‘We all know that after the end of the Cold War – everyone is aware of that – a single centre of domination emerged in the world, and then those who found themselves at the top of the pyramid were tempted to think that if they were strong and exceptional, they knew better and they did not have to reckon with the U.N., which, instead of [acting to] automatically authorise and legitimise the necessary decisions, often creates obstacles…and attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the U.N.’
Russian President Vladimir Putin, Speech at the United Nations General Assembly, 28 September 2015.
Addressing the United Nations General Assembly in late September 2015, Russian President Vladimir Putin emphasised one of the guiding tenets of Russian foreign policy over the past several years: resisting the United States’ ‘strong and exceptional’ hegemonic role in the post-Cold War international power structure. In his speech, Putin critiqued the foreign policy of the US and its allies as overly unilateral, and advocated for an alternative multipolar world system, one in which states theoretically share comparable amounts of political influence on the international stage. As such, Putin depicted Russia as a credible and indispensable player in a multipolar power system, manifesting an image of a country whose interests and political ideology could no longer be ignored in the international community. Over the course of 2015, Russian foreign policy continued to strive towards this objective, albeit at heavy costs to Russia’s deteriorating democracy and its backfiring economy.
Image courtesy of Kremlin.ru, © 2015, some rights reserved.
It is slightly more straightforward to assess the broader aims of Russian foreign policy over the past year based on three major geopolitical incidents in which Russia has recently been involved. These developments include Russia’s antagonistic relations with the West – in particular the US, the European Union (EU), and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) – Moscow’s policy towards Ukraine, and its involvement in the Syrian Civil War. Russia’s strategy in each of these cases falls within the country’s broad objective of reshaping the current international power structure towards a more multipolar division of power, which would, in principle, create greater room for Russian interests on the international stage. Russia’s motives to espouse such a system are quite clear: effectively, Putin and his close circle of policy advisors perceive power in the international arena to be a zero-sum game, in which one country’s loss of international influence is another country’s gain.[1] In pursuing this goal, realist thinking has dominated Russian foreign policy towards the West, Ukraine and Syria.
Russia’s current relations with the U.S. and Europe best show Putin’s brand of realism, that is, a primary reliance on displays of military power, complemented with secondary efforts at diplomatic cooperation on issues that benefit Russia’s immediate interests. 2015 began with encouraging signs of cooperation between Russia and the West, as France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine signed the Minsk II agreement in February, which halted the worst of the fighting in eastern Ukraine. However, despite cooperation between Russia and the West on Minsk II, fundamental policy disagreements remained unresolved, propagating mutual misconceptions and distrust. For example, Russia’s unnecessarily large-scale military activities in the Baltics and the government’s extension of Russia’s antisanksii – measures taken in retaliation against Western economic sanctions – affirmed these antagonistic views. In particular, Russia made its antisanksii laws harsher, not only extending the ban on particular types of US, EU, Australian, and Norwegian food imports into Russia, but also by publicly destroying these illegal imports. This development is an attempt to aggravate a division between EU and US policy towards Russia, given that several EU economies depend far more on exporting food to Russia compared to the US. Rather than engage with the West, Russian foreign policy continued to emphasize divisions and promulgate distrust between the two sides.
