As it is usually said, political and economic life dies away in summer.
However, this does not always take place. This summer, when it seems to be the time to calm down and start vacation preparations, people continue to follow world news excitedly. The reason is simple enough: everyone wants to see the outcome of the struggle between the USA and Europe. Citizens try to sort things out with the US greenback, which has become as close to their heart as the Russian roubles, and with the hardly known and somewhat indecently many-coloured euros.
The sharp appreciation of the euro rate to the US dollar is evidence of the fact that united Europe is really getting stronger while the USA begins to lose its positions. The Western mass media have started to discuss widely the crisis of the US business model, predicting further fall in the US dollar and focusing on the host of problems that will befall George Bush. The US President has more than enough problems today: a series of unsuccessful anti-terrorist operations, new threats of terrorist acts, a complete failure of the new Middle East settlement plan and, on top of that, united Europe.
The USA has to urgently look for a way out. The most obvious solution to the problem is to sow discord in the enemy's camp, and introduce an element of rivalry and confusion into the EU single front. There are no doubts about the fact that the USA will make such attempts, all the more so as this will not be difficult to implement. The point is that Europe has not become and will hardly become a really integral entity in the near future. The difference between the economies of the EU member states is too great as are the ambitions of each of them. The situation may be destabilised, for example, by the admission of a new group of East European countries into the EU in 2003 or by some small trade war between French and Italian wine producers. This may also involve something else that will be no less pleasant for the USA.
In any case, the intensification of the tug of war between Europe and the USA is inevitable. It seems that Russia can quite participate in this process. The desire of the EU and the USA to see Russia as a partner is quite obvious. The recent summit in Kananaskis is another proof of that. Most Western mass media have characterised the summit as the triumph of Putin. In their opinion, the Russian President has not only become a full member of the G8 group but has also achieved what Boris Yeltsin had never been able to do: to convince the other members of the world's elite club to hold its full-fledged summit in Russia in 2006. Apart from that, he has also received the laurels of the champion in the struggle against terrorism (George Bush said that Russia had achieved great successes in the struggle against terrorism. Moreover, he did not even say a word about the abuse of human rights in Chechnya!), and has enabled Russia to earn $20 billion, which the developed countries promised to allocate for the liquidation of mass destruction weapons. On top of that, (and this must also be credited to Putin), Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov has said that the growth rates of the Russian economy will be higher than those of the European or the US economy.
In a word, the West wants to be friends with Russia. It is possible to speak for long about the fact that the USA and Europe will in actual fact use this friendship exclusively in their own interests but the fact of this friendship is evident. Both proposals are advantageous for Russia. It only has to choose whom to be friends with and against whom. Or it should try to be friends with both. It is like the situation with the US dollar and the euro: you can either torment yourself for long over the choice of the currency or simply convert half of your savings in euros and the other half in US dollars.