The strategic impasse in which Russia found itself after the Cold War has now been translated into a broader impasse in relations between Russia and the West and in global affairs as a whole.
As Walter Russell Mead puts it, ‘Russia cannot be transformed into a democracy or won over as a genuine friend by any steps that the West can take. We must think about a Russia that is a neighbour to Europe but quite possibly for many years to come does not share the values, hopes and political system of its neighbours’. [1] On 17 March 2016 the US defence secretary Ashton Carter listed the five countries representing the major global strategic challenges, placing Russia in first place followed by China, North Korea, Iran and terrorism. Russia and China were the most ‘stressing competitors’, and asserted that his policy was based on a ‘strong and balanced approach to deter Russian aggression’ in Eastern Europe. [2]
While excoriated in the West, Putin came under domestic criticism from various nationalist and communist groups for his continued aspiration to join an expanded and transformed western and European community. Alexander Bastrykin, the head of the Russian Investigative Committee, warned that Russia had to abandon the illusion that a deal could be stuck with the West, and instead called on Russia to develop its military potential accompanied by wartime-style restrictions at home: ‘Enough of playing at pseudo-democracy and following pseudo-liberal values’, he warned. [3] Their arguments were the mirror-image of the ones deployed against ‘Russian aggression’, asserting that Russia’s ‘appeasement’ of NATO had emboldened the Atlantic community, which conducted threatening exercises along it land and sea borders, and enlarged to encompass Montenegro. The western propaganda offensive had not been adequately countered.
All of this reflects the fundamental tensions in global affairs. After a quarter century, in 2014 the dead-end of the cold peace gave way to something new. This is not simply a ‘new Cold War’ but a period in which Russia looks to achieve a strategic breakthrough away from the perceived impasse of the cold peace years. In the Russian view, it has a number of allies in this process. For the first time since the fall of communism the idea of a ‘new world order’, the term used by Mikhail Gorbachev in his landmark speech at the United Nations on 7 December 1988, is once again on the horizon. Old-style western-focused globalisation is receding and a range of regional blocs are beginning to exert their influence to create a more plural world system.
Russia now ranks itself among ‘the rest’, although it does not foreclose the option of becoming part of ‘the West’ if the strategic limitations of the cold peace period can be overcome. This ambivalent stance, which seeks to ensure maximum freedom of manoeuvre, means that its new partnerships will not turn into exclusive alliances. Russia is resigned to the fact that in the new era sanctions and counter-sanctions will become the norm. The Cold War bipolar system will not be restored, but neither will a new ‘concert of powers’ take its place because of the great variety of actors with different ways of exerting influence. The new system will be a ‘dialectical combination of competition and interdependence’. [4] The old ‘historic West’ (the US and its allies) will now be balanced by the ‘greater Eurasia’ led by Russia and China, with other countries aligning selectively with either or both. Neither will engage in deep integration but greater Eurasia will instead remain a general orientation with sufficient flexibility and economic potential to attract participants but not so exclusive as to generate bloc discipline. Structural realism shapes preferences, but it does not determine choices.
The Ukraine crisis reinforced a new type of bipolarity in world affairs. On the one side, the Atlantic alliance was intensified. The military aspect of European security is now reinforced, with effectively permanent US force deployments on NATO’s eastern boundary. This is accompanied by the intensification of the propaganda apparatus in a manner reminiscent of the Cold War. If the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is achieved it will create a powerful new economic community that would put paid to pan-continental representations of Europe for a generation or more. The creation of this ‘economic NATO’ will irrevocably divide Europe.
At the same time, US ‘leadership’ regained the prominence it had enjoyed for much of the Cold War. Although President Barack Obama tried to shift America’s strategic focus to the Asia-Pacific region, the US was once again the cornerstone of a European security complex. As in the Cold War, bloc discipline became a central concern of the Atlantic leadership. However, not all European countries believed in the Russian threat with the degree of passion exhibited by the most alarmist members of the Atlantic community, notably Poland and Lithuania. More countries came to meet the two per cent defence spending threshold, yet others were sceptical about the whole basis of the new confrontation.
