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By Hugues Honore
WASHINGTON: The United States has few economic levers it can use to
persuade Russia to pull its troops out of areas of Georgia as
relations between the two big powers sour, analysts said Friday.
Republican presidential hopeful, Sen. John
McCain, has called for tough action against Russia after its troops
occupied separatist regions of US-ally Georgia and pushed into
Georgian territory in the past week.
US President George W. Bush earlier Friday
called on Russia to honor its pledge that it would withdraw its
forces from Georgia amid frenzied diplomatic activity.
Russian troops and tanks poured into Georgia a
week ago after the Georgian army launched an offensive to regain
control of South Ossetia, the Moscow-backed region which broke away
from Tbilisi in the early 1990s.
Analysts said, however, that it was unlikely
that Washington will use its economic might to pressure Russia to
withdraw its forces from Georgian territory.
“It’s unlikely that the United States will
impose any of the usual sanctions that are sometimes brought to bear
on international miscreants,” said Stephen Sestanovich, a Russian
expert at the US Council on Foreign Relations.
Even if Bush wanted to apply economic sanctions
against Moscow, it would be a complicated task with many hurdles,
according to Blake Marshall, a senior vice president of The PBN
Company, a business consultancy focused on Russia and the former
Soviet republics.
“In a globalized economy you have to have
uniform agreement across the globe in order for the sanctions to
really reach their purpose. That’s very difficult to achieve,”
Marshall said.
“Experience has shown the unilateral sanctions
not only don’t work, but they rather tend to punish the American
companies,” he underlined.
Any potential sanctions would also be
complicated by the business and trade links between the world’s
largest economy and its 11th largest economy, and could affect
Russia’s vast energy exports to the West and the United States.
“The Russian economy overall is about oil. We
have been trying to cut our oil-addiction in this country but we are
not able to do it, and we could not effectively cut our imports of
Russian oil,” said Nina Hachigian, an analyst at the Center for
American Progress think tank and a former National Security Council
staffer.
Russia was the 20th biggest exporter to the
United States and the 30th largest importer of US-made goods in
2007. It held around 1.4 percent of all US foreign trade in June of
this year, compared with China which holds 11.2 percent and the
European Union which commands 23.1 percent.
“Sanctions are really the wrong way to
approach the issue, because I don’t think we could imagine to have
all our European allies to agree those sanctions when they are more
reliant on Russian oil and gas than we are,” Hachigian said.
She suggested that it could be more effective to
target sanctions at individual political leaders as Washington has
done with respect to government leaders in North Korea and Sudan.
-- AFP
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