Little, astonishingly little, is being written about the upcoming Geneva summit in America
It would seem that this event is the perfect occasion for political speculation about the possible and the actual. It would seem that geopolitical gurus could fantasise about both the subject of the US President’s conversation with the Russian President and the possible outcome of the event. But the gurus for the most part either remain silent or make passing remarks of little significance.
The summit is chiefly written about by those experts and those sources that have long lobbied for some warming of relations between the two countries such as The American Conservative or The National Interest, but they, it must be admitted, do not hold out much hope for the summit either. The contradictions between the countries are too great and the prejudices too strong to expect anything positive on June 16 in Geneva.
Curiously, however, the Biden administration has been very weakly criticised by its Republican opponents for a kind of softness towards Russia. Following reports that the State Department had decided not to sanction the main German-backed builders of Nord Stream 2, hawks such as John Bolton and Marco Rubio each issued a tweet condemning the decision. Bolton even called it “outrageous”, but that was about it. It can’t even be compared to the anti-Russia senators’ reaction to Obama’s 2013 refusal to bomb Syria, much less to the Democrats’ harassment of Trump for his alleged “sympathies” with Putin. True, a journalist from the conservative American Spectator has already predicted that Biden will lose in his confrontation with Putin, but this kind of cry from the back of a Trumpist corner does not change the situation.
And it seems paradoxical. For the Republicans now have an excellent chance to retaliate against Biden by claiming that it is he and not Trump who is the real “agent of the Kremlin”, however unwittingly. It would seem that White House opponents could have mounted a campaign by pointing to such “egregious” indications of weakness as the extension of START III, behind-the-scenes bargaining with Iran over the nuclear deal, and the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. And yet there has been no backlash so far. There are isolated voices drowning in a mood of general indifference. There are several reasons for this circumstance.
The first and most obvious is that the media supporting the Republican Party and Trump personally are noticeably less influential in the US than those supporting the Democrats. Republicans, meanwhile, are hopelessly split into a majority that continues to see the former president as its leader, and a minority that is trying – so far without success – to find an intraparty alternative to him. The former are not yet very keen on using the “Russian card”, the latter are wary of going to war with Biden, suspecting that they will soon have to seek refuge in his party.
The second reason is partly related to the first: Trump’s electoral “overthrow” in 2020 had all the hallmarks of a conspiracy that clearly involved members of the military and the intelligence community recoiling from what they see as an unpredictable president. Now, the main task of the entire coalition of “conspirators,” including the Deep State, is to prevent a Trumpist revenge, which is very, very likely, given the calm course of events. The mainstream newspapers in America are now writing mainly on this topic – how to avoid a return to the White House and Congress of Trump supporters and in general Republicans who are now electorally dependent on Trump. So whatever the US spy agencies think of Biden now, there are no leaks, no dirt against him in the newspapers. That is why the unpleasant subject of the Geneva summit for Biden is hardly discussed in the media.
Finally, there is the third and most important reason. The subject of the summit is unpleasant for the Democrats first of all because at the moment the Americans look more interested in the Geneva meeting than the Russians. The Russian foreign minister and his deputies publicly express skepticism about the outcome of the summit, openly talk about the discrepancy in the agendas of the sides and the lack of illusions on the Russian side about the motives of the Western partners. In a recent interview with Rossiyskaya gazeta, the secretary of the Russian Security Council spoke about the possible use of force in case of a threat to the country’s security, and this statement was at the top of Yandex. In America, on the other hand, only a prominent think tank such as The Atlantic Council***, whose website is unfortunately not accessible to Russian users, is particularly active in anti-Russian activities. The Atlantic Council’s website is, unfortunately, inaccessible to Russian users. The mainstream media is limited to editorial columns calling for “containing Russia”, including in cyberspace. What exactly is to be done is unclear.
