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| This is about as friendly as it got in Geneva. |
While the United States and Europe have grown since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, Russia has steadily gotten smaller and weaker, such that Moscow now commands 76% of the geographic area, 51% of the population, and only 26% of its former gross national product. This puts Russian somewhere between Mexico and Nigeria in terms of overall population and somewhere between Kazakhstan and Panama in terms of per capita GDP.
What Russia has in abundance are nuclear warheads (#1), geographic area (#1) and proven oil reserves (#8).
But, the clock is ticking on Russia, because many of those warheads date back to the Cold War and will soon be unreliable (and are exorbitantly expensive to upgrade), the Russian population is ageing and shrinking, the Russian economy is stagnant and in forty or fifty years future fossil fuels will become an anachronism, making all those reserves virtually worthless.
Vladimir Putin must be acutely aware of this predicament. It seems to me that he may yearn for the Soviet heydays when Russian power rivaled that of the United States. However, those days are long past, and unlikely to ever return. Today, Russia wields the purchasing power of the State of New York, which is not the hallmark of of a global superpower (no offence intended toward New Yorkers, of course, who similarly yearn for superpower status).
Geopolitically, the world is fast approaching a tipping point, where the center of the world, in terms of economic and military power, is shifting closer and closer to Beijing. Russia, literally and figuratively, straddles this divide. If Putin wants to see Russian greatness restored in his lifetime, does he hitch his cart to the economic engine of China or does he soften his tone and seek alliances with the West?
At the present, Putin seems to be eyeing China. For example, in December of 2020, Russian and Chinese heavy bombers flew a training mission that included a brief incursion into Japanese and South Korean defense zones, prompting the scrambling of jet fighters from both countries. In September 2020 China participated with Russia in massive military exercises in the Caucasus region of southern Russia. Most recently, in the lead-up to the Geneva summit, Russia conducted naval maneuvers near Hawaii while Chinese warplanes repeatedly invaded Taiwanese airspace.
So, is it too late to swivel the Russian gaze back toward the West? What can the U.S. and NATO offer Russia in exchange for an alliance and a lasting peace? Can we finally bury the skeletons of the Cold War and move toward denuclearization? Will Russia ally itself with the West as a bulwark against Chinese hegemony?
The problem lies in what fundamentally links Russia and China: authoritarianism. Authoritarian leaders do not like to share power within their sphere of influence. Authoritarian leaders can work with other authoritarian leaders without having to endure the constant, annoying buzzing of human rights groups protesting this or that abuse of human rights. Authoritarian leaders take pleasure when other authoritarians annex land and expel people (as long as it isn't their land or their people, of course). Authoritarian leaders seek to work with other leaders whose power is absolute in order to have confidence that their secret agreements won't be subject to the vagaries of the next election cycle.
So, at least from the perspective of two authoritarian leaders, Xi and Putin seem to be a match made in heaven, and what can the U.S. and NATO possibly offer to lure Russia into the fold?
It all depends upon Vladimir Putin and what he, in his heart of hearts, values most. Does Putin value the interests of the Russian people over the desire to see Russia command respect on a global scale, even if that respect has to be coerced at the point of a tactical nuclear warhead?
Unfortunately, the prospects of bringing Putin around to our way of seeing things doesn't look very good on that front, either. If you analyze Putin's domestic political strategy, he is certainly not seeking any sort of consensus of political views. He is actively involved in a war against progressive values and is accelerating the debasement of Russian democratic institutions. Putin is effectively a fascist dictator (think Stalin without Marx) seeking to rid the nation of "undesirables" and coalesce the population into a force that will do his bidding without question. In Stalin's time as many as 20 million "undesirables" perished during a period referred to as the "Great Purge" (out of a population of 168 million at the time, or more than one person in ten). Under Putin's leadership, Stalin's image in Russia has seen a tremendous resurgence. Today, 45% of Russians have a positive view of Stalin, a man who was the greatest genocidal megalomaniac the world has ever seen. Putin believes that Stalin was a man of "good intentions" and that the 20 million who died was a sacrifice that was justified by the country's great goals at the time.
