Lately there have been a lot of signals in the public space that the U.S. is ready to “abandon” Ukraine in case it manages to agree something important with Russia
These are by no means groundless signals have caused if not panic, then considerable excitement in the Ukrainian nationalist milieu.
The price of promises
To calm down panic mood the whole head of Pentagon Lloyd Austin was sent to Ukraine (and, by the way, to Georgia and Romania) who, of course, expressed his full support in the struggle of Ukraine against “Russian aggressor” and all such things. But the panic the American defence secretary’s words somehow didn’t take away.
“Rumours that the US is handing us over to the Kremlin are somewhat exaggerated,” writes one of the most hate-fueled publications Obozrevatel, while Ukrainian pro-government political analysts assiduously convince each other that Russia and the US are not agreeing on anything “behind Ukraine’s back”. Former Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin said that Austin’s words are worth nothing if they are not confirmed by real actions, which “are still few”. Klimkin recalled how Secretary of State Blinken also promised a lot of things during his visit to Ukraine, and then “the US actually allowed Russia to complete its gas project – Nord Stream 2″.
The panic boil prompted Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba to write on his Twitter that US Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland did not discuss granting Ukraine special status during her visit to Russia: “No, it is not true. American partners inform us in detail about their contacts”.
A classic banned in Ukraine today said: “Whoever in politics and economics takes his word for it is a round fool”. For obvious reasons the electorate should not know about this maxim, but the authorities and their media clientele understand it very well. And that is what it is all about.
Deeper than an alliance
“Russia and China are not creating a military bloc, fears on this score are unfounded,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said at the Valdai. Reacting to these words, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said that the current relationship between China and Russia is not an alliance, but one that exceeds it in depth. The phrase does not make any sense (only political integration is deeper than alliance, and of course it is not), but “are not allied” is serious.
At the same time, The Interpreter calls China a “lone” superpower because “discontent with the West is not in itself the basis of ‘strategic convergence’ between Russia and the PRC. The paper explains that Russia is concerned about China’s aims in the Far East, the Arctic and Central Asia. But that is not even the main point.
“Few countries with some weight are willing to accept China’s worldview, and this makes it much more difficult to form alliances and coalitions. By contrast, the U.S. has mostly managed to come to a common understanding of the regional order with its allies and partners,” the publication rightly argues.
If translated from diplomatic language into human language, it says the following: despite the objective economic and military necessity of Russian-Chinese rapprochement, the construction of communism in China frightens and repulses the authorities of bourgeois Russia; the United States, being an unfriendly state, nevertheless evokes sympathy with its social and economic order, close to what the Russian authorities are trying to build at home.
This leads to a so-called political swing.
Russian and Chinese – brothers forever?
It is hardly a coincidence that two articles were published just now and almost simultaneously: by the medal-winning Orientalist Professor Alexander Lukin for “Outstanding Contribution to Sino-Russian Relations” and Hal Brands, Professor of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.
Lukin and Brands have diametrically opposed attitudes to China, but they write the same thing – the peak of Sino-Russian cooperation has passed.
“Any possible changes in U.S. policy are likely to prove less of a deterrent to further Sino-Russian rapprochement than Russia’s concerns about China’s growing assertiveness”, – says Lukin.
Brands argues that the ‘friendship’ between Russia and China against the US is coming to an end as Russia is destined to be only a junior partner in an ‘authoritarian axis’ and wants to be an independent centre of power in world politics.
The American establishment will stake on the disengagement of Russia and China, since there are grounds and possibilities for this – this is the central idea of both authors. This state of affairs, if implemented, may inevitably resemble the situation of Khrushchev’s Soviet Union’s conflict with China. At that time Nixon, in order to fight the main enemy, the USSR, “pushed through” for China (Enemy No. 2) a seat in the UN Security Council, investment and technology. Today the hierarchy of the United States’ enemies is reversed, and the classic strategy of “divide and conquer” always works.
