IN THE past three years, the world has been adjusting to the consequences of 9/11. That one event has dominated American politics and policy. It has divided the Nato alliance, with France and Germany taking one line and the United States and Britain another. In both America and Britain it has been the central issue of political debate. It has been a major influence on the increasingly unstable world market for oil. It has been the crucial event in the growth of Islamic terrorism.
On the day of 9/11, I was asked to write a short piece for The Times, reacting to the event. I thought that the nearest to a comparable date was December 7, 1941, the day of Pearl Harbor, 60 years before. The American people responded to that with an absolute determination to destroy the power which had attacked them. They have done so again. President Roosevelt called it “a date which will live in infamy”. The consequences included the dropping of the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima; in many ways they persist in influencing the present.
Many other people saw 9/11 in the same way. Clearly we were right. Like Pearl Harbor or the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, 9/11 was one of the days which changed the world. Now we have to ask whether the hostage-taking of the schoolchildren of Beslan on September 1, 2004, the 65th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War, was another of these historic tragedies. In Russia, at least, that is how it has already been understood.
Beslan is for the Russians another terrible event which changes everything. It changes many of the major factors of world relations, the future of Russia itself, including the future of the Putin presidency, the war against terrorism, including both Russian and Western relations with Islam, the response to the growing threat of nuclear proliferation, the basic relationship between Russia, Europe and the US, the probable outcome of the American election and possibly even of the next British election, the future of the world oil market, the future of the Middle East, and particularly of Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia, even the economic development of the emerging superpower, China.
Beslan is what strategists call “a low-probability, high-impact event”. Potentially it changes everything.
One must not underestimate the sheer impact of the horror of the event itself. It is something people find very hard to contemplate. The people who planned this massacre are every bit as evil as the people who planned Pearl Harbor or 9/11, or as the SS men who ran Auschwitz. There is a blank horror about what they did to young children which fortunately has few parallels in the history of evil. It is important to hold onto that because the world’s sense of horror will influence everything that will follow. A certain degree of wickedness is never forgotten or forgiven, whatever its motive or political justification.
One can however start by asking some practical questions, issues which are of unavoidable and therefore of legitimate concern to the whole world of business and government. How, for instance, might Beslan affect Russian or Arab oil supplies, on which the world economy depends? That is not a cynical question. The oil inflation of the 1970s destroyed two or three American presidents, a German chancellor, a French president, a couple of prime ministers in Britain, and even contributed to the defeat of the Gang of Four in China and fatally undermined the Brezhnev regime in the Soviet Union. It damaged the world economy and grossly impoverished the Third World. Such far-reaching events require analysis.
In the past decade, oil prices were surprisingly low; that led to underinvestment in the development of new supplies, while the rapid growth of the Chinese economy increased global demand beyond all market projections. At the same time, the growing Russian oil supplies were stolen by the oligarchs or kleptocrats of the Yeltsin era; the present Russian Government — quite reasonably — wants to recover Russia’s oil from the men who sold it to themselves, at knockdown prices, in the 1990s.
The world oil market now largely centres on four countries, all of which lie on the faultline of Islamic terrorism: Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran. Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader, comes out of the Saudi oil industry. His family culture is that of an Islamic oil man. The US President, George Bush, has himself had experience in the oil industry and was Governor of Texas, the leading oil state. Both men know that terrorism’s strongest weapon is the potential ability to disrupt global oil supplies. The oil element in the war on terrorism is not a cynical American ploy; oil is the economic base of the war, and that is well understood by both sides.
The men who planned Beslan want to destabilise Russia, and particularly to undermine President Putin, whom they see as their most formidable Russian enemy. That is true whether the terror was planned by Chechen nationalists or by Islamic radicals, or by some mixture of the two. The Beslan siege has indeed had some initial effect in destabilising Russia and weakening Mr Putin. Yet I expect that he will survive this crisis, for the same reason that Beslan may be helping to re-elect Mr Bush. Democracies do not like war, but when they are engaged in a war, they tend to back the strongest leaders, such as Lloyd George in 1916, Churchill and Roosevelt in 1940, De Gaulle in 1958, or Ariel Sharon repeatedly in Israel.
The Western nations have an overriding interest in the economic and political stability of Russia — though after 175 years of blood, the Chechen problem will be at least as difficult to solve as those of Ireland or Cyprus. Beslan has reinforced the American understanding that it is at war, and is indeed under direct threat. Mr Bush is their war leader, even if American voters might prefer John Kerry’s domestic policies. Mr Putin is an authority figure; he is the toughest Russian leader since the end of the Soviet Union. That may be what the Russians need; it is almost certainly what they prefer.
After oil, there is the issue of nuclear proliferation. Whoever is elected president — and it will probably now be Mr Bush — Iran will have nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles inside the next term of office, perhaps by the end of 2005. No one knows how to prevent that. The basic choices of policy are to do nothing, to apply political pressure, to impose economic sanctions or to use military force. It is certain that Mr Bush would go higher up this scale of response than Mr Kerry.
It is not obvious how high Mr Bush would be willing to go, though the Cheney-Rumsfeld team might be willing to go the whole way. Mr Putin has more reason to accept a strong line with Iran than he had before. Iran is involved in most of the terrorist plots in the Middle East, and plays a big part in keeping Iraq destabilised. Russia has been committed by Beslan to the war against terrorism, and Iran is on the side of the enemy.
What about China? There was an interesting clue in the coverage of Beslan on CCTV-9, China’s world television news service. The hostage-takers were called “separatist rebels”. China does not support “separatist rebels” in China or anywhere else.
Islamic terrorism seems to be a loose network; I doubt if there can be any central strategic controller. There is a strategic idea of uniting radical Islam against the non-Islamic world. Yet such a strategy also makes the rest of the world more united against the terrorists.
Strategically, Beslan pushes Russia, which is a major power and a nuclear one, towards working with the US against terrorism and in the Middle East. China and India have similar motives and a similar fear of terrorism. Europe remains as doubtful as ever, but becomes less important. Objectively, as the Marxists used to say, the Chechen separatists have strengthened Mr Bush; they have pushed Russia towards supporting his policy and they have helped him to win re-election.
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