and fractured image of the big reality. The war on terror, the rise of the extreme and militant right, a new culture of branding communities and states and spreading hate campaigns targeting one another in an orchestrated fashion and so on are all the syndromes of this splintered era.
While the lone superpower is trying to retain the bygone era of superpower rivalry through engagements with elusive enemies and frontiers, the other superpower that fell from its grace after the political implosion of the 1990s and has been licking its wounds since is dreaming to regain its past glory. Despite the fact that it has lost its ideological authority and military superiority, the renewed dream of revival is based on the money earned from sale of gas and oil. Since it was once a global leader in both civilian and military aircraft-making as well as space science, the old empire is attempting to stage a comeback riding on that old treasure trove of know-how about military technology.
On that score, the other day, Russia organised an air show at Zhukovsky on the outskirts of Moscow titled MAKS-2007. Luke Harding of the Guardian reports on that air show in the following words.
" Vladimir Putin announced ambitious plans to revive Russia's military power and restore its role as the world's leading producer of military aircraft yesterday.
Speaking at the opening of the largest air show in Russia's post-Soviet history, the president said he was determined to make aircraft manufacture a national priority after decades of lagging behind the west.
The remarks follow his decision last week to resume long-range missions by strategic bomber aircraft capable of hitting the US with nuclear weapons. Patrols over the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic began last week for the first time since 1992.
Presidential aides hinted yesterday that Russia could shortly resume the production of Tu-160 and Tu-95 strategic nuclear bombers, now that the aircraft are again flying "combat missions". The bombers would be used as a "means of strategic deterrence", a presidential aide, Alexander Burutin, told Interfax.
Mr Putin said Russia would also resume the large-scale manufacture of civilian planes. "Russia has a very important goal which is to retain leadership in the production of military equipment," he said.
The new emphasis on Russia's revived military prowess comes against a backdrop of deteriorating relations with the West. Mr Putin has denounced the US's missile defence plans in Europe, scrapped an agreement with Nato on conventional armed forces, and grabbed a large, if symbolic, chunk of the Arctic.
Yesterday a senior Russian general warned the Czech Republic it would be making a "big mistake" if it permitted the US to use its territory. Yuri Baluyevsky, Russia's military chief of staff, said Prague should hold off any final decision on the shield until after next year's US presidential elections.
"I do not exclude that a new administration in the United States will re-evaluate the current administration's decisions on missile defence," he said, after a meeting in Moscow with the Czech defence minister, Martin Bartak.
Speaking at yesterday's MAKS-2007 international airshow, Mr Putin said: "Russia, as a state that has acquired new economic capabilities, will continue to attach special importance to high technology and development."
Analysts, however, took issue with Mr Putin's claim that Russia was already the leading producer of military aircraft. However, they acknowledged that Russia had developed some impressive "technologies".
These include a new S-400 missile and aircraft interceptor system, similar but better than the US Patriot, and a lethal new supersonic cruise missile, the Meteorit-A.
"They have some very good kit," one industry observer said.
Russia also used yesterday's air show - held at Zhukovsky, a former Soviet airbase on the leafy outskirts of Moscow - to show off its latest generation of jet fighters.
These include an upgraded Sukhoi jet, the SU-35, which has a new engines and a new radar system, and a revamped "vector thrust" MIG, the MIG 29-OVT. "They are good aircraft. The MIG can do a very lovely flip," the industry observer added.
One analyst said Mr Putin did not want confrontation with the west but was determined to restore Russia's strategic parity with the US.
"Russia wants balance. It wants a strategic balance with the US," Ivan Safranchuk, a Moscow-based expert on defence, told the Guardian.
"Russia wants to do this as cheaply as possible. But with the Bush administration withdrawing from arms control treaties, Russia is saying it is also ready to keep the balance at a high level of cost."
Asked about Russia's resumption of long-range bomber patrols, Mr Safranchuk said: "It's significant. For 15 years the political leadership was constraining the military on this. Now it isn't."
In the 1960s and 1970s the Soviet Union produced more civilian planes than any other country in the world apart from the United States.
