The system of international relations as it existed after 1945 has been destroyed. This is a simple statement that no one can object to. At the same time, the main issue today is not so much the absence of a bipolar or multipolar world, which ensured global balance, but a radical change in the rules of the game.

The essence of the behavior of the powers for many centuries after the death of the universal Pax Romana empire was to coordinate among themselves those actions that affected the interests of other important subjects of the international system. If these actions could not be coordinated diplomatically, war would break out. This procedure also worked in the absence of such an instrument for achieving an indispensable consensus as the UN Security Council (within the framework of the permanent five). By the beginning of the twenty-first century, a system of international relations had developed in which it was possible not to coordinate actions, to take actions that the most important subjects of the universal organization did not agree with, and not to fear the consequences of retaliatory measures.

Central Asia as part of a macro-region has become a full example of peacemaking at its preventive stage. The question here is not so much in its central geostrategic position, as researchers from H. D. Mackinder to V. I. Maksimenko point out. It used to be important, but now it is only one of the peripheral zones of" absorption and retention " by the forces of globalism.

From the point of view of the leaders of the modern monopolistic world, grouped around the military-political alliance of NATO, the further development of the international system looks something like this. The world system is developing around one civilizational center, it is becoming more and more manageable, but its development is gradual. Those states that have "matured" to voluntary governability join (in different statuses) the EU, NAFTA and NATO, guaranteeing themselves the opportunity to coordinate their interests. In return, of course, they delegate part of their sovereignty, formally in favor of the supranational bureaucracy, in fact-in favor of the G8 minus Russia.

Of course, the Central Asian countries are very far from a state of internal voluntary governance. The only way to achieve a certain level of predictability in relation to these territories was partial military control with a limited presence, which has been implemented so far. The next stage, in my opinion, will consist in a systematic "cleaning up" and replacing the elites that are highly corrupt and weakly dependent with more effective ones that are highly dependent on the West.

The longer you go, the denser the queue for joining selected international clubs will become. The perturbations of the international system on the periphery are being extinguished with increasing effect and with increasing inevitability. The zone of forced peacemaking is increasingly expanding beyond the limits of NATO's military responsibility. Rogue states1 ^are subject to isolation at first, and then the state system will be changed there, and the world will finally become manageable and homogeneous.

(c) 2003

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The final answer to the feasibility of this plan will be given by the life of the next generation. My task here is somewhat more modest: This is an attempt to forecast the responses that the system of international relations can provide to the challenge of peacemaking in the first decade of the twenty-first century. First of all, taking into account the fact that most of the current subjects of international law are in no hurry to part with this quality, and this majority will look for various and non-standard means of countering peacemaking.

Let us consider the main components of the coming era of armed peacemaking and global interventionism.

First. Such an instrument as the "concert" or at least the indispensable coordination of the interests of states disappeared, which in the second half of the XX century sharply reduced the likelihood of a large-scale war between the leading countries of the world. It is necessary to state that no political decisions adopted in the UN, OSCE and other organizations with equal votes, diverse interests and diversified membership are no longer a deterrent framework. Within the limits of international law, which draws its strength not so much from codification as from precedents, UN Security Council resolutions after the NATO aggression against Yugoslavia can be considered null and void.

This has already led to a qualitative decrease in the level of trust at the beginning of any conflict, even long before its acute power phase. The escalation ladder has significantly shortened, and this perception arises both when the conflict is conducted directly, as in the case of Serbs against Albanians, Abkhazians against Georgians, or Armenians against Azerbaijanis, and when it is a "proxy conflict" ^.2 In particular, the officially declared intention to resolve the conflict peacefully and through negotiations in the next ten years will be considered nothing more than an unsubstantiated declaration in the absence of deterrent mechanisms.

Accordingly, as the conflict progresses through the stages of escalation, the time required for the mobilization, training and deployment of conventional armed forces capable of conducting reliable defensive operations against their own populations has been reduced. As practice shows, in semi-partisan combat operations in conditions of high involvement of the local population and with difficult terrain, the attacking side may have significantly smaller forces than the defending side ^.3 Thus, all parties involved in the conflict have a serious need to launch preemptive strikes. Peacemaking as a practice, accordingly, tends to unleash a preventive war and aggression.