So, it seems fairly clear that Putin's management style isn't necessarily a good fit for roundtable discussions with the leaders of the great Western democracies, as the failed summit in Geneva served to prove. But, what is Vladimir Putin's end game? It seems that he is starting to follow the North Korean playbook, another autocratic nation with nuclear weapons that periodically engages in bad behavior to try and keep itself relevant in a world that is literally racing ahead of it. If Putin seems poised to bet everything on China, what could China be possibly promising him in return?
It is starting to become clear that China is looking to escalate existing confrontations beyond the breaking point, particularly in the case of Taiwan and the South China Sea. Their actions in these areas, when combined with their brazen abrogation of the "Handover Treaty" that protected civil rights in Hong Kong and the consolidation of power around Xi, point to a probing and testing of Western resolve that seems to inevitably lead to the occupation of Taiwan and the full-scale exploitation of energy resources in the South China Sea. Either of these actions would lead to a break with the West and the imposition of strict sanctions against China which would effectively shut off oil from Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. However, China has been slowly but surely transitioning from Saudi oil to Russian oil, up from 11% in 2014 to over 16% today, and is prepared to import more. When China decides to seize Taiwan they will be solely dependent on Russia, Iran and Malaysia for their oil supplies. Additionally, China dramatically accelerated their oil stockpiling when COVID-19 made oil cheap and are adding additional storage tank capacity at the rate of over 100 million additional barrels per year. In other words, China is preparing to lose access to its Saudi pipeline and will depend on its stockpiles, Russia and Iran for its supply.
Putin, on the other hand, would be in a position to demand a significant premium over market oil prices if China were become almost solely dependent upon him for oil. With China being the largest oil consumer in the world, this would be quite the choice customer to command.
So, the answer seems to be that Russia is allying itself with China in anticipation of the reunification of Taiwan with Mainland China and the geopolitical shock waves that this will create, in the interest of profiting mightily by supplying energy to China.
How did we get into this situation in the first place? When NATO won the Cold War and the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States and Russia had a unique opportunity to forge peace out of the fallen Iron Curtain. However, instead of working with Russia to develop their economy, build a democracy and to integrate economically with the West (like we had done at great expense with Germany and Japan post WWII), the United States and Europe virtually turned their back on Russia, gloating in their victory and instead focusing on helping the Soviet satellite states break away and gain their footing. Over this time massive Soviet-era industries were privatized and fell into the hands of the cronies of Boris Yeltsin for pennies on the dollar, financed by loans from European banks. These oligarchs are who now run Russia, with Putin overseeing everything. Instead of helping Russia to develop an evolved system of government they were left, essentially, to their own devices and Russia devolved in something akin to a Mafia State.
On the military front, NATO never altered it mission from one of containing Russia, even when the idea of containing Russia had become quaint at best and ridiculous at worst. Apart from its ability to launch a nuclear attack, Russia posed no real threat to the West. Toward the end of the Soviet Empire, the size of its military began to shrink dramatically, which only accelerated after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Today, Russia has 15,000 tanks versus the 55,000 that it had in 1990. In spite of knowing that Russia was a mere shadow of its former Soviet self, NATO kept its gunsights trained on Moscow.
I mentioned earlier that Russia, on a per capita basis, is not a wealthy country. Can you imagine if you were a Russian in 2010, earning less than $10K per year and having wealthy neighbors like Germany ($41K/yr) performing war games and continually expanding those war games into countries that were former members of the Soviet Bloc, right up to your borders?
How about when you, as a Russian, try to build a pipeline to export natural gas to Europe, only to have the United States oppose the project every step of the way on security grounds based on Cold War logic? Would you be made to feel that NATO and the United States wished to be your friends or were, in fact, rivals and antagonists?
I think you understand where I am going with this. Russia is in something of a sorry state for a country of its size and rich history, and that in and of itself is a difficult pill to swallow for the Russians. NATO needs to acknowledge this and reach out to Russia to facilitate solutions to some of their most enduring problems such as an extreme overdependence on energy production, weak governmental institutions and poor social cohesion (including the highest rate of alcoholism in the world and a declining life expectancy). We should be trading MORE with Russia, not less. We should be providing humanitarian aid and social services to Russia. We should be figuring out how to bring Moscow into Europe where it belongs.
If the NATO can openly admit to its mistakes and convince Russia to trust it we will pull an important leg out from under China's expansionist ambitions and will facilitate a free and modern Russia to the benefit of the European continent and the world.
If Putin agrees, of course.
