American pundits had a field day some years back with a cynical quote from a U.S. official. Anxious to expand the federal government's reach, the official in question said that "a crisis is a terrible thing to waste." The American political class was shocked - shocked! - to find that the ruling party might seek to capitalize on a crisis to advance its political agenda.
But in another world capital, far beyond the United States, that's milquetoast. When it comes to exploitable crises, why wait? In Moscow, real men make their own crises.
And there is no man more real than Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Rumors of manufactured crises have been there since the very start of the age of Putin. At the time of Putin's rise to power in 1999, there were persistent stories that the bombings of Moscow apartments were not the work of Chechen terrorists, but of Russia's Federal Security Service, or FSB -- an act meant to frighten the Russian populace into political quiescence. Whatever the truth, it's beyond question that the bombings proved just the tonic, providing Putin a platform to defend Mother Russia and consolidate political power.
Fast forward to August 2015. A series of strange Russian media reports claim that Ukrainian nationalists were found in possession of a Pringle's can packed with Uranium 238, the perfect fuel for a dirty bomb -- and a perfect pretext for a new Kremlin push into Western Ukraine to ferret out "Ukrainian dirty-bombers" before they can work their evil will.
It all fits the Moscow-backed narrative of a Russia under siege -- a sentiment driven by the fast-forming certainty in the Russian media that the United States and its allies are intent on fracturing Russia, because "Siberia is too large and rich to belong to one country."
Who said such a thing? The Russian media echo chamber attributes the quote to Madeleine Albright, the former U.S. Secretary of State.
How do Russian authorities know this? Was it something she said? No, it's a meme born in the Russian blogosphere -- and confirmed by a team of Russian mind-readers from a special FSB directorate who examined videos of Albright's body language to plumb her covetous thoughts on Siberia's resource riches.
Welcome to News of the Weird, Russian-style: Albright, as is well known in Kremlin circles, secretly wields the levers of American power, 14 years after her departure from the State Department. No doubt from a secret lair atop the Seattle Space Needle.
All of this would be hugely entertaining, if not for the fact that one of the actors is armed with nuclear weapons -- not to mention dangerously dependent on a high price for oil.
Russia's budgetary break-even price for oil is somewhere around $105 per barrel. With crude slumping below $50, the latest World Bank forecasts see crude oil, adjusted for inflation, trending to $70 per barrel by 2025. That's an entire decade of oil priced between today's $47 and $70. Contrast that to the trailing decade, in which Brent Crude tripled in price and averaged more than $100 per barrel in the five years from 2010-1014.
With nearly 70 percent of its export revenues derived from the sale of oil and gas, can Putin's Russia survive a decade of bargain-basement oil? In January, Russia's finance minister reported that Russia's economy "can run without a deficit only if oil prices stay above the $70 per barrel mark by 2017." Just last week, Russia's gross domestic product plunged by 4.6 percent, worse than estimates, and at a pace equal to the currency collapse in 2009.
In the face of impending economic calamity, what can Russia do? It can wait for the global economy to gain traction and pull the price of oil up along with renewed demand. But then there's the concern that the Saudis will put a brake on the oil price in order to keep nemesis Iran under water. (Tehran's oil price break-even is a stratospheric $130 per barrel.) The Saudis may pump just enough crude from their vast reserve to keep prices low. Russian conspiracists will add the United States to the mix -- the crucial question being whether the new normal for global oil prices will hover around the break-even point required by the fracking industry.
It won't take a Ph.D. from the St. Petersburg Mining Institute -- which Putin holds, by the way, with a dissertation titled "Strategic Planning of the Reproduction of the Resource Base" -- to see that low-priced oil may well tip Russia's economy into a death spiral.
Which brings us back to that crisis of convenience. How hard will it be for a country that manufactures oil and conspiracies to manufacture a crisis that drives Western economies into recession - and Russian oil prices higher?
Right now, the world's oil powers have Russia over a barrel. But keep an eye on that tic in Madeleine Albright's lip. It just may provide the provocation Putin needs to foment the crisis that brings Russia's economy -- and Putin's ruling junta -- back from the brink.
(AP photo)
