Special to WorldTribune.com

By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com

SEOUL — The resurgence of Vladimir Putin as president of Russia ushers in a new era of power politics and diplomacy in Northeast Asia with implications that may not be good news for either the United States or China.

Campaigning against strong opposition from the educated, intellectual, often critical elite of Moscow, Putin appealed for mass support by raising suspicions about the U.S. He found it easy to get through to millions of voters beyond the capital with claims that the U.S. was influencing elitists against him.

For now Putin would seem far more kindly disposed toward China than the U.S., talking up much improved relations between the two countries that a couple of brief generations ago faced off against each other in what was called “the Sino-Soviet dispute”.

The term has receded into the miasma of history, but Russia has to worry about the danger of rising Chinese power on their long common border and inside Mongolia, the vast landlocked country that’s wedged between them.

True, Putin did sign a treaty of friendship with China in 2001, and he has often called for strengthening ties in which Russian natural gas and vital pipelines play a strategic role. Against that background Russia and China have steadfastly stood side by side in the United Nations, blocking moves against Iran and Syria.

To the West, the nationalist appeal of Putin evokes uneasy memories of the era of Soviet rule when Russia was the dominant element in an empire that encompassed much of eastern Europe and central Asia.

Since the fall of communist leadership more than 20 years ago, Russia has retreated as a global power. The Cold War is long over, and nobody believes that Russian armies are gearing up to take over neighbors as did the dreaded Soviet forces of Josef Stalin.

Still, we have to wonder whether Putin equates his own resurgence with the rebirth of Russia as a strong power capable of intimidating rivals from Europe to Asia. The Soviet Union may no longer exist, but Russia still stretches across the Eurasian land mass. No other country begins to match that geographical reach.

Russia’s long border with China, moreover, is a double-edged sword. On either side simmer local disputes as business interests and border guards eye each other warily now as years ago. Russia and China did manage a few years back to bury the hatchet on where to draw the line on the Amur River border, across which their soldiers were firing shots at one another in 1969, but sensitivities run deep in a remote region over which Russians and Chinese have quarreled for centuries.

On a broader scale, though, Putin has clearly targeted the United States as the more serious threat. During his first two terms as president, from 2000 to 2008, he grew increasingly critical of the United States while U.S. policy called for shielding Europe with missiles and expanding NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization).

Having failed to convince George W. Bush in his last year in office that implanting missiles in NATO nations on Russia’s western flank would not be a good idea, Putin got into a habit of blaming the Americans for spurring on opposition both within Russia and on the fringes.

The fact that he was barred by Russia’s constitution from running for a third term in 2008 did not diminish his influence. Dmitry Medvedev, who he got to run as president in his place, rewarded him with the post of prime minister in a deal that called for Medvedev not to challenge him in 2012.

Putin as prime minister accused the U.S. of inciting Georgia, once a Soviet republic, to invade secessionist South Ossetia. The U.S. said nonsense to that notion while most Americans didn’t care — or notice. Former Soviet republics such as the Ukraine, where nightmares go back to the slaughter of millions of peasant farmers during Stalin’s long reign, took Putin’s position more personally. They see Russia as a re-rising menace.

Putin’s distrust of the U.S. carries significant implications for Korea. In his first year as president he visited Pyongyang in July 2000 and received the late leader Kim Jong-Il in Moscow in August 2001.

That visit climaxed in an epic journey that saw Kim spend nine days on a train. Kim Jong-Il saw Putin again in Vladivostok in August 2002 and last August met Medvedev at a military base in Siberia. They had two topics to talk about in that last venture by the Dear Leader onto Russian territory. First was a deal for Russia to ship natural gas through North Korea to South Korea. Second, as might be expected, was food aid for the North’s near-starving masses.

Against this background, it’s highly likely that Russia will want to build on its historic relations with North Korea. Stalin was not enthusiastic when Kim Il-Sung begged him to endorse his plot to invade South Korea in June 1950, but the Soviet Union wound up giving air support, military aid and advice to North Korea.

The 17-kilometer Russian border with North Korea along the Tumen River is strategically more important than ever. Trains from the Soviet Union carried vital supplies across the Tumen at highly discounted prices until the downfall of Soviet rule. After that, Russia demanded full payment at realistic exchange rates, not the vastly inflated value that North Korea put on its near-worthless funny money. The shipments stopped, and Russia’s relations with North Korea deteriorated.

Still, Russia would like access to the Rason special trade zone and port facilities at the mouth of the Tumen, all of which China also sees as a gateway to the Pacific. North Korea needs Russia as a foil against overwhelming dependence on China for just about everything, notably food and oil. That’s why Kim Jong-Il made sure to call on Putin and Medvedev.

We may expect to see latter-day Russia and latter-day China competing with one another for access to a port and industrial area long seen as a future major link between Asia, the western Pacific and the U.S. Look for overtones when Russia hosts the nations of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit of powers bordering the Pacific in 2012.

That rendezvous comes up in September the booming nearby port of Vladivostok, Russia’s great commercial and naval hub in the western Pacific, just as U.S. President Barack Obama enters the climactic phase of his campaign for re-election.

Russia is also eager to get along with South Korea. Roh Tae-Woo as president of South Korea from 1988 to 1993, introduced “Nordpolitik”, signaling a new era in relations with Moscow. More than three years before his election as president in 1992, Kim Young-Sam in June 1989 spent a week in Russia. He called on Mikhail Gorbachev, the last communist president, and returned to Seoul with documents proving Kim Il-Sung’s pleas to Stalin to support the North Korean invasion of South Korea.

Putin in his first year as president called on South Korea’s late president Kim Dae-Jung in Seoul in February 2001. Kim’s successor, the late Roh Moo-Hyun, visited Moscow in September 2004. South Korea’s current president, Lee Myung-Bak and President Medvedev talked enthusiastically about prospects for the gas pipeline when they met in St Petersburg last November.

It’s possible that South Korea can hope for broader relations with Russia as a counter both to North Korean “warnings” and to reliance on the U.S.-Korea alliance. That’s vital when North Korea seems increasingly hostile and the U.S. is distracted by conflicts in the Middle East, notably Iran.

At the same time, Putin may find good relations with South Korea — and maybe improved ties with the U.S. — as a useful foil against China regardless of all the happy talk about getting along with the country with which it shares by far its longest common border.

  Cold War, Dmitry Medvedev, Eurasian land mass, From Stalin to Putin: Moscow maintains uneasy balance of power in Northeast Asia, Kim Jong-Il, South Ossetia, Tumen River, Vladimir Putin