It says more about toxic US domestic politics than the realities of international relations
The Russian invasion of Ukraine may very well cause the most casualties from armed conflict that Europe has seen since World War II. The first professional casualty of this war, which occurred well before the tanks rolled over the border, was the head of the German Navy. On an official visit to India in January, Admiral Kay-Achim Schönbach commented that Crimea was lost to Ukraine and “will never come back,” and that Russian president Vladimir Putin “probably also deserves” respect, which NATO should accord him. Plunging in deeper, the admiral stated that the reason for his conciliatory stance towards Putin is that “we need Russia against China.”
The off-the-cuff diplomacy did not go over well in Kiev or other eastern European capitals, and in short order the admiral was history. The incident will soon be forgotten as an embarrassing stumble, but his comments, however clumsy, raise a question: is a Russian partnership with the West to counter a prosperous, rising, and militarily powerful China a remotely feasible arrangement in view of Russia’s barbaric behavior in invading Ukraine? How can some persons in the West possibly think this is a good idea?
It is significant that those who believe Schönbach’s argument that Russia could conceivably be an ally of the United States and other Western countries tend to inhabit the political Right. The paleoconservative American Conservative sees a US-Russia alliance as inevitable. The slightly more mainstream Heritage Foundation says that the Russia-China strategic partnership won’t last. In personal conversation or correspondence, I have encountered several conservatives claiming that we “need” Russia to counter China.
There may be a tiny grain of truth in what they say, at least in the long term. When Russia was the USSR, it never got along with China notwithstanding their supposed fraternal comradeship as communist countries. China deeply resents the unequal treaties of the 19th century, when Russia annexed large territories formerly under Chinese suzerainty. The thorough looting of Manchuria during the Red Army’s 1945 liberation of the region from the Japanese still rankles.
Aside from the historical record, there is a structural reason why a long-term Russia-China friendship may be tenuous: a gaping imbalance in the two countries’ relative strength. The population ratio is ten Chinese to one Russian. China is an economic powerhouse with diversified manufacturing and a high-tech base, while Russia has been described as a gas station masquerading as a country, and whose only other consumer exports are vodka and matrioshka dolls. Its GDP ranks near Spain and South Korea, hardly the stuff of superpower status.
But Russia has always been prickly and defensive to the point of paranoia about its claim to being a great power. Given its militantly hostile reaction to NATO’s presence in Eastern Europe, it is easy to imagine its deep resentment at being relegated to the status of junior partner by China, to be treated like Mongolia or a central Asian republic.
History suggests that this is something China is prone to do when it has the upper hand. The tributary system of the Chinese empire required surrounding countries to formally acknowledge their lesser status, and Beijing appears to be demanding the same sort of recognition by Southeast Asian countries of its claim to sovereignty over the South China Sea. It is logical that the Kremlin would seek to avoid becoming a bit player in a future Pax Sinica.
The matter would seem to be a straightforward one of incompatibility between Russia and China that forecloses partnership, but that theory ignores the obvious: what is actually happening now.
The two countries are currently in a de facto alliance; in the last year they held the largest joint military and naval maneuvers in their history. China’s voracious consumption of oil and gas, and Russia’s ability and willingness to provide them, are mutually beneficial and unhindered by any scruples of either party about human rights or the environment. For Russia, this is a welcome change from the tiresome haggling over certification of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Europe.
The Russia-Ukraine standoff has unmasked this closer relationship. Diplomatically in the United Nations Security Council and rhetorically via Chinese state media, Beijing has consistently supported Russia while denigrating the United States and NATO. It also appears to be ready to neutralize any potential economic sanctions against Moscow.
Putin’s conspicuous presence at the Beijing Olympics even as many Western leaders stayed home is a fitting symbol of the relationship. Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jin-ping did not waste any time: they claimed a “no limits” partnership diplomatically, militarily, and in technology and energy. Pointedly, Beijing publicly backed Moscow’s stance against NATO.
For the time being, a Russia-China alliance is logical. Both are revisionist powers. Russia seeks to reverse the outcome of the cold war and the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany of 1990. China is opposed to the post-World War II dispensation in East Asia whose bedrock is the 70-year old Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan.
This follows a tradition of revisionist powers banding together even if there is ideological or geopolitical incompatibility. In the early 1920s, Weimar Germany and Bolshevik Russia were excluded from the post-World War I international system. But at Rapallo, they signed a treaty of diplomatic and (covert) military cooperation. It is notable that the agreement was pushed by the German military and other reactionary elements in the Weimar Republic. They set aside their loathing of Bolshevism for the sake of overturning the system established by Versailles.
