| An unpleasant thing happened to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov last week. Exactly at the moment when he was in Israel defending Iran from possible international sanctions, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that Israel should be erased from the world map. And then he confirmed these words during a mass march in Tehran dedicated to the so-called “international day of struggle against Zionism.” I had to urgently call the Iranian ambassador to the Russian Foreign Ministry and explain to him that his patron should not have uttered such words.
Stories like this will happen all the time. They are one of the inevitable consequences of our persistent desire to have completely odious political regimes as our allies. In the post-Soviet space, Russia has one relatively decent ally left - the President of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Uzbek leader Islam Karimov is only pretending to be friends with Russia. This is understandable: Moscow, together with Beijing, turned out to be the only two world capitals that refused to admit that the bloody execution of hundreds of civilians in Andijan was the fault of the official authorities of Uzbekistan. And they strongly supported official Tashkent’s refusal to conduct an independent investigation. The international community interpreted this refusal as a desire to distort the picture of what happened. As a result, Uzbekistan has fallen into international isolation and now finds solace in a tactical alliance with Russia.
Everything about the Belarusian regime has also been clear for a long time. Moreover, our main formal ally, Father Lukashenko, “loves” Russia so much that he constantly strives to deceive her for money - from attempts to sell Beltransgaz to the Russian Gazprom at an order of magnitude higher than the real price to the persistent desire to transfer Belarusian enterprises to domestic Russian prices.
Russian friendship with Iran looks even more short-sighted. It is, of course, profitable to build a nuclear power plant in Bushehr and for this purpose try to convince the world that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons. But even if you believe this, today’s Iran is a “suitable” ally of Russia even without a nuclear bomb. Iran, where the Islamic revolution not only won, but where the official state doctrine of exporting the Islamic revolution operates, is a friend of Russia, whose authorities attribute every major terrorist attack to international terrorism. Moreover, these same international terrorists hardly mean Orthodox, Catholics, Jews or Buddhists.
If the Russian authorities hope to win favor with the Muslim world by supporting Iran or Uzbekistan, they are greatly mistaken. The Muslim world itself is extremely heterogeneous. Iran has many enemies in this world, and in Uzbekistan, under the pretext of fighting Islamic extremism, they are pursuing a policy that only further Islamizes the hopelessly impoverished population. Russia will not be able to become a serious mediator in conflicts between East and West, because friendship with rogue regimes reduces the degree of trust in us in the West, without increasing it in the East.
An attempt to put together another political bloc with China from the countries of post-Soviet Central Asia within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is also not a very providential activity. Firstly, Russia will not be able to become the political leader of this alliance, since it is inferior to China in population by almost nine times, lags behind in terms of economic growth and is no longer superior in military power to such an extent as to dictate its terms to Beijing. Secondly, China is generally a very dubious ally, if only because it is one of Russia’s most dangerous economic competitors. Peaceful colonization of the Russian Far East by the Chinese in the coming decades, given the current rate of population decline in Russia and the lack of a clear concept for the development of the eastern regions, is almost inevitable.
By overestimating its geopolitical capabilities, not wanting to use centuries-old ties with the Western world and become a full-fledged part of the West, Russia risks becoming a rogue country in a society of extremely bad and extremely unreliable allies with a marginal status. Semyon Novoprudsky
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