If this line of thought was an implicit offer to the US to join forces and develop a common anti-missile defence in the future, it was certainly not taken up at Munich, nor any time after. Russian questions and uncertainties were never properly addressed by the White House. Nor was the issue effectively referred to NATO, as German chancellor Angela Merkel had demanded soon after the Munich conference. It is still lingering and creating bad blood not only between Russia and the US but also between the US and most NATO countries. Even in Poland the placing of the US anti-missile missiles is highly controversial, while the Czechs are not amused. But the local promoters see in it, whatever the technological merits or non-merits, the chance to make Poland or the Czech Republic an honorary 51st member state of the US. No wonder then that the Russians, too, look at the symbolic dimension – and do not like it.
Soon after that Munich meeting Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to the elder Bush from 1988 to 2002, called the entire project premature. ‘We should not have gone forward with it,’ he said in his Washington office in the summer of 2007. ‘It will take the Iranians many years to develop an intercontinental system, and once they are close to having one, we can still, possibly together with the Russians, instal anti-missile defences.’
Need an enemy?
In the greater scheme of things, two principal reorientations stand out, far above the tactical movements of day-to-day politics, and on both counts Putin has left a mark. One concerns China and the future Russian-Chinese relationship, the other Russia’s place and role in Eurasia.
As far as China is concerned, in Munich Putin never even mentioned the Middle Kingdom, rising and rising over the vastness of Siberia. Nor did he care to describe in any detail the multipolar system that he seemed to envisage instead of US dominance. China was conspicuous by its absence from that world vision projected in Munich, though certainly not absent from any long-term Russian strategy. There was no hint at Russia’s China policy of the future, except that, when it came to America-bashing, Beijing and Moscow would act in unison. In the long run, however, the US must clearly be the preferred partner in balancing the ever growing potential of mainland China – a balancer from beyond the sea.
I shall never forget what, in late 1993, those Russian generals from the Moscow Defence Ministry and the general staff who had just put the finishing touches to Russia’s post-Cold War strategic doctrine told their German counterparts at the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, the German government’s strategy think tank in Ebenhausen. NATO? They seemed to be relaxed about the transatlantic alliance, a threat no more. At that time, long before NATO enlargement towards the East turned from a Polish and East European dream into an American policy priority, Russia, clearly an enemy of the past, was no longer a threat for the present or the foreseeable future. The real dangers, the Russian generals said, making no secret of their long-term concerns, would come from the East – they did not mean North Korea but the Middle Kingdom – and from the south, Chechnya and beyond. They were indeed traumatized by ten years of unstoppable Soviet losses in Afghanistan and the defeat of the mighty Red Army at the hands of high-tech armed jihadists.
Those Russian generals were of course painfully aware of the fact that all Russia’s riches were in the East, beyond the Ural mountains. No people and all the riches on one side of the Amur and Ussuri border, and all the people and no minerals on the other side: a strategic equation unlikely to last forever, notwithstanding the assurances of friendship and cooperation towards the rulers of the Middle Kingdom, the expressions of multipolar convictions and flourishing anti-American rhetoric, the joint military manoeuvres and the more recent unfolding of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
Every Russian general, one of those present at Ebenhausen told me, is by heart a historian – which in this context means they are used to taking the long view. They knew enough about the Caucasus to anticipate Islamist contagion and to worry about what Russians, ever since Ivan the Terrible conquered Kazan with 60,000 soldiers, regard as the empire’s soft underbelly. The south, to this present day, is a region where a border is seen as secure only when Russian soldiers keep guard on both sides. They recall the nineteenth-century ‘Great Game’ – to use Rudyard Kipling’s oft-quoted phrase – when the armies of the Tsar and the regiments of the British Empire, not to speak of adventurers, spies and secret agents, were competing for control of Central Asia’s vast spaces, Afghanistan, the Khyber Pass and access to the warm waters of the Indian Ocean. Towards the end of the twentieth century it had become increasingly clear that those lands had untapped oil and gas reserves and were strategically ideal as the location of major pipelines, but also contained rich mineral resources. Since the fall of the Soviet Union it became clear that the barren spaces of Central Asia were about to become the venue of a new Great Game, this time in a triangular configuration with the Russians, the Chinese and the Americans competing for energy, pipelines, influence and power.
We are a European nation
Even more important is Russia’s place in Europe. ‘We are a European nation,’ Putin recently said, defiantly and pointedly, at a meeting in Sochi soon after Munich, adding that Russia insists on a global rank that is second to none. Of course he is aware of Russia’s inescapable Eurasian vocation, and he for one would never give up any of Russia’s Asian possessions. The war he fought in Chechnya while aiming for the Yeltsin inheritance, putting himself in heroic pose and donning a military uniform, is a case in point. Once you let go, the reasoning goes, where would it end? In 1917, in 1941 and 1942, and in 1991 the Outer Empire fell apart, with vast repercussions throughout the Inner Empire. Putin has certainly not forgotten the early 1990s when another war in Chechnya threatened to ignite fires elsewhere, in oil-rich Tatarstan, almost 1000 kilometres north. But at the same time Putin and most of the people he has around him are natives of St Petersburg, traditionally Russia’s window – and seaport – on the West. An eighteenth-century European capital on the Baltic, a dream brutally called into existence by Peter the Great, who spent his imperial apprentice years travelling throughout Europe and trying, ever since, to correct those mistakes that God had made when allotting to the Russians the icy terrain of the eastern nowhere.
By comparison, the seven giant towers that Stalin built to fence in Moscow project an image of Asian empires and the vastness of the Steppe. It is only now, when high-rise buildings begin to dwarf Stalin’s brutal fantasies, that Moscow, once again, acquires an appearance in line with the architecture, and symbolism, of the West.
‘Europe our common home’ – this slogan had long preceded Putin. It was indeed a phrase coined by Gorbachev in 1985, during the early stages of glasnost and perestroika. Gorbachev is today, not forgotten but associated with the decline and implosion of the empire. However, his catchphrase expresses feelings deep within the Russian soul. In fact it is a key element of that Russian identity that is forever torn between the materialism and sophistication of Western Europe and the silent heroism and spirituality of the East, between the soft comforts of Baden-Baden and the icy vastness of Sakhalin.