On the other side, a disparate, mostly inchoate, but nevertheless strengthening tide of counter-hegemonic arrangements and organisations is emerging. This is nothing like as formalised or intense as its counterpart during the Cold War, since Russia lacks the attractive power, ideological conviction or economic resources of the USSR. It makes no sense for countries wilfully to antagonise the Atlantic powers, with whom they are tied by so many trade and political relations. Nevertheless, the dangers of unipolarism are clear. The experience of post-Cold War military interventions are a clear warning of happens to a country when it steps out of alignment or seeks to embed its economy in greater social control in a manner that threatens global corporations. The creeping universalisation of American law accompanied by practices of universal jurisdiction represents a new type of power that threatens the sovereignty of states everywhere. In response, counter-hegemonic movements are gaining vitality and dynamism rooted in real challenges.
In all of this, Russia is in the vanguard. Its attempts to join a transformed West ended in failure. Instead, the institutions and practices of the historical West were reinforced. In response, Russia became one of the most active proponents of the creation of a non-West. Bobo Lo notes that ‘the Kremlin seeks to build an alternative ideational and political legitimacy that challenges Western notions of global governance and moral universalism’. [5] This is not quite accurate, since the challenge is to the perceived inadequacies of the existing system of global governance, a dissatisfaction that is shared by a number of countries and prompted the creation of alternative structures. Equally, the challenge is to the practices of moral universalism and not the principles, since Russia has no intention of repudiating such foundational acts as the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
As far as Russia and its allies are concerned, the values-based policies of the post-Cold War years had been applied instrumentally and selectively to advance the hegemonic power of the West, rather than genuinely to advance the realm of justice. From Moscow’s perspective, it simply made no sense to condemn Russia’s failing while giving Saudi Arabia a free pass, where the abuse of human and civic rights is far more egregious. Moscow’s critique had some substance, but this fails to recognise that the historical West’s commitment to the principles as outlined in the Atlantic Charter were genuinely foundational. Equally, the West tends to under-play the hegemonic and commercial distortions in the application of value-based policies. As the foreign minister Robin Cook and the New Labour government quickly discovered, it is very hard to pursue an ethical foreign policy.
Criticism of ‘an imposed model that presents itself as universal’, provoked a ‘demand for alternatives’. [6] The alternative, however, can only be partial, since Russia is not an outright revisionist power, but neo-revisionist: condemning not the principles but the practices of the hegemonic powers. Moscow seeks to temper the practical application of moral universalism in what are perceived to be arbitrary and punitive ways, while ensuring that the instruments of global governance really do reflect global concerns. The goal is not simply to reproduce polarity in a single world order, but to create an alternative world order whose very existence would ensure geopolitical and ideational pluralism. Talk of an alternative globalisation does not mean the reproduction of what is increasingly seen as western monism. As a Valdai discussion paper puts it, ‘The Atlantic community is a unique example of value unification. By contrast, non-western states are together in stressing the importance of diversity, insisting that no uniform emblems of a “modern state and society” are either desirable or possible. This is an approach more in tune with the conditions of a multipolar world’. [7] But even the Valdai paper failed to recognise the potential radicalism of the multi-order perspective.
Western sanctions accelerated the trend to find alternatives to the dollar, such as pricing oil in gold and other currencies, but this did not entail withdrawal from global economic integration. China helped Russia to withstand the sanctions, while the BRICS countries began to create an alternative to western-dominated international institutions. This is a non-West that remains part of the global economy, but seeks to ensure that universal rules became impartial and not part of a monist power system. In other words, a pluralistic multi-order world would remain based on the UN system and the internationalisation of economies, but would move away from the narrow perspectives of the historical West. If Russia could not join a new West, then it would become a founding member of the non-western community.
