As Russia is drawn deep into Chinese Orbit, Xi Jinping must thank Americans for changing world order in his favour

America’s experts on Russia, they just don’t know Russians. This is what the then US Defence Secretary, Robert M Gates, must have meant when he, while lamenting the worsening Russo-American ties, said of himself and Condoleezza Rice: “For the first time both the United States Secretary of State and Secretary of Defence have doctorates in Russian studies. A fat lot of good that’s done us.”

Today, amid the raging Ukraine war, which is unlikely to be ending anytime soon, and as Vladimir Putin seems to be firmly and comfortably placed on the lap of Xi Jinping, following the latter’s high-profile Moscow visit early this week, Gates’ otherwise casual remark seems to be quite pertinent about the American understanding of Russia — and also China. How else can one explain the American propensity to push Putin away from being someone who saw Russia as “part of the European culture” to becoming a junior partner in a China-led anti-West alliance? So gung ho was Putin about joining the Western order that, soon after 9/11, he not only helped the US get bases in Central Asia and facilitated the American troops’ transit through that air and land space, but also quite audaciously asked the then NATO Secretary-General, George Robertson, when Russia would be invited “to join” the Western military alliance.

Two decades later, the same Putin finds himself in the company of Xi Jinping, pondering over the creation of a new world order against the one led by the United States. The declaration signed by Putin and Xi early this week highlighted Russia and China’s concerns at NATO’s growing presence in Asia and accused Washington of “undermining” global security. It called upon the US “to stop undermining international and regional security and global strategic stability in order to secure its unilateral military advantage”. The visit also saw Putin and Xi signing several economic and military deals, thus bringing Russia well and truly into the Chinese orbit.

As Thomas Friedman would often insist, a sense of humiliation, national as well as personal, has been “the single most underestimated force in international relations”. In the 1990s, President Boris Yeltsin would be heard telling his American counterpart, Bill Clinton: “Russia isn’t Haiti!” In his book, The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (2013), Strobe Talbott, Clinton’s adviser on Russian affairs, records a conversation with the then Russian foreign minister Andrey Kozyrev. “You know it’s bad enough having you people tell us what you are going to do whether we like it or not. Don’t add insult to injury by also telling us that it’s in our interests to obey your orders,” Kozyrev said.

But in its hegemonistic triumphalism of the post-cold War era, when the “end of history” was being prophesied in favour of the US-led world order, the Americans cared very little about offending Russia and its proud citizenry. They just thought Russia can be brushed aside. In its Russophobic obsession, the US-led military alliance kept pushing its frontiers eastward despite verbal assurances given by then US Secretary of State James Baker to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that if the USSR pulled its troops out of East Germany, then NATO would not move “one inch east”. Since then NATO has expanded more than 1,000 km to the east of Germany and seven of the eight former members of the Warsaw Pact have become an integral part of NATO.

It’s not that the West wasn’t told to exercise caution when it was running amok in Eastern Europe. Even George F Kennan, the proponent of the policy of Soviet containment during the Cold War, called NATO’s eastward march the “most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era”. The consequence, Kennan predicted, would be a Russia that would “likely look elsewhere for guarantees of a secure and hopeful future for themselves”. And that’s exactly what happened when the West crossed the threshold in Ukraine.

Had the West read the history of Russia, especially vis-à-vis Ukraine, and also analysed the personality of Putin well, then the Ukrainian misadventure would have been avoided. First and foremost, Putin isn’t Yeltsin. He loves being seen as a strongman who gives back as good as he gets. And this is something he has got from his tough childhood on the streets of Leningrad. Richard Lourie writes in his book, Putin, “The lesson that the streets of Leningrad taught was simple, and it stayed with Putin his whole life: The weak get beaten. Weakness is both disgrace and danger… The streets would shape not only Putin’s worldview but his tactics as well. In discussing preemptive attacks on ISIS in Syria when justifying his support of the Assad regime, he said: ‘The streets of Leningrad taught me one thing — if a fight is unavoidable, throw the first punch.’”

On Ukraine, Putin did exactly that. When the fight became unavoidable, he threw the first punch, caring little about the global order and the international norm. But was it a wise move on the part of the US-led West to make Ukraine a prestige issue? As Lourie writes, “All Russian history flowed from Kiev… In fact, Russia’s two great foundation myths are centred on Kiev and Ukraine.” This must have been in Putin’s mind when he told George W Bush at the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest: “You have to understand, George. Ukraine isn’t even a real country.”

Historically, most Russians see Ukraine as a county, and not a country. But strategically as well, Ukraine can’t be allowed to go the other way. For, it is strategically too close to Russia to not just threaten its territorial integrity, but also inflict the Russians within the borders with a similar virus. Writes Laurie, “There is a point where geopolitics becomes existential, Darwinian, and, for Putin, the situation in Ukraine was one… This was a matter of life and death. No Russian leader could allow his country to be outflanked from the Baltic to the Black Sea. He would be seen as weak. And Putin knows what happens to the weak.”

Even more ludicrous is the American objective of a regime change in Moscow. Not only is this a dangerous task, which may unleash chaos in the world’s largest country, but also this won’t make any substantial change in the Russian thinking vis-à-vis Ukraine. There is unanimity about Ukraine in Moscow across the political divide. Like Putin, Alexei Navalny, the leading Opposition figure in Russia who is often jailed for his anti-Putin stand, too doesn’t “see any kind of difference at all between Russians and Ukrainians”. The two also agree on the status of Crimea. And they would prefer the division of Ukraine if the stalemate continues, with the Russian-speaking eastern part merging with Russia.

The American handling of post-Cold War Russia has been problematic. It’s obvious that Americans largely know neither Russia, nor Russians. A country that was so eager to join the Western world order, a country that had no qualm in helping the Americans find military bases in Central Asia soon after 9/11, should have been accommodated with reverence it deserved. Also, Putin’s Russia had been wary of rising China and its growing fingerprints in Central Asia, which the Russians till the other day thought was their own strategic backyard.

But NATO, led by the US, has refused to shed its Russophobic mentality. It doesn’t realise that in the post-Cold War world, Asia, and not Europe, is the new geostrategic frontiers for the world powers. China is the challenger. A sagacious American leadership would have accommodated Russia, promoted India, assured Japan, and taken along Europe to create a grand coalition against the Middle Kingdom in Asia.

Xi Jinping, in the company of Vladimir Putin, should be a relieved man today. He must be the only man laughing at an unnecessary war being fought in Ukraine. The lack of American imagination vis-à-vis Russia, resulting in the Ukraine war, has brought China at the striking distance of ushering in a new world order based on greed, violence and uninhibited power play.

The author is Opinion Editor, Firstpost and News18. He tweets from @Utpal_Kumar1. Views expressed are personal.

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