It can be concluded that the means to counteract this emerging practice will be to increase the rigidity of the response of the defending side in the conflict, regardless of whether it is the central government in Delhi, Beijing or Yerevan, or the "separatists" from Sukhumi, Transdniestria or Kurdistan who want to fix the status quo and therefore defend themselves. Ethnic cleansing will be much faster and probably more ruthless than Milosevic's clumsy attempt to drive Albanians out of Kosovo before the NATO aggression began. It will be necessary to try to make it before the invasion of international peacekeepers begins, and the next decade will probably become familiar in practice with the phenomenon that can be called an "ethnocidal blitzkrieg" in advance. This is an inhumane but rational response to the disappearance of instruments for coordinating the interests of subjects of international law.

Second. Preventive diplomacy, which was so much hoped for at the end of the cold war, has essentially degenerated into a pre-emptive war. The basis of preventive diplomacy, which consisted in reaching a consensus of the leading interested Powers before the threat of use of force, and even more so its use, took the form of consensus-building within NATO.

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Objects of preventive diplomacy in the military-military version have two possible responses.

Most European countries have chosen the option of preemptively renouncing their sovereignty in the form of joining NATO, with all the obligations that follow. The most difficult obligations are the readiness to support even those decisions of the leading countries of the bloc that conflict with long-term national interests, to be ready to participate in military actions of the bloc where there are no real security interests, and to be ready to deploy any type of weapon on their territory, including strategic ones.

A different answer is chosen by those states that do not seek to cede the most important components of their sovereignty for various, most often civilizational or historical reasons. Such a response consists in launching an arms race in the field of defense against air and missile strikes-air defense and missile defense systems. Such a variant of the answer blocks the possibility of a sudden peacemaking intervention of the war through air strikes, or forces you to pay an unacceptable price for attempts at an air-missile blitzkrieg. Thus, States that have deployed high-precision and effective defense systems invite a de facto return from preventive war to preventive diplomacy, creating incentives for dialogue at the negotiating table.

The third. The massive use of a new generation of high-precision weapons of increased destructive power in violent peacekeeping operations makes the resistance of the regular army almost hopeless. In any case, before the start of ground intervention and direct contact on the battlefield. Such a situation will develop when there is a threat of peacekeeping aggression if the defending army does not have high-precision defensive weapons, or the financial capabilities are insufficient to fend off aggression for several weeks using ultra-precise and ultra-long-range means of defense.

According to the concept of the peacekeeping intervention strategy, this situation will lead to the surrender of the armed forces of the peacekeeping object, or to the actual refusal to counteract the remote means of peacekeepers. Most likely, this will be true for States that could not or did not have time to preemptively launch an arms race in the field of creating a missile defense and air defense shield.

However, even the" late " countries still have an asymmetric response. Moreover, like the aggressor, they have an escalating ladder of escalating responses to force peacekeepers to resume negotiations. At the first stage , it is a counteraction to the forces and means of invasion, and the goal of the operation will be the systematic destruction of manpower, regardless of the combat significance of the destroyed personnel. The second stage is sabotage against the aggressor's military, economic and political facilities in third countries, and the third stage is terror against the civilian population of peacekeepers around the world, including on the aggressors ' own territory.

A direct consequence of such tactics of countering peacemaking is the introduction of State terrorism into practice. Military construction and state defense planning is moving from the field of setting goals for the military and political defeat of the enemy to the sphere of destroying people, given the increased sensitivity to human losses in countries of the technotronic level of civilization.

Fourth. Information weapons. Its broadest application creates a vacuum of support and sympathy around the objects of peacekeeping, deprives them of the opportunity to form coalitions and counteract them through international organizations and legal institutions. In the military-applied plan, information technology means deprive the defending side of the ability to conduct remote counteraction to an attack. The answer is probably not deployment at all

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of their own technotronic systems or information campaign, and the violation of information communications of the enemy (from hackers on the Internet to terrorism against the nodes of the World Wide web).