Russia led the way in challenging the conventional post-bipolar world. The fundamental question is whether attempts to reshape global order represents the beginning of an enduring shift that will remodel world politics; or whether it is no more than a temporary aberration in the long-term process of the consolidation of a liberal world order. Russian policy reflects elements of both perspectives, yet the fundamental assumption since at least 2007 and Putin’s Munich speech is that the current framework of liberal order works to Russia’s disadvantage. The benefits it can offer, which Russia is only too keen to exploit, come at too high a cost in terms of undermining the long-term foundations of Russian security and development as a sovereign state. Part of the Russian elite has bought into the view of America’s long-term decline and the weakening viability of the US-led international order. Thus the countervailing strategy makes sense, aligning Russia with the rising powers such as China and the nascent alternative world order. However, this assessment may be a mistake, and instead of being part of a rising wave, the current perturbations may be about little more than Russia and do not indicate the sinews of an alternative global architecture. If that is indeed the case, Russia’s strategy is fundamentally mistaken, driving it further into the post-Cold War strategic impasse, into a political and developmental dead-end. [8] A stable order may well emerge, from which Russia would be an outcast. Russia is playing one game, when in fact the action is elsewhere.
However, although the shape of an alternative world order remains speculative, the fact of the emergence of elements of multipolarity is clear. The establishment of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) without China indicates the creation of nascent blocs in the Asia-Pacific region. Although TPP is primarily about the economy and trade, there are signs of growing politicisation. China’s response to TPP has been to intensify its links with Russia and to develop its own financial, developmental and economic instruments. China’s attempt to assert sovereignty rights within the ‘nine-dash’ region, including building artificial islands and military installations, was censured by the International Court of Arbitration in July 2016 in an action brought by the Philippines, but the judgment was angrily dismissed by China. China remains an enormous strategic challenge for the US. Their tight economic links have not prevented moves towards the intensification of security links that exclude China. This does not preclude the long-term stabilisation of the Sino-US relationship. This would jeopardise the foundation of the Russian strategy of resistance. Already, Chinese financial institutions have been reluctant to lend to Russia for fear of falling foul of US sanctions. China has avoided politicising the conflicts with the US, but it is devising various practices of resistance of its own while it unfurls its wings globally. Economic development policies and programmes like the Silk Road Economic Belt (SREB) have important geopolitical implications. The situation remains in flux, and thus Russia seeks to avoid becoming trapped into positions that become untenable.
As Putin’s various interventions at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) 2016 demonstrated, Putin refused to use the term ‘cold war’ to describe the stand-off between Russia and the West, recognising the absence of ideological rivalry between two systems while looking to deepen economic ties with countries such as Italy, Germany and even the US, whose business leaders attended the forum in greater number than in earlier years. With Donald Trump advocating a more isolationist America that focuses on its own problems, Putin repeated his statement that Trump was a ‘bright’ person, while Trump complimented Putin on his leadership qualities. [9]
The Ukraine crisis reinforced Euro-Atlantic solidarity, but at the same the plethora of challenges revealed the European Union’s vulnerability. The Syrian crisis showed that on such issues as terrorism and refugees, NATO was not able to guarantee European security. The EU’s lack of adequate security instruments was also exposed, encouraging member states to take matters into their own hands, undermining the EU’s institutions and policies. The EU’s Global Strategy adopted by the European Council on 28 June 2016 indicates moves towards greater security coordination within Europe. The document stressed that ‘peace and stability are no longer a given. Russia’s violation of international law and the destabilisation of Ukraine, on top of protracted conflicts in the wider Black Sea region, have challenged the European security order at its core. The EU will stand united in upholding international law, democracy, human rights, cooperation and each country’s right to choose its future freely’. [10] The wave of terrorist attacks in France and Germany in 2015 and 2016 highlighted the need for greater coordination of intelligence and border services. The Warsaw summit of NATO on 8-9 July saw moves towards greater cooperation between NATO and the EU in naval patrols and other issues, but this advanced in parallel with the EU developing independent capacities.
It is too early to be able to predict the consequences of the Brexit vote of 23 June, when 52% per cent voted for the UK to leave the EU. It could well accelerate moves towards greater integration, certainly within the eurozone, although there is not much popular support for ‘more Europe’. It is unlikely to lead to greater fragmentation. Brexit is a problem for Europe, but it is primarily a problem for the UK. It is likely that none of the existing models of relations will be applied (Norway, Switzerland, Canada), but a tailor-made set of relations will be devised. The UK and Europe are too important for each other for the rupture to be too intense. The view that the UK could re-establish some sort of ‘Anglosphere’, combining the US with the former dominions, is rather fanciful. In a world full of uncertainty, the British vote has added a whole set of unknowns into the mix.
