China sets out on Putin
presidency By M K Bhadrakumar
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov
stated last Friday that the crisis in Syria was
impossible to settle if the international
community ignored the positions of Russia and
China.
Russia obviously feels frustrated
that the "international community" is bent on
discrediting the United Nations observer mission
in Syria and keeps undermining Moscow's efforts to
bring about an "all-inclusive" Syrian dialogue.
However, the striking thing was that
Lavrov also spoke up in a media interview on
behalf of Beijing. His warm words coincided with
the visit by China's Vice Premier Li Keqiang to
Moscow. And Li lost no time endorsing what Lavrov
said, expanding on it to say, "The [Chinese and
Russian] sides hold 100% coinciding positions on
the issues of North Korea and Syria."
Meanwhile, Chinese Communist Party
newspaper Global Times
also featured an
editorial on Saturday on Li's visit, repeating an
argument it first floated two to three months ago;
namely, that the international situation compelled
China and Russia to come together to resist the
West's interventionist policies. The daily wrote:
The biggest significance of the
China-Russia partnership, in the foreseeable
future, may be that it establishes an obstacle
to the Western monopoly and protects the basic
rights of the non-Western world, including the
independence of national interests and the
diversity of political
systems.
However, the editorial did
acknowledge that there are lobbies in China and
Russia that prioritized ties with the West and,
besides, "China and Russia also have suspicions of
each other". Nonetheless, it maintained, Li's
visit "in a year of global elections" (in Moscow,
Washington and Beijing) demonstrated the mutual
confidence of China and Russia in their relations
and aimed at making the partnership "clearer and
more attractive".
Li is regarded as the
possible successor to Premier Wen Jiabao this
October and his mission to Moscow signified an
early attempt by Beijing to reset the compass of
the China-Russia partnership in anticipation of
Vladimir Putin returning to the presidency on May
7 after serving as prime minister for the past
five years.
Beijing has already secured
the scheduling of an official visit by Putin to
China in June, which will be his second visit in
the past year. Beijing is going all out to
strengthen its comprehensive strategic partnership
with Moscow when the US's "pivot to Asia" is
beginning to grate on Sino-American ties.
Fundamental contradiction But
Moscow's focus is somewhat different. The
consensus among Russian elites is that access to
Western technology is the key to modernizing
Russia's economy and Moscow should prioritize its
partnerships with the US and Europe. Russian
elites and the middle class do not regard China as
a substitute to the West. Nor do they succumb to
China's "soft power". Russia indeed has its
definite (and valuable) uses for China, a big
neighbor and an economic powerhouse.
Russia's predicament lies in that
Washington has so far adopted a policy of
selectively engaging it on issues of critical
interest - principally, Afghanistan - and this
falls short of Russian expectations of an equal
partnership between two great powers.
Washington needs all the transit
facilities it can get from Moscow within the
Northern Distribution Network to allow goods into
and out of Afghanistan, but it doesn't see the
need to consult Russia on the post-2014 regional
scenario for Afghanistan and Central Asia. Nor is
it paying heed to the Russian demarche on US
military bases in Afghanistan after the scheduled
withdrawal of troops in 2014.
From the
Russian viewpoint, the missile defense issue
becomes the litmus test of US intentions. But the
US aims at neutralizing all strategic missile
capability from any quarter - not only from
Russia, but China or Iran as well - that may make
it vulnerable.
This has been a
longstanding US objective and with the collapse of
the Soviet Union, it is realizable. On the other
hand, global strategic balance lies at the core of
the Russian military doctrine. A recent opinion
piece in the Moscow Times framed the paradigm:
The United States' pursuit of an
advanced global missile defense system is
tightly intertwined with the idea of US global
dominance. This goes to the very heart of US
foreign and defense policy. For that reason, all
negotiations with the US in limiting missile
defense end up going nowhere ... Given that
Russia is the weaker party in bilateral
relations, there is no compelling reason for
Washington to tie its hands on an issue it
considers central to its military and national
security strategy just for the sake of good
relations with Russia.
Meanwhile, the
US is going ahead with the deployment of the
missile defense system. A week earlier, the chief
of general staff of the Russian armed forces,
General Nikolay Makarov, warned: "The missile
defense development ... may disrupt the stability
of the strategic forces of Russia and the
stability in Europe from 2017-2018 at the latest
... We [Russia] are going to take some kind of
counter-measures."
On Thursday, Russian
Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov said, "So far,
we have not found a mutually acceptable solution
to the missile defense issue, and the situation is
at a dead end ... There is a dilemma facing our
countries now. Either we pass this test of
cooperation and respond together to new missile
challenges and threats, or we [Russia] will be
forced to undertake the necessary military
measures."
There is a fundamental
contradiction in the US-Russia relationship, which
is not easy to reconcile. However, paradoxically,
China is unable or unwilling to exploit it.