Everyone, however, understands what Washington wants and what Biden intends to do at the Geneva summit. There are practically no secret trump cards up his sleeve, the playing field is clear to both sides. And both sides are aware of how the game will end. And yet it cannot be abandoned. The Americans need to split the possible Russian-Chinese alliance by any means. Which after China’s strategic agreement with Iran, concluded in March 2021 for 25 years, may well become an alliance of three civilizations – Muslim, Marxist-Confucian and Orthodox. This alliance is what the late Samuel Huntington and Zbigniew Brzezinski feared most. As a matter of fact, the whole American political realism since the late 1960s has made it its main goal to prevent the emergence of such a Eurasian axis.
And Biden’s main goal is undoubtedly the same – to drive a wedge between Moscow, Beijing and Tehran. As angry as the Republicans are at Biden, they realize there is no alternative to this strategy in Washington. All the Atlantic Council speculation about the need to rally the “world of democracies” against the “world of authoritarianism” can be left to foreign and domestic propaganda, in the realm of diplomacy, useless.
The collective West has already, by and large, discovered two cards to be used by the American president in this project of “driving a wedge”. The first is a report, coming from British intelligence, about the laboratory origin of the coronavirus. We will probably never know how this contagion actually originated, because all public reporting on the subject will be political. Clearly, it’s a pass to Biden now. He will not have to ask Putin to make some sort of joint anti-China declaration that is knowingly unacceptable to Russia. He will simply call on his Russian counterpart to declare the perniciousness of the development of biologic weapons and related virological research on the subject, dangerous to all mankind. Nothing seemingly political, but it is clear that any joint communiqué on this topic, even if couched in the most neutral tones, would be implicitly anti-Chinese. I am sure that the Russian side understands this game very well and would prefer to refrain from making such statements.
There is a second theme that brings Russia and the United States closer together and, on the contrary, divorces Russia and China. It is the use of Arctic resources. Russia and the United States are full-fledged members of the Arctic Council, they are among the “near-arctic” states and can therefore take advantage of the part of the Arctic shelf that belongs to them. In contrast, China is a claimant country that has declared its “arctic” status, but is not supported in its polar ambitions by any of the Arctic G8 states, including Russia. Under Trump, the US paradoxically tried to fight both China, which sought to internationalise access to the Arctic (modelled on Antarctica), and Russia and Canada, which claimed sovereignty over polar sea routes through their territorial waters. I think today America could move a little closer to Russia on this issue, in which case Russia would move a little farther away from China. On The National Interest’s website, Thomas Rotnam of the Kennan Institute’s Woodrow Wilson Center for Russian Arctic Policy proposes just such a strategy of “paradoxical rapprochement,” which, by the way, bluntly calls this polar “detente” “driving the tiniest of wedges” between Beijing and Moscow.
What is Russia doing in response? It is rather harshly demonstrating the price it is willing to pay for a timid diplomatic rapprochement with Washington, at least on those items of the agenda where there are common interests with the West and disagreements with China. As I said, I doubt the coronavirus probe will work, but the climate and arctic themes could work. But it would require Euro-Atlantic and its military and political structures to clearly refrain from moving further towards Russia’s borders. Sergey Lavrov had already quite clearly expressed this priority of Russian diplomacy on the eve of the summit, and judging by the more than sluggish reaction of the American press to all this diplomatic friction in recent days, the message of the Russian Foreign Ministry has been heard by the Americans.
Russia obviously does not want to take sides in the coming Euro-Atlantic-China conflict. At the same time, Russia is not economically self-sufficient at the moment. It cannot simply shut itself away and isolate itself. However, it does not want to be a shield between the West and the East, to shield one of these forces from the other. After all, we are talking about a clash of ‘winners’ in the Cold War that destroyed the Soviet Union; the US and China acted as virtual allies in the final phase of that war, and the third partner in that alliance was Islamic fundamentalism. The victors have quarrelled and are now fighting each other. Russia is forced to interact with each of them, and the most advantageous strategy for Russia would be to mediate between these two forces, the hegemony of each of which is unacceptable to Russia.
Let’s hope that our country will be able to maintain this strategic line and thus win the XXI century for itself.
Boris Mezhuev, FS