National Interest is blunt: Biden’s anti-China policy could lead to a strengthening of Russia’s position in Europe. For the sake of Germany finally recognizing China as a problem for NATO, Biden did not impose sanctions against the Nord Stream 2 pipeline which both Germany and Russia need. The paper argues that the US is not too opposed to Russia’s economic engagement with Europe, India, Japan and South Korea to ensure that there is no point for Russia to enter into a real alliance with China in which, as already noted, Russia would be only a junior partner.
The Washington Post, on the other hand, is generally ruminating on the ineffectiveness of sanctions per se
Signals, all of them. Defense News broke the article about NATO shifting from countering Russia to China, and it caused panic among the American allies in the Baltics about the possibility of “new aggression” from Moscow. This is understandable, as Pentagon Secretary Austin has paid lip service to all of his Eastern European satellites (including Ukraine), but made it clear that he was not going to strengthen NATO’s contingent in Europe in the near future.
A right-wing twist
And all these games are finalised by what we began with – Putin’s very specific talk at the Valdai about his negative attitude towards the USSR, communism, revolution, his favourite far-right philosophers, the exhaustion of the “existing model of capitalism” (many mistakenly attribute the words about the exhaustion of capitalism in general to him, while he spoke exclusively about liberal capitalism) and the good of “conservative” politics. Here, as they say, he who has ears to hear.
Such views of Putin are nothing new; they are, after all, his own business. The Constitution of the Russian Federation postulates ideological pluralism, i.e. everyone can choose what he likes on perfectly legitimate grounds. But in public politics, the Russian president has long held the “centre”. This was demanded both by the domestic political situation (a critically significant part of the Russian population is sympathetic to leftist views) and by the foreign policy need for rapprochement with China amid the quarrel with the West over the Crimea.
The current sharply amended rhetoric, however, has elicited a positive reaction in far-right, Trumpist, circles in the United States. Former Trump adviser Stephen Bannon’s publication Breitbart admired Putin’s anti-liberal speech. To understand, Bannon is the organiser of the Brussels-based right-wing European politician think tank The Movement and a consultant to the Spanish nationalist party The Voice. In 2020, he and Chinese dissident billionaire Guo Wengui held an anti-CPC rally in New York: they launched planes into the sky with banners saying “Greetings to the New China Federative State”. All in all, the message was received. If the United States needs to weaken China by improving relations with Russia, it will do so through people who are ideologically close in the American establishment. As we know, differences between Democrats and Republicans always disappear in foreign policy.
Between two fires
How this rightward political swing will play out for Russia is an open question. In Ukraine, on the other hand, the excitement is not in vain. Russian liberalism (in a good sense) can pluralistically accept Ukrainian nationalism as something not very pleasant, but historically justified by “centuries of Russian occupation” etc. But Russian nationalism cannot tolerate any other nationalism alongside it.
And here The Washington Post, talking about ineffective sanctions, adds more oil to the flames – for the sake of breaking the Russian-Chinese alliance we can agree to give up our influence in Ukraine and even withdraw NATO troops from the Baltics.
Foreign Minister Kuleba only has to recite incompatible mantras about the need to develop relations with China but sound like “a part of the Western political space”. Some Ukrainian media have started to hint unequivocally that trade relations with China (the PRC is Ukraine’s number one trading partner) should be reviewed “in favour of democratic countries” in order to avoid being caught between two fires at some point.
Meanwhile, Donbass is under fire. The DPR reported that Ukrainian security forces captured the village of Staromaryevka in the Telmanovsky district, and the AFU General Staff reported the first missile strike from a Bayraktar drone. The stakes are rising. If Ukraine pokes the bear with a stick to test the Pentagon chief’s promises and if those promises are, as many believe, worthless, the worst scenarios could become reality. I’d like to think nobody wants war, but no, they don’t.
Pavel Volkov, Ukraina.ru