Russian President Dmitry Medvedev Calls For Europe To Freeze Out U.S.

Russian president Dmitry Medvedev calls for Europe to freeze out US
The Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, has called on European leaders to create a new world order that minimises the role of the US.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...ze-out-US.html

By Adrian Blomfield in Moscow
Last Updated: 6:33PM BST 08 Oct 2008

Confident that a spat with Europe prompted by Russia's invasion of Georgia in August was over, Mr Medvedev arrived in the French spa town of Evian determined to woo his fellow leaders into creating an anti-US front.

Gone was the kind of war time rhetoric that saw Mr Medvedev lash out at the West and characterise his Georgian counterpart Mikheil Saakashvili as a "lunatic". Instead Mr Medvedev spoke of a Russia that was "absolutely not interested in confrontation".

Yet there was little doubt that Mr Medvedev was playing the divide-and-rule tactics of his predecessor Vladimir Putin by seeking to pit the United States against its European allies.

In a speech delivered to European leaders at a conference hosted by President Nicolas Sarkozy of France to discuss the international financial crisis, Mr Medvedev sought to show that the United States was at the root of all the world's problems.

He blamed Washington's "economic egotism" for the world's financial woes and then accused the Bush administration of taking Europe to the brink of a new cold war by pursuing a deliberately divisive foreign policy. He also maintained that the United States was once again trying to return to a policy of containing Russia.

"After toppling the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the United States started a series of unilateral actions," Mr Medvedev said. "As a result, a trend appeared in international relations towards creating dividing lines. This was in fact the revival of a policy popular in the past and known as containment."

While he called for a cooling of the noxious rhetoric that has blighted East-West relations in the past two years, Mr Medvedev clearly laid the blame for the deterioration on the United States, which he said was again viewing Russian through the prism of the Cold War.

"Sovietology, like paranoia, is a very dangerous disease, and it is a pity that part of the US administration still suffers from it," he said.

To remedy Washington's ambitions to play the global policeman, Mr Medvedev proposed an overhaul of the world's security and financial structures.

In order to end the "unipolar" model in which the world depended on the United States, he proposed creating new financial systems to challenge the dominance of the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation, both of which had fallen under Washington's spell.

Slamming the enlargement of Nato, which he said had advance provocatively towards the borders of Russia, he also proposed drafting a new European Security Treaty. While Russia has insisted it is not intending to supplant Nato, Mr Medvedev made it clear that the US-dominated alliance was partly responsible for the war in the Caucasus by its failure to rein in Georgian "aggression".

If the tone was softer, the theme of the speech was familiar, and drew comparisons with an address by Mr Putin in February last year in which the former president, now prime minister, railed against US "hyperpower". Many observers say that address heralded the beginning of a new era in East-West confrontation.

"Medvedev's speech was more balanced than previous ones, but it was still permeated with criticism of the United States," said Nikolai Petrov, a Russian foreign policy expert at the Carnegie Centre think-tank in Moscow. "He curtsies to Europe but what he proposes is ultimately anachronistic rather than constructive."

To what extent Europe will warm to Mr Medvedev's policies is uncertain. It is clear, however, that Russia's diplomacy with Europe's major powers – Britain aside – has been remarkably successful in the aftermath of a war that saw Moscow branded an international pariah, even by traditional allies like Germany.

The Russian president won fulsome praise from Mr Sarkozy after he announced that all Russian troops had been withdrawn from buffer zones around Georgia's rebel enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia before Friday's deadline for a pull out.

Describing his guest as a man who had "kept his word", Mr Sarkozy immediately declared that talks on an EU-Russia partnership deal, suspended as punishment for Russia's military operation in Georgia, could resume.

Russia has also mended fences with Germany, concluding a new bilateral energy deal and winning assurances from Angela Merkel, the chancellor, that Berlin would not support granting Georgia or Ukraine Nato candidate status when the alliance meets in December.

While Russia may have pulled out of undisputed Georgian territory, Kremlin critics fret that the EU has won a pyrrhic diplomatic victory. Russia has doubled its troop presence in Abkhazia and South Ossetia in contravention of United Nations resolutions and in defiance of earlier EU calls, which now appear to have been dropped, to withdraw to pre-conflict positions.

Despite international condemnation, Russia has also unilaterally recognised the independence of both provinces, a fact that observers say could cause instability in the Caucasus for years to come.