How to become an outcast

On Sunday, Iran rejected all Moscow's proposals to reprocess nuclear fuel on its territory. An anecdote on the topic: Khaled Mashal arrives from Moscow, and they ask him: “Well, how do you like Putin?” He’s a normal guy, answers Khaled Mashal, but you don’t need to go to the toilet with him.

I don’t know about Mashal, but they reduced all of Russia to the toilet. Judge for yourself what the results of our latest diplomatic efforts are.

We invited Hamas to Moscow - and right at the airport we heard that there could be no talk of recognizing Israel, and when asked what he would do in the Kremlin, other than look at museums, Mashal answered with humor worthy of a like-minded Basayev: "Allah knows."

We invited the Iranian delegation to Moscow and offered our services to supply Iran with everything Iran needs. The Iranian delegation broke off the negotiations on the first day and flew away from Moscow; In response to this diplomatic insult, the head of Rosatom, Sergei Kiriyenko, rushed after the delegation to Tehran, like a horny schoolboy after a porn model. On Sunday they spat in our faces for the second time, we wiped ourselves off and commented: “the negotiation process continues.”

In just two weeks, Russia has outdone itself a year ago. Remember when President Putin was negotiating with North Korea and said that he had gotten Kim Jong Il to promise to stop the DPRK’s nuclear program, and then Kim Jong Il then said that he was joking?

If we ignore the psychological overtones of our foreign policy (“let’s do everything to spite the United States” or “let’s create as many enemies for the president as possible in order to become his only defense against them”), then the rational grain underlying our friendship with rogue countries is pretty simple. The Kremlin is trying to create, in Chinese terminology, “something out of nothing,” to create a position in order to then sell this position.

How do officials act in the domestic market when they initiate criminal cases against an enterprise in order to then “sell the topic” either to the enterprise itself or to its enemies.

It’s the same in the foreign policy market: let us first “create a theme” - our friendship with Hamas or Iran - and then sell it to the West in exchange for foreign policy concessions.

There are two problems here. First, neither Hamas, nor Iran, nor North Korea have any illusions about Russia. Even before the final refusal, Iranian newspapers were full of comments that if we make a deal with Russia, it will immediately sell us to the West. Therefore, a "topic" is not created. If rogue countries want to sell themselves to the West, they may well do it themselves, without the help of a commission agent in the person of Minister Lavrov.

Therefore, it is not the Kremlin that uses outcasts, but the outcasts – the Kremlin, to make broadcast statements at a Russian airport or to delay negotiations at the UN.

Secondly, by negotiating with rogue countries, Russia itself is dangerously approaching the line of a rogue country. After all, a rogue country is not a country with an authoritarian regime. In the world of real politics, no one cares what the state does with its citizens, whether it eats them with butter or not. A rogue state is a country with an unpredictable foreign policy.

Let me give you one specific example. A few months ago, speaking about the construction of the Bushehr nuclear power plant, I noticed that it was ridiculous to talk about whether the Iranian nuclear program was peaceful or non-peaceful: the Bushehr nuclear power plant on the shores of the Persian Gulf itself is the largest suicide belt in the world. This was a layman's opinion.

And here is a specialist’s testimony given in Novaya Gazeta dated March 9, 2006. Deputy head of Minatom Konstantin Kuranov recalls how in 1992 Iran refused the Russian proposal to build a nuclear power plant in a new location from scratch and insisted “that we continue the project of the unfinished German-made (Siemens) nuclear power plant in Bushehr, which was more difficult because we we had to build our reactor into a different design.

It took long (more than three years) work to examine what was created by the Germans and adjust what had to be done. Why were such difficulties necessary? In a conversation, one of the Iranian comrades noted that this site suits them better because it is closer to Israel.

Can a country that helps another country build a stationary nuclear bomb “closer to Israel” be considered a country with a predictable foreign policy?

And does the Kremlin understand that the advantages of turning Russia into a rogue state (that is, the opportunity to do the usual business of saving the country and its beloved president from the countless enemies surrounding it) are accompanied by a serious disadvantage, namely: the seizure of accounts in Western banks?