Another option for an asymmetric response is to create a counter-ideology. The high degree of adaptability of militant Wahhabism to the conditions of Central Asia will be proved in the coming years.

Fifth. The globalization of the economy leads to increased effectiveness of embargoes, blockades, and financial repression. This has become an almost absolute weapon, if we take into account the normal, "white" functioning of any national economy. Currently, a state with almost any margin of macroeconomic strength needs both import and unhindered export of financial resources to maintain the functioning of the economy.

Partial autarky, the creation of free economic zones, the development of "gray" and "black" re-exports, conducting financial transactions through offshore zones, through a parallel bill system of drug dealers, and obtaining finance from drug trafficking will be the answers to the use of globalization in the interests of isolating and blockading peacekeeping facilities. In this regard, the real allies of countries falling into financial and economic isolation are Colombian drug lords and successors of Al-Qaeda, access to the closing EU market is provided by" gray " smugglers from offshore companies in Istanbul and Limassol, and international criminals will help launder money through Nauru and the Bahamas to pay bills in London and New York.New York. As a result, the world will become less regulated and significantly more criminal.

Sixth. The provision of humanitarian aid has become a real tool for conducting military operations. The goal of any Government that suppresses separatism or guerrilla movement on its own territory on any other grounds was to deprive the rebels of their mobilization base. The population has always had to prove in practice that it is not profitable to cooperate with the rebels, that this means the termination of economic ties, unemployment and, consequently, hunger and disease, lack of medical care, and an increase in civilian deaths.

The humanitarian aid provided at the early stages of the peacekeeping intervention as part of the strategy to combat the "humanitarian catastrophe" actually mobilizes the population to support the insurgents, strengthening their human potential and territorial control. Humanitarian aid delivered to areas surrounded by Government forces has the same immediate effect as a strategic operation to mobilize and strengthen the rebel rear. In civil wars, solving this problem often becomes more important than achieving purely military success.

However, an adequate answer will eventually be found here. It can consist of striking humanitarian convoys that help the enemy, including for the purpose of defeating personnel, sabotage against foreign medical personnel operating in the rear of the rebels. A strategic solution to the problem may be to conduct preemptive ethnic cleansing, in order to eliminate the reason for intervention under the pretext of a "humanitarian catastrophe" from the outside. To the extent that the experience of the former Yugoslavia has demonstrated the ineffectiveness of" squeezing out " a hostile population, a transition to rapid genocide tactics is not excluded in future conflicts. Thus, high humanitarian goals, when applied in the practice of peacekeeping interventionism, can generate incomparably greater brutality during civil conflicts.

Seventh. International judicial bodies, in practice, in solidarity with the peacekeeping countries, show exceptionally high principles in punishing war criminals, depriving them of the possibility of honorable surrender, withdrawal

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privacy in exchange for ending the fight. Naturally, this is accompanied by high selectivity: the majority of those recognized as war criminals are, of course, on the losing side of the conflict. If peacemaking is directed against the central Government, then public officials, including those elected by the people, are almost universally condemned to the status of criminals in the eyes of the international tribunal.

The response of the party opposing intervention will be that it is logical to show a refusal to compromise and negotiate. The conclusion that it is impossible to negotiate, that we must stand up to the end, "smearing in the blood" all our comrades-in-arms and most of the army and the civilian population, will lead to a tougher struggle.

Theoretically, the International Court of Justice's principled position on the inevitability of punishment for crimes is a tracing paper from the logic of criminal law and internal judicial practice. This proves once again that the leaders of the current system of international relations are seriously revising the concept of sovereignty of subjects of international law in the direction of its complete abolition. However, the above-mentioned means of counteraction may force us to reconsider the existing attitude to the sovereignty and status of heads of state, even if hostile.

Eighth. There are attempts to ensure that humanitarian intervention is carried out automatically, based on the international community's recognition that certain principles and criteria have been violated in the internal political life of individual States. This reliably follows from the conviction of the NATO countries that the current generation of international law is based on humanitarian law, which is interpreted in Brussels and the final verdict makes international borders transparent and accessible to force.

