Under Bush ‘Together where we can, alone where we must’ was forged into the slogan, rather frightening for the Europeans and many others around the globe: ‘Allies, not alliances.’ World order courtesy of the United States? Yes, up to a point. Non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is a strategic dimension where the US, like it or not, still has to cooperate and even invite others to do the heavy diplomatic lifting. But for the rest, America wants to go it alone. If it is not isolationism that is beckoning, the name of the game is certainly unilateralism.
Why should Russia be more cooperative? Or more predictable? And why should the Kremlin be blamed for mirror-imaging much of America’s newly invented splendid isolation? A ‘lonely wolf’, this is how Kremlin insiders describe, in a metaphor both heroic and frightening, the role they ascribe to Russia in the early twenty-first century. As long as the wolf does not succumb to self-pity and aggression, is well fed, morally reassured and happy with itself, and in control of ever-increasing oil income, the Kremlin can afford such a policy. But to have no friends comes at a price.
Challenges
The geopolitical challenges are indeed as vast and as contradictory as the Russian landmass. Moreover, their imperial past has bequeathed to Russians an inheritance of huge, almost uncontrollable problems. They range from the ominous presence of China, with ten times the population of the Russian federation, rising and rising over the Eastern perimeter fence at the rivers Amur and Ussuri, to the southern regions under the white peaks of the Caucasus mountains. For many centuries, the Tsar’s generals viewed these southern expanses with concern as the empire’s soft underbelly, threatened by British imperial expansion and, in more recent times, by US big business looking for natural resources.
For the time being and well into the future the most pressing threat, however, comes from the cohorts, assassins and, in the not too distant future, weapons of mass destruction sent out by militant Islam: this is a fear that hates to give its name. Putin avoids referring to militant Islam when talking about the dangers of terrorism, but from Afghanistan to the trauma of the Chechen wars and the terror scenarios that have unfolded since, Russians are very much aware of a looming threat. This was, after all, the psychology that helped Putin turn around the electorate in 1999 and win his first presidential term. There is more political mileage in the fear of radical Islam – but it has to be handled with care.
In the south-east, there is Turkey, and many a church spire built in the nineteenth century in Moscow, St Petersburg and elsewhere shows the crosses of Russian Orthodoxy piercing the crescent moon of Islam to celebrate victories past and future. Turkey, although a NATO member of long standing, is for Russia more and more a partner, whether it be as a consumer of Russian energy or a contractor for large-scale building. Turkey’s secular model of state and society also helps to reassure the Kremlin about the future of Muslims holding a passport adorned with the double-headed eagle.
And, most important of all, there is Europe and, beyond Europe, the United States of America, the latter so vast and so powerful that for Russia the Far West and the Far East almost coincide. For Russia and the Russians, the sun rises over America and the sun sets over America. This is not just symbolism. Cold War or no, Russia compares itself not with China or India, nor with Europe, but exclusively with the United States.
While this approach, by implication, affords Russia the status of superpower, especially in the UN dimension and in strategic arms control, other dimensions are patently absent from the equation. America’s military has what Russians do not have, the capacity to project power worldwide. The US rules the waves, Russia, from the battle of Tsushima lost against the Japanese to the explosion of the Kursk, has always failed in the maritime power game and is not likely to catch up soon. Iraq, the Russians console themselves, is slowly and inexorably becoming America’s Afghanistan – but not quite. There may well be an Iraq legacy, much as Vietnam left deep scars on America’s body and soul, but it will not be the beginning of the end of US superpower – as Afghanistan, twenty years ago, was for Russia. Today Russia can just about compete in the nuclear dimension, but not in terms of conventional power, cyberspace or maritime presence across the Seven Seas.
In today’s world, however, other elements of US expertise count for even more. While America’s ‘soft power’[12] reaches far beyond America’s hard power, winning the proverbial ‘hearts and minds’, Russia after the Soviet Union has little to offer in terms of soft power. America’s industrial capacity, research and development are the envy of many Russians, the standard by which to measure their own progress and the target of unrelenting industrial espionage. The US currency is still the benchmark of value, but Russians are beginning to have second thoughts, reading into the decline of the US currency a message of secular decline. Empowered by oil and gas, they consider extricating themselves from the sinking USS Greenback, putting their faith into the freely convertible rouble and keeping major savings in euros – though certainly not in Chinese renmimbi.
‘Does America need a foreign policy?’ Henry Kissinger famously asked. It was no surprise that the Doctor came out with a book prescribing medication based on balance of power, cooperation and compensation, alliances and containment of major adversaries. Russia, too, needs a foreign policy, but does Russia have one? Russians do not mind very much that Russia is, by and large, a country without friends as long as Russia wields a veto over great matters of global concern or lesser matters within its sphere of interest, territorial or political. In today’s world, one could imagine Kremlin leaders secretly citing to themselves Lord Palmerston’s words 150 years ago in the House of Commons: ‘We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.’
New chessboard, old rules
Russia’s policy-makers today claim an almost boundless measure of freedom of manoeuvre and sovereignty. This has vast practical implications, worlds apart from the Soviet orthodoxy which combined unlimited geopolitical ambition with the idea of a Marxist-Leninist ‘Third Rome’. It is much closer to tsarist aspirations for a place at the head table, control of warm seaports and strategic sea lanes like the Dardanelles or the Baltic approaches; most of Germany in the nineteenth century lived sous l’oeil des Russes, and so did the Balkans and much of Scandinavia. Russians also tend to remember fondly the informal veto in world affairs that they wielded before and after the Vienna Congress of 1814-15, not unlike today’s veto power in the UN.
Today, there is not much of an overriding doctrine beyond the pragmatism of oil and gas and the wish to translate eight years of windfall profits into a dominant position in the globalizing world of industry and finance, national self-respect and an acceptable idea of history past, present and future. There is a love-hate relationship with the US, a kind of cold marriage, forever strained but unlikely to end in divorce. The idea in Berlin and elsewhere that the quarrelling couple needs counselling, and that the Germans are called upon to provide friendly advice and mediation, is not of the real world. Russians and Americans know each other’s telephone numbers well enough, be it in the situation centres in Moscow and Washington, in anti-terror departments at the CIA and the FSB, or in those exclusive clubs concerned with non-proliferation.