Russian Parliament Adopts New Global Strategy:
Justice and Peace through Self-Determination?

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

Forty years ago, Zbigniew Brzezinski developed a new strategy to transform the Soviet Union.  He called it “peaceful engagement.” As Nixon’s principal foreign policy adviser from the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis to the time that Reagan’s foreign policy adviser, Dick Allen, replaced me and then Rockefeller’s foreign policy adviser, Henry Kissinger, took over during the 1968 campaign, Zbig’s new strategy sounded like a brilliant stroke out of left field.  The amazing thing is that it worked.

Another opportunity for peaceful engagement presents itself perhaps in the standoff between Bush and Putin in the Caucasus today.  The unanimous vote in the Russian Parliament on August 25th, 2008, to recognize the sovereignty of Ossetia and Abkhazia conceivably could mark the beginning of liberation and independence for all the nations along the southern border of Russia. 

The key variable will be whether the Russians want independent statehood for both the Ossetians north of the high Caucasus mountain chain and the Ossetians who have long been oppressed by Georgia on the south side of the mountains.  Like the Germans, the Vietnamese, and the Koreans, and even like the Kurds, they will never accept partition.  If the Russians call for a united Ossetia, this would be the most significant world news since the United States violated human rights by violating the independence of Iraq and Afghanistan five years ago followed by brutal attempts to impose a powerful imperial government on the organic nations of the Fertile Crescent. 

The possible strategic rationale of such an historic breakthrough in the Caucasus was developed shortly after the crisis broke out on August 8th, 2008, in my position paper on the history and future of national confederation in the Caucasus.  It seemed immediately obvious that the new Russian policy in the Caucasus might serve as the best and most reliable means not only to remove American hegemony in Southwest and Central Asia but to win the global war of ideas.  President Medvedev announced only a couple of days after the liberation of Ossetia and Akkhazia in early August that recognition of their independence as sovereign nations of the world was the only solution to foreign interference along the borders of Russia.

The independence of Georgia, of course, also must be respected, provided that the Georgians stop their policies of aggression against neighboring countries.  And most importantly of all, other nations in the region, especially Chechniya and Dagestan, have equally strong claims to be among the next countries to join the United Nations as sovereign members of the world commonwealth.  On August 7, 1998, at the Islamic Unity Conference in the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, I had the honor of introducing the keynote speaker, Aslan Maskhadov, the president of Chechnya, to a gathering of several thousand cheering Muslims.  Unfortunately, he was later assassinated on orders of Putin because Maskhadov opposed violence and was much too popular throughout the Caucasus.  The result was the mutation of a small terrorist movement led by Al Qa’ida to a nationalist insurrection, which led to Russia’s annihilation of Chechnya’s entire capital city. 

If Putin now would become the leader of self-determination by the very peoples whom he has so long oppressed, perhaps the United States would get the message that the attempted occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan belongs to a bygone era of Great Power colonialism.  If America would support the integrity of nations, which by definition have the same reverence for their national past, the same values for the present, and the same hopes for the future, as a framework for foreign policy, we would win the war of ideas hands down.

The next phase in the moves toward the self-determination of nations must be economic self-determination, because the most grievous denial of human rights and by far the major cause of extremism and terrorism around the world is the rapidly growing wealth gap both within and among nations, which is caused by defective institutions of money and credit.  Putin has rescued Russia from the world’s most atrocious system of economic oligarchy, which was permitted by Yeltsin and vigorously promoted by America, following the catastrophic advice of Jeffrey Sachs of Goldman and Sachs.  Having saved Russia from a catastrophe rivaled only by Stalin’s collectivization in the 1920s, Putin must now use his power to set an example by perfecting economic institutions in order to broaden and indeed universalize individual ownership of productive wealth.

Both totalitarian socialism and totalitarian capitalism have failed.  The time has now come for both of the major parties in America to get the message that there is a viable solution to the inequities of modern civilization based on compassionate justice through broadened capital ownership and that failure to change existing policies poses the major threat to peace, prosperity, and justice.

The details are spelled out in the network of websites related to the American Revolutionary Party, which advocates the policies pioneered but never implemented by Ronald Reagan, whose time has perhaps now come.  See http://www.americanrevolutionaryparty.us and http://www.cesj.org and my hundreds of articles in The American Muslim http://www.theamericanmuslim.org, especially my article, posted on August 25th, 2008, “Pillars of Self-Determination: Pluralism and Natural Law.”