At SPIEF 2016 Putin outlined grandiose plans for ‘greater Eurasia’. Instead of the much-vaunted but still-born greater Europe, Putin announced ‘As early as June we, along with our Chinese colleagues, are planning to start official talks on the formation of comprehensive trade and economic partnership in Eurasia with the participation of the European Union states and China. I expect that this will be one of the first steps towards the formation of a major Eurasian partnership’. He noted that ‘Despite all the well-known problems in our relations’, the EU remained Russia’s ‘key trade and economic partner’. He thus invited Europeans to join the project for the Eurasian partnership, and he welcomed the initiative by Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan Nazarbaev, to hold consultations between the EEU and the EU. [11] Contrary to those who argue that Putin sought to weaken the EU and to exacerbate its internal divisions, the ambitious plan for a trading bloc from the Pacific to the Atlantic sought to make the EU a full partner, with the support of the Chinese leadership. Russia would not have to choose between Europe and Asia, and Eurasia in between would unite the two.
Russia and China combined to think in global terms, but missing from this formula is the US. As with the greater Europe project, the US would see it as weakening the Atlantic system and undermining its own global leadership. Already many in Russia believed that the Ukrainian events and Yanukovych’s overthrow was designed to drive a wedge between Russia and Europe, and its advocacy of TTIP would do for the West what TPP had achieved in the East – the creation of US-centred blocs in which Russia and China had no place. After the Cold War Russia had been dependent on the West to create the ‘common European home’; now Russia and China could move forward in the creation of a new bloc independently. Putin clearly tried to avoid Gorbachev’s mistake in risking Russia’s future on factors beyond his control. Nevertheless, these plans remain to a large extent on paper, but they do indicate the high degree of flux in the international system. While the West retains its global leadership, it no longer holds a monopoly on models of global order.
References
[1] Walter Russell Mead, ‘Washington and Brussels: Rethinking Relations with Moscow?’, in Aldo Ferrari (ed.), Putin’s Russia: Really Back? (Milan, Ledi Publishing for ISPI, 2016), p. 46.
[2] Lisa Ferdinando, ‘Carter Outlines Security Challenges, Warns against Sequestration’, 17 March 2016, http://www.defense.gov/News-Article-View/Article/696449/carter-outlines-security-challenges-warns-ag....
[3] Aleksandr Bastrykin, ‘”Pora postavit’ deistvennyi zaslon informatsionnoi voine”’, Kommersant-Vlast’, No., 15, 18 April 2016, http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2961578.
[4] Fyodor Lukyanov, ‘The Goal is to Streamline Chaos and Rationalize Diversity’, Valdai Discussion Club, 20 January 2016, http://valdaiclub.com/news/the-goal-is-to-streamline-chaos-and-rationalize-diversity/.
[5] Bobo Lo, Frontiers New and Old: Russia’s Policy in Central Asia, IFRI Russia/NIS Centre, Russie.Nei.Visions No. 82, January 2015, p. 9.
[6] War and Peace in the 21st Century: A New International Balance as the Guarantee of Stability, Materials for Discussion at the 12th Annual Meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club, Sochi, 19-22 October 2015, p. 4.
[7] War and Peace in the 21st Century, p. 5.
[8] For a challenging discussion of the issue, see Ivan Timofeev, ‘World (Dis)order: An Advantage for Russia?’, Valdai Discussion Club, 30 June 2016, http://valdaiclub.com/news/world-dis-order-an-advantage-for-russia/.
[9] Tyler Pager, ‘Putin Repeats Praise of Trump: He’s a “Bright” Person’, Politico, 17 June 2016, http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/putin-praises-trump-224485.
[10] Shared Vision: Common Action: A Stronger Europe. A Global Strategy for the European Union’s Foreign and Security Policy, June 2016, p. 33, http://europa.eu/globalstrategy/en.
[11] ‘Plenary session of St Petersburg International Economic Forum’, 17 June 2016, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/52178.
Views expressed are of individual Members and Contributors, rather than the Club's, unless explicitly stated otherwise.