Jorge Dezcallar
Ambassador of Spain
Biden and Putin have just met in the Swiss city of Geneva. China, which was not invited to the meeting, was the big absentee because if there is one thing that really worries Washington it is the possibility of a rapprochement between Moscow and Beijing, which is not easy but not impossible either.
It is not easy to get into the mindset of Vladimir Putin, now in his third decade of rule. An ambitious man trained in the hard school of Soviet intelligence services and with a nationalist soul that makes him undisguisedly long for the times when the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) shared the world with the United States in spheres of influence that both respected, so that conflicts only broke out between interposed actors and on the periphery: Greece, Berlin, Hungary, Cuba, Vietnam, Czechoslovakia…. These were times when, once fascism had been defeated, the ideological struggle pitted communism against liberalism and the centralised economy against the market economy; it was the era of nuclear balance, cold war and “mutually assured destruction”. And that was the world Putin liked because it put Russia, as the head of the USSR, on a par with the United States, while China bled internally with the great crimes of the Mao era from the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution.
The fact is that all that belongs to a past that will not return. The USSR imploded because of its economic inefficiency and political oppression (remember people risking their lives jumping over the Berlin Wall to escape the “communist paradise”), gave birth to a brood of fifteen or so independent republics from Estonia to Kazakhstan, lost its control over Eastern Europe from the Baltic States to the Balkans, and was reduced to its present borders from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok. … which nevertheless make Russia the world’s largest country by land area, a country that maintains a permanent seat on the UN Security Council with veto power and is a nuclear power…. but is no longer a US-level power and has to put up with Obama’s once dismissive reference to it as a “regional power”. Putin has never forgiven him.
Moscow maintains influence over some of the republics that emerged from the demise of the USSR that enjoy, so to speak, a kind of supervised freedom that prevents them from acting contrary to the interests of a Kremlin that is too close to their tastes. And when they do not behave as Moscow wishes (for example by seeking rapprochement with the European Union) they pay a price, as Ukraine – which has lost Crimea through annexation and the eastern region of Donbas through occupation – and also Moldova and Georgia know all too well, while others find understanding for their excesses (Belarus) or relief for their defeats (Armenia). What is not found in this world is sympathy or admiration for Russia, and Moscow knows this even if it does not want to see it, because Russia needs this zone of influence in the conviction that NATO is closing in on it in an unacceptable way from the Baltic states to Poland and Romania. And it does not accept this.
This vast and sparsely populated Russia, repressive towards opponents as Alexei Navalny knows, subject to political and economic sanctions from the EU and the US, with a dwindling population, exporting only raw materials such as gas and oil, and with an economy only slightly larger than Italy’s, is seeking its place in the concert of nations with Putin. And the truth is that it has managed to play an important role in the Syrian crisis, where it has taken advantage of the gap left by the US withdrawal to establish a bridgehead from which to extend its influence (and arms sales) throughout the Middle East, from where it had disappeared in 1991. The Izvestia newspaper said at the time that the USSR had danced its last tango at the Madrid Peace Conference.
The fact is that all this belongs to a past that will not return. The USSR imploded because of its economic inefficiency and political oppression (remember people risking their lives jumping over the Berlin Wall to escape the “communist paradise”), gave birth to a brood of fifteen independent republics from Estonia to Kazakhstan, lost its control over Eastern Europe from the Baltic States to the Balkans, and was reduced to its current borders from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok. … which nevertheless make Russia the world’s largest country by land area, a country that maintains a permanent seat on the UN Security Council with veto power and is a nuclear power…. but is no longer a US-level power and has to put up with Obama’s once dismissive reference to it as a “regional power”. Putin has never forgiven him.
Moscow maintains influence over some of the republics that emerged from the demise of the USSR that enjoy, so to speak, a kind of supervised freedom that prevents them from acting contrary to the interests of a Kremlin that is too close to their tastes. And when they do not behave as Moscow wishes (for example by seeking rapprochement with the European Union) they pay a price, as Ukraine – which has lost Crimea through annexation and the eastern region of Donbas through occupation – and also Moldova and Georgia know all too well, while others find understanding for their excesses (Belarus) or relief for their defeats (Armenia). What is not found in this world is sympathy or admiration for Russia, and Moscow knows this even if it does not want to see it, because Russia needs this zone of influence in the conviction that NATO is closing in on it in an unacceptable way from the Baltic states to Poland and Romania. And it does not accept this.
