Russia has one-eighth of the land on the earth and natural resources estimated at 75 trillion dollars yet its gross domestic product is 2 plus trillion dollars and less than the GDP of Italy. Surely President Donald Trump will find opportunities observing the economic doldrums of Russia’s economy and its vast potential for development. Russia needs as did the US in the 19th century foreign capital to develop. After the chaos in the 1990s making a transition from a communist to a market economy, President Vladimir Putin has done an excellent job raising standards of living greatly but his economic policy like his politics has been central control from the top down. It has worked but only to a degree and the next stage of development in Russia’s young market economy can only be the result of a free and large injection of foreign capital and business know-how if there is to be full development. Putin has manoevered himself to a position where he is now blocking Russia’s development. Trump has the capital and the financial institutions tied to his government that Putin needs but where and on what basis can they make a deal? Both leaders have vast areas of their countries outside of industrial areas that are ripe for development. Both have military budgets that are excessive and drain capital from civilian needs. A bold sudden military alliance would allow both to lessen military spending and by sharing technologies they could at the same time make their militaries more powerful. The problem is that the alliance would naturally lead to economic cooperation between them that would weaken Putin’s political power which is based on the strong and genuine nationalistic feeling of Russians combined with a competitive and hostile posture against the US. Here is where Trump’s art of the deal comes into play. He must find a way behind the scenes to make Putin secure in power and at the same time get enough concessions from him to silence the war hawks in the US. The greatest deal Trump might work would be convincing Putin to return Crimea to Ukraine. Putin does not need it as much as he needs a wholehearted financial alliance with the US federal government. Crimea belongs to no nation. Let Ukraine have it with the assurance that any Russian citizen can go there freely across a Ukrainian border with the same rights there as a Ukrainian. Ukraine would certainly agree to a strip of land there under Russian sovereignty for the Russian navy. Let’s see if Trump is a master deal maker. He and Putin together have large areas of their countries to develop and Trump has the financial means to develop both if he can somehow make a deal that will make Putin politically secure and that will give him and himself more elbow room combined with a more secure and more peaceful world.
Daniel McNeill
Read Daniel McNeill’s writings under Culture, History, Fiction and Autobiography at the United States of the World website: www.usoftheworld.com
No comments:
Post a Comment