Further aggravating this distrust, influential Russian government-owned media channels frequently portray the US as an untrustworthy and hypocritical country, whose attempted foreign policy overreach is no more than an effort to preserve its decaying power in international politics. As an example, these views are particularly espoused by the bombastic pundit Dmitry Kiselyov, whose Vesti Nedeli (News of the Week) show affirms popular anti-Western conspiracies and beliefs, such as accusing the US of supporting the Islamic State (IS) in Syria.[2] Constantly critiquing US foreign policy towards Russia in such terms only serves to construct a perceived opposition between Russia and the West, emphasising Russia as a competitor rather than a partner to the West, and reinforcing the Russian government’s foreign policy narrative of emphasising its strength on the international stage in countering the dominant West and moving towards a multipolar power structure. This type of rhetoric only serves to heighten Western perceptions of Russian aggression, particularly in the Baltic States, Sweden and Finland, the latter two which, after decades of military non-alignment towards Russia, have recently – and, more importantly, openly – debated joining NATO.[3] Rather, it seems that the Russian policy elite is gambling on the fact that enflaming such mutual misperceptions between Russian and Western motives will expose confusion and hesitation in the West’s foreign policy towards Russia. Given that Putin sees international influence to be a zero-sum game, the prevailing belief is that the West will be weakened by this hesitation that will ultimately benefit Russia. This tactic is clearly not limited to 2015; on the first day of 2016, Russia revised its annual foreign policy strategy to include NATO as a ‘direct threat’ to Russian security.[4] Seizing upon the atmosphere of distrust, Russia continued down a path of division rather than engagement with the West.
Amidst Russia’s ‘tough-talk’ towards the West, international focus on the conflict in Ukraine notably waned. This lack of attention played into Russia’s advantage: whilst the Minsk II agreement in February ceased the majority of fighting in eastern Ukraine, it also preserved the status quo. Both of these factors benefit Russia’s policy towards the question of Ukraine’s place in the European security framework. In the immediate term, Russia is able to consolidate its territorial gains in Crimea, and pro-Russian forces can maintain a high degree of influence in Donetsk and Luhansk. In the long-term, the presence of a pro-Russian population in eastern Ukraine guarantees that Ukraine will have a difficult, if not impossible, time joining allegedly ‘pro-Western’ organisations, such as NATO or the EU. Likewise, although the constant Russian antagonising of Kiev has established a bad precedent for Russian policy in the region, serving as an impetus for vitriol against Russia as the foundation of the new Ukrainian government, the animosity in Kiev in response to Russia has enflamed the position of pro-Russian supporters at the same time. In this case, Russia has exacerbated the perceived differences between the pro-Western political ideology and a pro-Russian position in regard to Ukraine’s political and security trajectory. Again, highlighting this contrast serves to push back against Western influence and affirms Russian accusations of Western policy overreach. Indeed, as long as Russia emphasizes perceptions of contrast between the West and Russia, as has been done in Luhansk and Donetsk, Ukraine will remain a neutered state, both politically and militarily.
With the focus of the international community now shifted away from the conflict in Ukraine, Russia pivoted to Syria, assuming a greater role in the country’s civil war. Beginning in late September, just days after Putin spoke at the United Nations, Russia staged a military intervention in Syria, solidifying and expanding on the territory held by long-time Russian ally President Bashar al-Assad with airstrikes and other special operations. Effectively, Russian policy in Syria bolstered Assad, whom Russia sees as the legitimate leader of Syria, so as to maintain Assad’s influence in strategic areas of the war-torn country and ensure that any peace agreement must include Assad at the negotiating table. In the Russian media, however, Russia’s main goal in Syria was often summarized as ‘fighting terrorists,’ who pose a grave threat to the Russian state. This is not exactly categorically false; rather, this oft-repeated statement simply relies on Russia’s far broader interpretation of ‘terrorism.’ Indeed, Russia manipulated the rhetorical emptiness of the word ‘terrorism’ and morphed the term into fitting with the country’s political goals. Accordingly, Russia would consider the majority of Syrian opposition groups to be terrorists; as a Washington Post graphic shows, Russia largely targeted areas held by Syrian opposition rather than territory occupied by the Islamic State (IS), the West’s primary terrorist target.[5] With these differing interpretations over the main terrorist target, attempts to create a grand coalition in Syria, combining the US-led coalition with Russian forces against IS never truly materialized, particularly in the wake of Turkey, a NATO member, shooting down a Russian fighter jet in November. The non-materialization of this ‘grand coalition’ not only exposed such fundamental disagreements between Russia and the West over the most pressing ‘terrorist’ threat in the Syrian Civil War, but also displayed the friction between the competing Western and Russian security agendas. With Russia heavily backing Assad, and the West calling for Assad to abdicate power, Russia’s intervention in Syria displayed an emerging competition between the Russian political ethos – a system dominated by a rhetorical emphasis on ‘stability,’ a strong leader, and unchecked executive power – and the West’s emphasis on democratic values. However, for Russia, the country’s exit strategy in Syria is crucial. Having achieved the goal of somewhat strengthening Assad’s position in a matter of months, a prolonged campaign would be a major error for Russia, as further success is not necessarily guaranteed, complicating Russia’s policy and putting the country’s objectives at risk. However, with that said, ending the civil war will indeed rely on a heavy degree of cooperation and concessions from all sides involved in the conflict.
