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COMMENTARY
Russia's questionable offensive in
Asia
By Stephen Blank
One of the hallmarks of Russian diplomacy has
been its persistence. Whenever Russian or Soviet
authorities came up with an idea that they believed
advanced Russia's foreign policy or defense interests,
they keep promoting it, even after the conditions that
had given rise to it no longer applied. Thus this
persistence often led them into what turned out to be
grievous errors, like the acceptance of the Helsinki
Treaty, even though they were thereby obliged to accept
the accords on human rights that ultimately proved to be
a major factor in unraveling the Soviet bloc. Today,
this persistence continues, although it may again be
persistence in error.
Specifically, Russia's
foreign policy leaders have once again returned to
proclaiming multipolarity, ie, the leveraging of
anti-American alliances, as the lodestar of their
policy, especially in Asia. Beyond proclaiming that the
world is definitely moving towards such multipolarity,
even though there is no evidence to support this claim,
they have also gone back to aligning with China on this
anti-American basis.
Once again we see Russian
diplomats pushing the antiquated idea of a three-power
bloc composed of Russia, China and India. This idea was
first advanced by then foreign minister Yevgeny Primakov
in late 1998 at the bottom of Russia's economic crisis.
Primakov, driven by an anti-American calculus and eager
to find some way to leverage Russia's position in Asia
so that the Russian government, and especially its arms
salesmen, would not have to choose between Beijing and
New Delhi, promoted this scheme across Asia to no avail.
A key reason for his failure was that neither
India nor China was ready to draw so close as to
subordinate their policies to Russia's anti-Americanism,
though they were each happy to cooperate with Moscow on
their agenda. Indeed, China essentially drove
Sino-Russian relations from 1998-2000, bringing Russia
to its agenda rather than vice versa. This confirmed the
observations made by insightful Russian and Western
analysts that such a bloc would make Russia China's
junior partner, not America's principal opposing
interlocutor.
Undaunted by five years of
frustration, Primakov's successor, Igor Ivanov, and his
diplomats are again talking up this idea. Allegedly this
association is not aimed against any specific party and
merely represents the identity of the three states'
interests in somehow confining American power and policy
to channels approved by them in advance. That is they
seek to check, if not veto, the exercise of American
power. While the commendable part of this is the Russian
promotion of improved Sino-Indian relations; it does not
seem likely that beyond the atmospherics of the
successful bilateral summit in Beijing last week that
Moscow's urging can overcome the foundation of this
relationship's strategic tension. Indian elites believe
that China, for all of its talk of improving relations,
seeks to support Pakistan's nuclear capability, and
overall development as a check to Indian power in south
Asia.
They also believe that Beijing is trying
to encircle India from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean
and are acting to forestall that possibility of
strategic encirclement. On the other hand, China's
historic disdain for Indian pretensions to power have
only been weakened since India went nuclear and became
increasingly a military partner of the United States.
The prospect of this partnership worries China and is
one of the key factors that lies behind efforts at a
rapprochement with India. But whatever rapprochement
occurs between these powers will not be enough to
subordinate India or China to anyone else's foreign and
defense policies. Neither does it get at the root causes
of Indo-Pakistani tension in South Asia.
In
fact, the gambit for a three-power bloc exacerbates that
rivalry. India and Russia, no doubt in collaboration,
earlier this year killed the projected
Turkmen-Afghan-Pakistani gas pipeline, a major blow to
Pakistan and blocked the expansion of Afghanistan's
overland trade with India through Pakistan. Instead,
that trade and any pipeline from Afghanistan will go
through Iran, another key blow to Pakistan. India even
signed what amounts to a military alliance with Iran.
Likewise, Russia's hoped-for three-power collaboration
aims to suppress the terrorists supported by much of the
Pakistani establishment as well as to restrict American
power globally.
Yet beyond the fact that India
and the US will not break up to please China or Russia,
the increasingly visible joint American and Russian
action to galvanize India and Pakistan to reach an
agreement between themselves clearly implies not a check
to American power but joint action together with it and
the legitimization of America's presence in South and
Central Asia. There is little doubt that these
US-Russian initiatives towards both parties are
proceeding along parallel, or maybe even conjoined
tracks, but that conjunction rules out the very idea of
a three-power bloc against American ambitions and
policies in Asia. Certainly, Moscow hopes to gain not
just stability in Central Asia, but also new economic
outlets for its energy and weapons through improved ties
to Pakistan, hardly the goal implicit in this
three-power program.
Thus here again we see the
vaunted persistence of the Russian foreign policy
establishment even after the global situation that gave
rise to the original policy has rendered it moot, if not
infeasible. But we see this persistent approach for a
strategic "triangle" as taking place in an inherently
contradictory and thus unrealizable context. It will be
most interesting to see how long these diplomats and
even President Vladimir Putin, whom Quentin Peel of the
Financial Times called a "diplomatic Houdini" can keep
dancing at these two simultaneous but opposed weddings.
But it will be even more interesting when the inevitable
failure to realize one or both of these policies comes
about.
This is because failure to make progress
on the Indo-Pakistani agenda, no mater what Beijing and
New Delhi jointly accomplish, will have much more
dangerous implications then will failure to achieve this
bloc, which is not just foredoomed to frustration but is
also the product of an antiquated and outdated approach
to thinking about Russia's foreign policy situation and
the current world. In this respect, Ivanov, if not his
master, Putin, may in their own way replicate Leonid
Brezhnev's errors in Helsinki. And as one of the most
eminent practitioners of the "old diplomacy", Charles
Maurice Talleyrand, observed, a mistake is worse than a
crime.
Stephen Blank is an analyst of
international security affairs residing in Harrisburg,
PA.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co,
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
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policies.)
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