Neither Moscow nor Beijing (which is also
coming under pressure from the US missile shield
in the Asia-Pacific) is interested in working
jointly. A senior Defense Ministry official in
Moscow heading the military cooperation department
was quoted on Thursday as saying, "China's nuclear
potential will be 'neutralized' [by the US] much
sooner than Russia's. China has a far limited
capability ... But clearly they have a different
philosophy for guaranteeing national security,
which ought to be commented on by the Chinese
themselves."
The heart of the matter is
that Moscow prefers to work on its problems with
Washington on its own steam. In a major interview
with the Russian media last week before laying
down office in the Kremlin, President Dmitry
Medvedev went out of the way to caution against
"demonizing" America.
Lavrov took the
point further in another interview cautioning
against dramatizing the "rough patches" in
Russia's ties with the US. He estimated that
Russia-US relations were "probably at their best"
in recent years. Lavrov claimed that Moscow had
been "able to improve the situation with the [US
President Barack] Obama administration". (Medvedev
also claimed in his interview that the Obama
presidency had been "the best in the history of
Russian-US relations".)
Hearts of
iron Meanwhile, Russia has also begun
courting Big Oil. Vice Premier Igor Sechin, who is
close to Putin and is billed as Russia's energy
czar, paid his first visit to Washington last
month on an investment promotion tour. A fortnight
ago, Putin personally presided over the signing of
a joint venture agreement with ExxonMobil
estimated at half a trillion dollars through the
coming three or four decades.
Having said
that, Moscow places high importance on economic
cooperation with China. Sino-Russian trade touched
almost US$80 billion last year, showing a 42.7%
year-on-year jump. During Li's visit to Moscow,
the two countries signed 27 trade contracts worth
$15 billion. The energy ties spearhead
China-Russia strategic cooperation and it may play
an even bigger role for meeting the bilateral
trade target of $100 billion in 2015 and $200
billion in 2020.
Nonetheless, Li could not
resolve the price deadlock that has been blocking
the trillion-dollar gas deal with Russia's gas
giant Gazprom. Moscow demands tariffs on a par
with what it gets from Europe, while China thinks
that is excessive. Under the pending gas deal,
Russia would sell up to 68 billion cubic meters of
pipeline gas annually to China, making China its
single-biggest customer.
Moscow's deal
with ExxonMobil would have come as a surprise to
Beijing. It carried the imprimatur of the Putin
presidency. Li reportedly proposed "a completely
new model" of cooperation in the natural gas
sphere and "received a positive assessment from
the Russian side" - according to a senior Chinese
official in the Chinese entourage visiting Moscow.
Beijing will be pinning hopes on wrapping up the
gas deal during Putin's visit to China in June.
However, Moscow isn't in any obvious
hurry. No sooner had Li departed from Moscow,
Gazprom announced that Russia and Japan were in
talks to build a gas pipeline from Russia to
expand gas supplies."The parties have discussed
prospects of increase of natural gas supplies from
Russia to Japan in terms of higher liquefied
natural gas production at the Sakhalin Island and
implementation of an LNG plant construction
project in Vladivostok. The parties also discussed
the opportunities for a gas supply project from
Russia to Japan through pipeline." The future
pipeline could be laid on the seabed.
Welcome to the land of the rising sun.
Clearly, Moscow is signaling to China that it is
but one of its major clients for natural gas and
currently not even the main Asia-Pacific client.
Gazprom is already implementing a $7 billion
project with a Japanese consortium of companies to
build a LNG plant and gas chemical complex in
Vladivostock, which is scheduled to be launched in
2016 and will produce 10 million tonnes of LNG out
of which 7 million will by supplied to Japan and
three million to South Korea.
That is to
say, contrary to what the Global Times has
written, Putin is not in the business of aligning
with China for tilting at Western windmills with
the aim of protecting the "basic rights of the
non-Western world". He may well tilt at windmills,
but it will be a highly motivated act and strictly
for safeguarding Russian interests.
Moscow
would rather take a leaf out of Washington's
copybook and have an engagement of China that
optimally dovetails with Russian interests. Thus,
on Syria, the answer to Chinese advances for both
to act in unison simply happens to be "yes" (for
the present, at least); but on North Korea, it
could at best be "maybe"; and, on Vietnam, it is
most certainly "no".
In sum, the key to
radically shuffling this Sino-Russian equation
lies in Obama's pocket. Obama needs to make up his
mind whether he should "re-reset" relations with
Russia against the historic backdrop of the US's
"pivot" to Asia.
It is entirely up to him
to assess the caricature of Putin that is embedded
in Western perceptions. Indeed, Li's visit to
Moscow has sprung some surprises.
Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a
career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His
assignments included the Soviet Union, South
Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.
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