GUAM transformation: New “sanitary cordon” against Russia

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In order to understand what may be happening at the Kiev summit of GUAM (Georgia-Ukraine-Azerbaijan-Moldova), any unbiased expert or observer will have to look back at an earlier event attended by the presidents of Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova and the prime minister of Azerbaijan – the “Common Vision of Common Neighborhood” conference in Vilnius. So as not to quote some participants inspired by the anti-Russian rhetoric of US Vice President Richard Cheney, let’s just say that, once backing the founders of GUAM, in Vilnius the Americans had to admit that the bloc has failed to do what it was supposed to do – a mission severely slated by many Russian politicians in 2000-2001, particularly, by then-Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov.

To remind, they in Moscow believed that GUAM and the US’ attempts to enlarge it were something like “bringing a Trojan horse” into the CIS and, even more, a plot to create a kind of “sanitary cordon” around Russia – similar to the one existing around the USSR in the 20s-40s of XX.

In Vilnius in early May the US, in fact, “gave an order” to its post-Soviet satellites – the Baltic states, Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova – that, from now on, GUAM will be replaced by another “sanitary cordon” formula – Democratic Choice Commonwealth (DCC). We would like to remind you that the pseudo-initiators of the DCC – a structure with yet seemingly illogical imperatives – are Georgian and Ukrainian presidents Mikhail Saakashvili and Viktor Yushchenko, who came out with the idea as early as last summer. The participants in the Vilnius conference made it clear that they are going to “struggle for democratization” of Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan jointly (under the patronage of the US and the EU).

And Latvia’s call — “democratization can’t stop at this, it’s time for the international community to look towards the east – Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus” – was meant as start to this struggle. We would like to note that, for the Baltic states, Eastern Europe is two “non-democrat”-countries – Belarus and Russia. And when Lithuanian President Valdas Adamkus urged the West to create a “European Democracy Fund,” everybody understood that this fund would be a kind of account for “paying” for “revolutionary services” by certain circles in Russia, Belarus, Armenia and Azerbaijan. As you may know the “color revolutions” of the last years have “died out” in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Central Asia, and the “children of the revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine have already fought with one another.

We believe that the US no longer needs local smaller-scope sub-structure in a more global anti-Russian structure, even though we can’t but agree with the first vice chairman of the CIS committee of Russia’s State Duma Akhmed Bilalov that in their time many people, even those in Western Europe, agreed that GUAM was a purely American project that was supposed to give the US an advantage over France and Germany in Europe. “In this light, Paris and Berlin will hardly want this project to succeed, especially as the aspiration of the GUAM members to join the EU can undermine the positions of the old traditional European leaders,” Bilalov said on May 21. So, it is obviously not without purpose that people are talking that during the GUAM summit in Kiev this non-functional and inefficient alliance will be renamed into “Organization for Democracy and Development GUAM” – i.e. will be turned into a kind of “structural sub-division” of the DCC in the region of Black Sea and Caucasus.

As we know, since 1999 American emissaries of different levels and ranks have been actively persuading the Armenian authorities into, at least, declaring their intention to join GUAM in some near future. And so, today we don’t even doubt that the Americans will start an even bigger fuss over Armenia. Now they will probably start to persuade us that, unlike GUAM (which has proved no less amorphous than the CIS), the “flagship of democracy” in the post-Soviet area – the DCC and its branch, the Organization for Democracy and Development GUAM – will have more clear goals and mechanisms and will get a big recompense for joining in the new “Crusade” against Russia – from the selfsame Adamkus- and his US patrons-proposed European Democracy Fund.

In fact, the point is not so much that the US and its satellites might be doing this because of the “Iranian problem.” The actual point is that they may well be growing anti-Russian because of Russia’s unprecedented (for the whole post-WWII period) rapprochement with China, including in the military. In fact, political pirates from different countries are trying to come together into a single “front” against the two biggest Eurasian states.

In this light, the whole row about the “Iranian dossier” looks quite differently: not as a fight against theocratic rule in Iran or for control over vast reserves of oil, gas, uranium and precious stones in that country, but as an attempt to create a solid “circle” and, simultaneously, to seize a key territory in the way of the so-called Great Silk Road-2, a project by Sam Brownback, US congressman known for his radical anti-Russian views. In other words, the world community is dealing with the “declared” undeclared war of the West’s reactionary circles against Russia and China. The bankrupt GUAM is just the “fifth wheel in a cart” in this strategy.

Sergey Shakaryants – expert of Caucasus analytical center