This vast and sparsely populated Russia, repressive towards opponents as Alexei Navalny knows, subject to political and economic sanctions from the EU and the US, with a dwindling population, exporting only raw materials such as gas and oil, and with an economy only slightly larger than Italy’s, is seeking its place in the concert of nations with Putin. And the truth is that it has managed to play an important role in the Syrian crisis, where it has taken advantage of the gap left by the US withdrawal to establish a bridgehead from which to extend its influence (and arms sales) throughout the Middle East, from where it had disappeared in 1991. The Izvestia newspaper said at the time that the USSR had danced its last tango at the Madrid Peace Conference.
For his part, Xi Jinping has abandoned Deng Xiaoping’s prudence of prioritising the economy and “hiding capabilities” to embark on an expansionist policy, based on the Confucian tradition (respect for authority, primacy of the group over the individual), authoritarianism (he has put an end to collegial leadership and the time limit on the presidency), personalism (he has inscribed his “Thought” in the Constitution, as Mao Zedong had done earlier), nationalism (“China is back”, ambitions over Taiwan and the South China Sea), Marxism-Leninism and the dictatorship of the omnipresent Communist Party (a meritocracy of 90 million members) that controls everything. Xi legitimises himself with economic success as the world’s second largest economy (14% of world GDP) on the way to becoming the first after having lifted 600 million compatriots out of poverty, effectively combating the pandemic and in fact being the only economy that in 2020 managed to grow worldwide, albeit at a modest 2%. On the negative side, there are rural-urban disparities, a declining birth rate, and a heightened repression that is now being felt dramatically by the Uyghurs of Xinjiang but also by Hong Kong, Tibet and the population as a whole, thanks to sophisticated and technologically advanced systems of social control.
Xi believes that the West is in decline and although he sees American decline as inevitable, he knows that he is not yet in a position to confront the US, even if he resents what he perceives as Washington’s dirty manoeuvres to prevent China from taking its rightful place in the world. As a result, the danger of conflict between the two is real, and Michelle Flournoy warns of the risks of “miscalculations”, especially in the South China Sea, which is precisely the setting chosen by Admiral Stavridis for his recent “2034, a Novel of the next World War”. Graham Allison refers to this as a “Thucydides Trap”, alluding to Sparta’s pre-emptive strike in the face of Athens’ threatening growth.
The result is that Russia listens to China’s siren songs inviting it to move closer to jointly confront what both see as hostile US policies. That is probably Washington’s greatest nightmare, the possibility that Xi and Putin will do to Biden what Nixon and Mao (on the advice of Kissinger and Chu En-lai) did to Brezhnev in 1972 in the aftermath of the “Ping-Pong diplomacy”. It is a temptation that has in fact already resulted in a significant increase in Russian gas and arms sales or in the holding of joint military exercises within what China calls a “multidimensional strategic partnership of coordination”, and which also led them to found the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in a policy that can be defined as “never against each other, never completely with each other”.
And this shows that there are limits to this Russian-Chinese rapprochement because of Russian misgivings about China’s demographic strength and its vast, sparsely populated Siberian regions (China has been losing population lately, hence the permission to have three children after the suicidal Maoist one-child policy); about the progress of the Silk Road land infrastructure network in the “Tan countries” (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan etc.) that have emerged from the Soviet orbit; and because of the covert struggle between China and the Soviet Union, which has been going on for years: because of the covert struggle between the two countries to gain influence in the buffer state between them, Mongolia; because mutual mistrust persists, which explains why China has not recognised the annexation of Crimea and why Russia remains silent on Beijing’s claims in the South China Sea; and above all because Russia would be the junior partner in the alliance and the alpha male Putin would have to cede primacy to Xi Jianping. And that may be too much to ask because in Putin’s mind the USSR has always been ahead of China … without it being worth reminding him that this was before and that things have changed now.
© This article was originally published in Atalayar