Nevertheless, the Russian strategy of manufacturing perceptions of contrast between the Russia and the West’s political systems has had adverse affects on Russia domestically, particularly on the country as a ‘democracy.’ In distancing the country from Western democratic values, Russian politicians have in turn adopted increasingly autocratic tendencies. The outright anti-opposition sentiment in the country, spurred by these tendencies, led to the highly publicised murder of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in February, on a bridge in Moscow only a few hundred meters from the Kremlin. However, such non-democratic trends are certainly not limited to Moscow, with pro-Kremlin Chechen President Razman Kadyrov echoing Soviet propaganda by recently branding opposition politicians as ‘enemies of the people.’[6] Moreover, Russia’s antagonistic foreign policy strategy has hurt the country economically. Western sanctions in response to the country’s blatant aggression in Ukraine have targeted the Russian financial system and have cut Russia off from global capital markets, decimated foreign investment in the country and caused the country’s currency, the Rouble, to lose more than half of its value to the US Dollar over the past year. Combined with the declining price of oil, Russian GDP is estimated to have contracted 3.8 per cent in 2015, and the looming budget cutbacks will both reduce government services within the country and, depending on their size, may constrain Russia’s expansionary foreign policy strategy.
Over the course of 2015, Russia continued to pursue its objective of returning its vision for the world to the forefront of international politics. Seeing foreign policy as a zero-sum game, and looking to counter the West’s influence, Russia emphasized its alternative political philosophy, one not strictly bounded to democracy, but instead dominated by a strong head of state and a perception of upholding stability. In particular, Russia realized this strategy via its policies of confrontation towards the West, consolidation of the country’s position in Ukraine and expansion into Syria. However, in 2015, Russia only managed to dent the US and Europe’s pre-eminence in global affairs, and Russia’s vision for a multipolar world, in which Western influence is constrained by other powerful states around the world, including Russia itself, has not yet been realised. Indeed, a truly multipolar world would mean that Russian political, military and economic clout would be equal to that of the US and Europe, a theoretical situation that simply does not yet reflect the current reality within international affairs.
[1] Charles Krauthammer, “Putin’s Gambit, Obama’s Puzzlement”, The Washington Post, published September 17, 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/putins-gambit-obamas-puzzlement/2015/09/17/8d168584-5d6d-11e5-9757-e49273f05f65_story.html
[2] The Economist, “A New Spectacle for the Masses”, published October 3, 2015. http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21670061-vladimir-putin-embarks-risky-campaign-prop-up-syrian-regime-and-embarrass-america
[3] Arkady Ostrovsky, “Putin’s Pressure”, The Economist: The World in 2016, published Novmeber 2, 2015. http://www.theworldin.com/article/10470
[4] Jack Farchy, “Putin Names NATO Among Threats in New Russian Security Strategy”, Financial Times, published January 2, 2016. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6e8e787e-b15f-11e5-b147-e5e5bba42e51.html
[5] Thomas Gibbons-Neff, “Mapped: Russian vs. US Airstrikes in Syria”, Washington Post, published October 13, 2015. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2015/10/13/mapped-russian-vs-u-s-airstrikes-in-syria/
[6] Scott Rose, “Kadyrov Calls Russian Opposition Enemies of the People”, Bloomberg, pbulished January 12, 2016. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-12/kadyrov-calls-russian-political-opposition-enemies-of-the-people