For Russian foreign policy, there will always be East and West, says top Orientalist

Who is Russia’s chief expert on China? Any top position is always being contested, so there are at least three people who may currently claim the title. For wider public, it’s a relatively young man, Nicholas Vavilov (37), who has rushed into fame and glory from nowhere. First, he spent several years in China, second, he is a good communicator, authoring two popular books, hosting several websites and speaking out on every TV and radio channel. Respectable academicians with old reputations are grumbling, but they should know that competition is good for them. Then, there is Alexei Maslov, director of Moscow University’s Asia and Africa faculty, where I had the honour of studying. And finally, there is my favourite in that contest, the man I know well, Alexander Lukin. He holds top position in Sinology at the prestigious Higher School of Economy, as well as directorship of China and Contemporary Asia Institute of the Russian Academy. And this is the man who says, that there should be no such thing as Russia’s “Pivot to Asia”, instead, there has to be Moscow’s balance between East and West. Simply speaking, Alexander is following India’s wisdom on the need for any big power to keep balance between all the pinnacles of the world that is. Demand for Lukin’s opinion is at its height currently, so he supplies me and other friends with links to his numerous recent interviews, for domestic and foreign media. Here and now I’ll simply highlight the basic points in these interviews. He says: “There have never been serious political thinkers in USSR and Russia who advocated a complete break with the West in favor of total asianisation of our foreign policy. Venerated Evgeny Primakov (Foreign Minister – 1996-98, Prime Minister – until 99) is known as an architect of the said “Pivot to Asia”, but he never wished to limit Moscow only to its Oriental friendships. Primakov’s idea was, simply, that if you allow your diplomacy to be dominated only by one group of nations, in Russia’s case of the 1990-s – the West, then you have no diplomacy at all. Being dependent on the East is only slightly better than be dependent on the West. So the pro-Western disbalance of the early 1990-s had to be corrected, nothing more than that.” Alexander Lukin happened to get all these things right from the source. He is the son of academician Vladimir Lukin, Russia’s famous politologist and politician. Lukin Sr., who began by writing books on America’s Pacific policy, served as Russia’s Ambassador to Washington in 1992-1993, and was present in every political turmoil of the ensuing years. So Alexander had every chance to learn the ideas of the top strategists live, right at home. No one of them was thinking about locking all doors to the West and making Russia completely Asian. There were, of course, exotic personalities like Dugin, adds Alexander, but no one at the top took their ideas seriously. What he says about Russia and China alliance right now, amounts to total delight at the depth of economic and cultural ties, but also to serious doubts about the chances of such alliance being the only mainstay of Russia’s or China’s diplomacy. What happens in the world now is not normal for the two mentioned powers, as well as for the US or Europe. What is not normal will change. “It’s not clear why the US have to forcefully bring us and China closer and closer together, nevertheless they do it, and very stubbornly”, says Alexander in one of the mentioned interviews. “It’s a very strange kind of policy from the point of view of American interests. What the US realists used to do was to drag us apart and to bring the weaker nation against the stronger one”. In the meantime, he adds, the Russian public and political class have to learn how to handle that alliance, dumped in our lap so unexpectedly. First of all, we all have to realise that China now is much stronger than Russia, with an economy 10 times as bigger. But, even so, Russia was the first to be attacked by the West, and passions run high about everything. China yet has to face a similar provocation, leaving it no other options but to invade Taiwan, so China is cautious about its deteriorating ties with the West. China needs a balance, just as Russia would prefer it. As a result, the Russian public should not expect a kind of unlimited support from Beijing in the current battle with the West. China is definitely on our side, it’s doing the best it can to help us, but no more. So where the world is heading to? I tend to agree with Lukin about the total weirdness of the ensuing struggle. Hopefully, normal people will come to power in the proper places, and what will we get then? Here I have to refer to my recent discussion with some Moscow movie-makers planning to do a mockumentary of the first Russo-American project in space in 1975, namely the docking of two of our spaceships, Apollo and Soyuz. The general feeling at the time was, that normalcy was coming back after all that unneeded enmity of the previous decades. So, maybe the Sansara wheel will turn us back to the 1970s. That was the time when the US, saddened by its Indochina disaster, has parted with plenty of illusions and decided to achieve some kind of détente with the USSR. But then, at the same time, America managed to create a Russo-Chinese confrontation, that lasted until the late 1980-s. In the meantime, Alexander is teaching to his students the ideas of Liang Shuming, the last century’s great philosopher. He was the one who said that the Western civilization always aimed at solving humanity’s material problems, while India’s and China’s civilizations have jumped over material matters to solve the social and spiritual questions. All three of them are right, in a way. The author is a columnist for the Russian State agency website ria.ru, as well as for other publications. Read all the Latest News , Trending News ,  Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.