Russia is not the threat she appears | Dominic Lawson
The political theatre of Russian power - how the UK should define its relationship with an ever weaker and more desperate Russia
After the release of the Russia report, I detailed some thoughts upon our relationship with the Russian Federation. The gist of what I said revolved around the fact that Russia has become a convenient bogeyman for the left and neocon right to explain away problems which are native to the West, such as rising populism or a lack of faith in our institutions and leadership. But in contrast, on the social conservative right we see some emerging idolising of Russia which is completely undeserved. Both of these fall into the strategy of Vladimir Putin, which projects an image of resurgent Russian power that is not reflected in the material conditions of Russian society.
The truth is that Russia is a country faced with numerous systemic weaknesses which put it at a severe disadvantage compared to the West. These systemic weaknesses go some way to explaining the reason that Russia has acted in the way it has in recent decades.
The Russian president’s skill comes from using relatively limited resources in a concentrated and strategic way which has allowed him to project an image of a Russia as being ever present and ever deadly. This has been a successful strategy as Russia is now often shown in popular culture, the media landscape, and in the calculations of our leaders as being comparable to the United States in terms of its power and global influence.
This is completely untrue when one looks at the facts. Russia may hold the largest nuclear arsenal on Earth and be a vast expansive nation but it’s military power is close to trivial when compared to the United States, let alone the combined might of NATO.
Economically, the situation is not much better. Russia’s economy is smaller than that of Italy. And it suffers from endemic corruption and a rapacious elite. Russian reliance on hydrocarbon exports into Europe and China means they are vulnerable to changes in the global oil markets. Moscow has not made adequate efforts to prepare for the coming transition to renewable energy technology, and has doubled down by expanding drilling in the Arctic and Siberia.
As the world transitions in the next ten years, and as the United States remains the largest energy producer, Russia will find itself increasingly behind the times, entirely reliant upon China’s energy needs to sustain its economy.
Russian hybrid warfare has been able to strike at cleavages within our own society but the credit that Moscow is given, that they fixed the votes for Brexit and Trump, for instance, is a wide exaggeration. These expressions of populism were phenomena which are native to Western societies. Yes, Russia may benefit from a divided EU or from an American president keen on friendly relations with Moscow but so do many people within the West.
Ironically, this obsession with a deft Russian hand reaching into the heart of Western democracies only adds to Putin’s mystique and his carefully constructed image of power. Putin is an effective ruler but he is encumbered by large-scale geopolitical forces which point to a process of gradual and unforgiving Russian demise. Much of Russia’s actions in recent years, whether it be the annexation of Crimea, tampering in Western democracies, or the obliteration of Aleppo, actually stem from a position of weakness- not strength.
Fortunately, this means that we aren’t doomed to spending the rest of life living under some impending Russian threat. But it also means that Russian elites may grow increasingly desperate in their methods of retaining a dwindling global influence, and we may begin to see them operate in an increasingly sporadic manner.
“Power is not what you have, but what your enemy thinks you have,”
A conservative superpower?
Following the Western cultural revolutions of the 1960s, Russian strategists identified Western social conservatives as potential allies to Russia. People who felt that their societies were suffering from liberal overreach sometimes saw Russia as a bastion of family values and Christian civilisation, and more importantly for Moscow, they tended to dislike American adventurism and favour a multi-polar world order.
The social conservatism of the United Russia Party is probably a mix of genuinely held conviction and realpolitik. And for certain, Russia has made efforts to defend Middle Eastern Christians, but this has largely been done for strategic reasons. It is undeniably an effective marketing tactic on the part of the Kremlin and has held up a harsh mirror to a West which seems utterly unconfident in its traditions and identity. However, while the individuals at the top may be conservatives, Russian society is not the type of society which social conservatives should look to as an example.
Alcoholism, social disintegration and anomie are rife within the Russian Federation. One of the most grisly and emblematic examples of this is the fact that Russia has the highest abortion rate in the world — with 13 abortions to every 10 births. Likewise, despite having a population of close to a hundred million people less than the US, it still has a higher rate of HIV/AIDS, partly due to the massive rates of hardcore drug abuse which is rampant within Russian society.
This all combines to create a society which is facing demographic collapse. Abortions and deaths from despair are effective barrometers by which to judge the future of a society. People generally do not kill their babies or themselves if they are hopeful about the future. At present, Russia is the largest state in the world yet it has a population comparable to the Indonesian island of Java and projections estimate that it could more than halve by the end of the century.
These issues are not solely the fault of the current Russian elite. Decades of living under a communist tyranny which did everything it could to disintegrate social bonds, and then being subjected to the most brutal and uncompromising form of capitalism in the “shock doctrine” of the 1990s would always have the inevitable consequence of crippling a country’s society.
Despite the choreographed image of strength, Russia is blighted by major domestic problems.