The answer to the automatism of humanitarian intervention will be the automatism of escalating forms of armed struggle and repression against the side that should be supported by the intervention, i.e. against its own insurgents. Moreover, with unequal resources and capabilities, government forces will have no choice but to escalate ahead of time. For example, if the international community recognizes the problem of dissatisfaction on the part of a national minority regarding its status, the central government may start the practice of squeezing this ethnic group out of the national territory, in the case of providing humanitarian assistance, it may start the practice of selectively destroying groups of an unreliable ethnic group living compactly, and so on.

The ninth. The absolute military superiority of the forces of international interventionism reduces the reliability of military responses from the objects of intervention, thereby eliminating the need to coordinate interests with a notoriously weak opponent.

The answer will be that the objectively defending side will be placed in conditions where it will be forced to prove the need to negotiate with itself by preemptive military actions. In addition, the presence of weapons of mass destruction, both nuclear and "poor people's" weapons - chemical and biological-is very useful for the reliability of the repulse potential. The effectiveness of its delivery in the absence of standard carriers will have to be proved by the possibility of transporting and detonating WMD ammunition through a network of terrorists in the territories of interventionist countries.

Let us assess some general trends in the system of international relations as a consequence of the ongoing practice of interventionist peacemaking. Its immediate results may include::

- Withdrawal of a number of States from the NPT;

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- acquisition of missile technology for delivery outside the national zone of interest;

- the air defense and missile defense arms race;

- large-scale terrorism, ethnocide and genocide;

- state support for the global drug mafia;

- focus on waging a war to defeat manpower;

- destruction of part of the global information space;

- deterioration of control over global banking flows, partial destruction of the global economic structure based on interdependence.

It is unlikely that responses to humanitarian intervention will lead to the emergence of new blocs opposing NATO - none of the potentially interested participants will have enough potential for this. Unleashing a world war would also be ineffective. Most likely, the answer will not be an apocalyptic scenario, but a radical change in the system of international relations, comparable to the beginning of the Cold War after the period of close alliance of the United Nations in the first half of the 1940s.

Taking into account the transformation of the system of international relations described above during the first decade of the XXI century, we can come to the expediency of the following foreign policy conclusions for revising Russia's strategy. They are as follows:

1. Close ties with NATO are the most important position for proactive alignment of interests and an information resource of influence;

2. Active support of rogue states on a paid basis, and a comprehensive reduction in the effectiveness of the blockade and sanctions;

3. A clear and firm position on defending the system of international law formed in the second half of the XX century, non-recognition of aggression bypassing the UN Security Council at the highest state level;

4. Pre-emptive delivery of air defense and missile defense systems to potential victims of peacekeeping operations prior to the start of the operation;

5. Creation of a rapid deployment corps and a rapid response division, the main task of which would be, respectively, to conduct and win a local war against separatism, and prevent peacekeeping aggression-interference in internal conflicts on the territory of the Russian Federation or other CIS countries;

6. In foreign economic relations - a comprehensive reorientation to the states that do not threaten to impose sanctions on us on political grounds;

7. Change in the military doctrine of the Russian Federation regarding the formulation of the main threat is aggression in the form of peacemaking on its territory or on the territory of our closest allies (Belarus, Armenia) in the CIS;

8. Preemptive "withdrawal", the curtailment of its own military and political presence in the regions that are objects of preventive peacekeeping by the West.

Central Asia is just such a region. The goal is to avoid getting involved in a war on someone else's side and for other people's interests. It is not permissible to play not only a global, but even a regional stabilizer of Russia. First, Russia will have to stabilize its own Muslim regions of the Volga region and the North Caucasus.

notes

¹ Officially adopted by the US leadership, the term "rogue states "is also translated as" rogue"," swindler"," scoundrel"; before the era of" peacemaking", this was roughly the name of opponents during the war.

² The English political science equivalent is "proxy war".

³ It is known from the history of the art of war that in "correct" wars-one army against another-a minimum of three times the superiority was required to break through the defense with equal fire capabilities at the conventional level; wars of the peacemaking era will be anything but "correct".

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