After the collapse of communism, Russia's impoverished government rastically cut spending on its aircraft industry. Factories producing military lanes fared better than those building civilian aircraft, mainly because of buoyant sales to India and China. But Russia started to fall behind the west in the design of advanced fighters and other military aircraft.
Mr Putin is now determined to make Russia the world's third-largest manufacturer of passenger jets - after the United States, with Boeing, and the European Union, with Airbus.
Russia's passenger airlines own about 2,500 ageing aircraft - of which just 100 are western-made models - although they fly one-third of all Russian passengers.
Last week Russian officials said they planned to build 4,500 civilian aircraft by 2025, while the Kremlin has pledged £125bn to boost the civilian industry.
As part of the plan to boost significantly Russia's civilian aircraft industry, a new state-controlled organisation, the United Aircraft Corporation, has been created.
It is led by Sergei Ivanov, Russia's hawkish first deputy prime minister, who sat next to Mr Putin during yesterday's air show - and the leading candidate to succeed him after next year's presidential elections.
Max Delany of Moscow Times says: As expected, the opening day of MAKS brought a raft of deals, including the sale of Sukhoi jets to Indonesia, an agreement for a joint venture between U.S. giant Boeing and domestic manufacturer VSMPO-Avisma, and even plans for trips to Mars.
In soaring temperatures, industry representatives from almost 40 countries crowded into the events at more than 75 pavilions, eyeing up aeronautical hardware and a host of potential deals.
Amid much backslapping, the first deal of this year's event was struck between state-run arms exporter Rosoboronexport and Indonesia for the sale of six Sukhoi fighter jets worth $300 million, Rosoboronexport chief Sergei Chemezov told reporters.
The memorandum of understanding came on top of a previous $200 million deal for four Sukhoi jets, signed with Indonesia in 2003, and could see Sukhoi deliver three Su-30 and three Su-27 fighter planes.
Sukhoi, part of the recently formed, state-run United Aircraft Corporation, is also looking to push its flagship civilian Superjet-100 project at the show. The company announced Tuesday that it had received a commitment from the state-owned Development Bank to fund potential international sales of the jet.
Elsewhere on the first day of the biennial event, leasing company Ilyushin Finance confirmed that it had clinched a series of eye-catching deals, estimated to be worth a total of almost $600 million.
The company, also part of UAC, signed a contract with airline Rossia for 12 short-range An-148 regional jet aircraft and a memorandum of understanding for one Il-96-300 passenger plane, Ilyushin Finance spokesman Andrei Lipovetsky said.
The Il-96-300 will be used by the presidential administration, Lipovetsky said.
Lipovetsky did not offer any details on the value of the contracts, but it is understood that the Il-96-300 would cost around $75 million and the An-148s a little more than $20 million each.
Ilyushin Finance also wrapped up a firm contract with Avialinia-400, a company owned by billionaire Alexander Lebedev and linked to his start-up carrier Redwings, for six Tu-204 midrange craft thought to be worth a total of $250 million, Lipovetsky said. Delivery of the planes will begin in 2008.
In a long-anticipated move, U.S. giant Boeing gave a boost to domestic manufacturers when it inked an agreement with VSMPO-Avisma to create the joint venture to produce titanium components for Boeing's 787 Dreamliner jets, said Sergei Kravchenko, head of Boeing in Russia.
The creation of the new company, Ural Boeing Manufacturing, which will be based outside Yekaterinburg and headed by Boeing employee Gary Baker, was first proposed in April 2006, Kravchenko said.
Neither the value of the proposed venture nor the required investment for the 8,900-square-meter plant, which will be built in the Urals town of Verkhnyaya Salda, was revealed.
Amid the more extravagant announcements made Tuesday, was the revelation that the Federal Space Agency is to join forces with the European Space Agency to build a shuttle for flights to outer space.
The old empire of the Soviet era will never return. So will not the concept of parity in power balance as sought by the present Russian leadership. Nevertheless, the Soviet Russia that collapsed in the early nineties of the last century did leave fearsome vacuum in the global power equation. Had the West, especially, the US behaved responsibly, it could help avoid the anarchy and senselessness the world has been witnessing recently. It is expected that the present Russian leadership understands this reality and would chart out its dream of revitalization accordingly.