The Russian state has attempted natalist policies to halt this decline but, thus far, it has only slowed. This is important to note in the foreign policy approaches of Western nations because it threatens Russia’s control over its peripheral regions. Some 70 per cent of the ethnic Russian population is concentrated in the Western European regions of the country.
Should the population continue its freefall, the state may find its already tentative control in its outer areas increasingly hard to maintain. When the titular ethnic group of a country is no longer the majority in outer regions, this can prompt the rise of secessionist movements and sympathies.
The Russian Federation is not a single nation but a union of numerous diverse peoples held together often by brute force or bribery, or both in the case of Chechnya. The possibility of a second collaspe in which multiple nations secede shouldn’t be dismissed. State collapse and disintegration is a common feature of Russian history. It is also something which the West would not benefit from and we should bear this in mind if we set out to weaken Moscow.
Our interests in a stable Russia
In the history of Russian-Western relations, neither side is innocent. The West has not respected Russia’s legitimate security fears in regards to NATO’s presence on their borders. Likewise, we can be relatively sure that whatever Russia is doing to meddle in Western democracies, the West is also doing to dethrone Putin.
The expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe is at the heart of this. Moscow has always maintained that there was an implicit agreement that the rump Russian state would not have to contend with the presence of Western militaries so close to it’s heartland. And NATO, for its part, denies this ever happened.
It is my belief that the expansion of NATO directly to the border of the Russian Federation was a mistake and has created a security dilemma which has contributed to a sense of strategic weakness on the part of Moscow.
However, now that an expanded NATO is a fact, the UK should continue its role as a leading defender of the organisation. Our military assets within the Advanced Forward Presence should be kept as we redefine our relationship with the European Union to show our commitment to Europe’s defence.
However, we should recognise that a stable Russia is in the security interests of the West. Should Russia disintegrate again, we could be faced with a continent-wide Yugoslavia. We would likely see widespread chaos throughout Asia which would destabilise the globe and likely affect the UK.
Countries such as Chechnya and Dagestan could act as Caucasian Afghanistans within which global terrorist and criminal networks are able to shelter and plan attacks against the Western core.
Likewise, the large caches of weapons dispersed throughout Russia could mean that we see the global black market being saturated with small arms and munitions, much of which could end up in the UK. After the Soviet Union collapsed, whole armouries of Kalashnikov rifles simply disappeared, often resurfacing in conflicts in Africa. These days, increasing trade means that it is now easier to smuggle goods across international borders, and that includes the English Channel.
As said, the fear of a collapse of the Russian Federation is not some paranoid Kremlin fantasy but has been common throughout Russian history. Our leaders must strike a delicate balance between supporting Russian stability and pushing against their attempts at aggression.
Towards a new detente?
Our differences with the Russians are not as irreconcilable as many assert. Moscow is threatened by Islamist terrorism just as we are. Likewise, they do not want to see nuclear weapons proliferate. In areas of common interests, both the West and Russia have shown the ability to negotiate fairly.
One area where there may be more common interest than we realise is in the rise of China as a global power.
At present, Moscow and Beijing have come into an alliance but this is based purely on a desire to balance out against the United States. There are no deeper principles and both countries have interests which clash.
Should Moscow calculate that its interests are better served by aligning with the West, we will likely begin to see rapprochement. If this seems unlikely, remember that we witnessed this very thing happen during the Cold War with the aim of balancing against China. This day may come sooner than we expect and the issue of Siberia could act as the wedge which opens the Chinese-Russian cleavage.
If Siberia were an independent country, it would be larger than Canada yet have a population smaller than England. It is one of the most resource-rich areas on the planet, with vast hydrocarbon deposits, precious metals, forests and access to the rapidly melting trade routes of the Arctic Circle. The already dwindling ethnic Russian population is sparsely dispersed across this vast territory, and defended by an overstretched and antiquated military.
Geopolitical logic dictates that being both rich and weak is a deadly combination. Kremlin elites must look at China’s actions in the provinces of Tibet and Xinjiang with a growing sense of unease. Just like Siberia, they are vast, sparsely populated and resource rich areas- and Beijing has used them to fuel their hungry economy.
In the coming decades, we could see increasing tension between the two powers. Perhaps Chinese intelligence will sponsor Siberian separatists, or we could see state sponsorship of mass migration of Chinese labourers, not unlike the situation of Mexican migration to the United States. Either way, China will probe the weaker Russian periphery.
The possibility of a standoff between the two nuclear powers could lead to Russia becoming a reluctant member of the anti-Chinese containment alliance which will likely be a core feature of the international environment of the 21st century.
Managing Russian decline will likely be a core foreign policy aim of many states across the world throughout this century. Where they test us, like committing an assasination on our territory or harassing an ally, we should respond with strength. But the Russians are rational actors who operate devoid of emotion, and when we deal with them, that is what we should be too. Further common ground may yet be found.
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