Dmitry Medvedev is ready to test Barack Obama's mettle

Political “analysts” have been unanimous in their assessment of immediate challenges that president elect Barack Obama would have to contend with once sworn into office in January 2009. The most prominent and most obvious is the state of the economy of the United States (US). Obama inherits a dysfunctional economy which has plunged almost the entire global economy into immediate crisis. It is a task that would require exertion of all energies and pragmatism as well as extraordinary faculty of judgment.

Recent history does suggest that new US presidents are generally initiated into office by a crisis in one form or another. When Bill Clinton assumed the reigns of power at the White House a group of lunatics in 1993 detonated a 680kg bomb in the underground parking of the World Trade Centre in Manhattan, New York. The failed plan was that the bomb would knock the North Tower into the South Tower, collapsing both towers and killing the Americans in their thousands. This plan failed hopelessly and resulted only in six deaths and injured just over a thousand people.

When George W Bush occupied the Oval Office in 2001, Al Qaeda returned to the World Trade Centre more determined and vicious. The events of September 11 2001 are still freshly carved in our memories. For Barack Obama, his is not the issue of global financial crisis alone. A certain Dmitry Medvedev, president of Russia, has been gradually asserting his authority in the region and causing a headache to members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) who are advancing the expansion of this alliance, to the obvious annoyance of Moscow.

NATO wants to expand into the Balkans and eastwards into Ukraine and Georgia in order for these countries to be members of this club of war criminals; a move seen by Moscow as a direct military threat to its security. Medvedev said: “No state can be pleased about having representatives of a military bloc to which it does not belong coming close to its borders.” Medvedev has threatened both Ukraine and Georgia with military action should they join NATO. Already Russia has made Georgia pay a heavy price for its sins when it attacked South Ossetia recently. The NATO expansion in the region appears to serve not interests of member states but particularly those of the US, which wants to assert regional dominance around Russia. Since 2004, NATO has added new members: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, all formerly part of the Soviet Union or the Warsaw Pact. This was the biggest single expansion in the history of alliance.

The US government has been installing missile defence systems in the region under the pretext of providing security against probable nuclear threat from Iran. No evidence exists that indeed Iran is a nuclear threat. The non-existent nuclear threat by Iran is manufactured by Washington in order for Israel to maintain its “supposed nuclear arsenal”; the only country in the Middle East believed to have military nuclear capability. The present and known nuclear threat to global peace and security is the US, the only country ever to have unleashed the devastating might of atomic bombs against Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Russia has a valid reason to be concerned by a calculated US military expansion on its doorstep. The Bush administration has been engaged in a disastrous war on terror which, instead of ushering peace and security, has instead exposed the US and its allies to direct counter-attack by the resolute Al Qaeda Jihadists who similarly have launched Jihad (holy war) against “infidels”. The expansion of NATO is firmly aligned to the strategy of the US government to shift military accountability to members of the alliance in its war on terror (you may read as war against Islam). An expanded NATO means the US government can continue its fight against terrorism without over-exerting its own resources. Already NATO forces have been engaged in Afghanistan since 2003 to fight America’s war.

In response to the agreed installation of the missile defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic, Russia has threatened to deploy an Iskander missile system in the Kaliningrad region which is surrounded by EU states. The Iskander missile system is capable of carrying nuclear warheads. This threat was delivered a few hours after Barack Obama’s election victory. Already Russia has test fired the RS-12M Topol missile which has a maximum range of 10 000km.

Dmitry Medvedev had previously warned Bush that the deployment of this US missile defence system in the region “would be absolutely unacceptable for the Russian federation”. Will Barack Obama continue with this belligerence and advance the US military interests in the region? Dmitry Medvedev, by not congratulating Obama on his presidential victory, may be testament that he is intent on challenging the US militarily in the region. Medvedev and his Prime Minister Vladimir Putin already would be thorns in Obama’s backside; and the “enemy” that would test his mettle! Is he as tough as he is expected to be?