In the current case of Russia and China, they have a mutual desire to demolish the liberal-international status quo; as long as China does not feel strong enough to overwhelm the United States and its allies in the Indo-Pacific, it needs Russia to distract and overstretch the Western alliance system. But there are domestic ideological imperatives as well.
Neither Beijing nor Moscow wants any outbreak of a Prague Spring or Color Revolution. For the sake their number one priority, the maintenance of an authoritarian status quo, dictatorships will band together to fend off any threat to their legitimacy. One sees this among smaller pariah states as well, for example the North Korea-Iran connection. It is a rational foreign policy founded on the need for ideological solidarity among like-minded regimes.
With all these factors working against a Western partnership with Russia against China (not to mention a massive Russian military assault, why do some in the West believe in it so strongly? Admiral Schönbach’s comments give us a clue. He stated that recruiting Russia as an ally was something that he, “as a radical Roman Catholic,” would welcome.
His remark lies at the heart of the Western conservative illusion about Russia. Fifteen years ago, Russia as a bulwark against China (or other purported Third World threats) was the fringe enthusiasm of Pat Buchanan and other politically marginalized culture warriors, while the Republican Party – with the exception of oddballs like Dana Rohrabacher – was still living off the lingering fumes of cold war suspicion of Russia.
But by Barack Obama’s second term, the GOP had completed its transformation – although it had been in the making for decades – into a radical party whose foreign policy was determined by the Religious Right and other culturally conservative factions. It was at this time that evangelicals like Franklin Graham became enamored of Russia, while the Kremlin began cultivating conservative pressure groups like the NRA.
Now, what remains of the Republican foreign policy establishment is struggling against senators like Josh Hawley and Mike Braun, or Representatives Marjory Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, and Matt Rosendale. While the latter are (as of now) a minority of GOP politicians, they have received an assist from figures in the conservative media-entertainment complex like Tucker Carlson, Fox News host Dan Bongino, and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. An intraparty struggle for policy dominance has begun.
The turning of the Republican Party mirrors that of Russia-friendly rightist parties in Europe, such as Alternative für Deutschland, Rassemblement national, and Lega. It is the reactionary Right returning to its historical roots after the long 20th century detour of anticommunism.
The diplomatic history of the early 19th century Europe was dominated by the ultra-conservative Count Metternich. In order to suppress liberalism and constitutionalism while upholding absolutist monarchy and the church, Metternich welcomed Tsarist Russia into the European state system and counted on it as a buffer against any outbreak of republicanism on the continent. The rest of the century was dominated by the rise of Germany under Bismarck. For him, a friendly Russia not only prevented France from combining with another power against Germany, its absolutist monarchy was more to his taste than republican France or the social democratic movement in Germany that he was busily suppressing.
Today, Russia exerts a similar attraction for conservative nationalists. Statements by Senator Hawley and others frame their reluctance to support Ukraine as a matter of national interest and claim it distracts US foreign policy from confronting China. But even if the Tucker Carlsons and Franklin Grahams were not pressuring them from further right, the Kremlin’s rhetoric of “traditional values,” “Christian civilization,” anti-homosexual laws, and general tough-guy posturing would be alluring to the post-Trump GOP.
While the pro-Russia faction in Congress is a small minority, it is possible that, having been cleverly positioned as a populist stance, support for Putin could eventually become a majority GOP position. Now that Donald Trump, still the putative leader of the GOP, has pronounced Russia’s annexation of Donetsk and Luhansk to be a good thing, the possibility becomes even more likely: however much some Republicans disdain Trump’s crude style, almost all of them want as little daylight as possible between themselves and him on policy. So, as strange as it sounds, a GOP predominately unified around a pro-Putin policy is hardly unthinkable in view of the various Republican policy somersaults of the past decade.
Should the position of this GOP faction ever become the foreign policy of the United States, it would hardly represent the triumph of national interest foreign policy, or of hardheaded realpolitik. It would signal the dominance of the most questionable aspects of US domestic policy in the international arena: the cultural obsession with abortion, gay rights, fundamentalist religion, and similar issues launched onto the world stage.
It would make a rational policy towards Russia, or for that matter China, much more difficult to execute and sustain. Further, there is no realistic basis for believing that appeasing Putin would inveigle him into acting as a shock absorber against China for America’s benefit while making him drop his fixation with reversing the last 35 years of history in Europe. The notion of engineering a US-Russia alliance is a conservative wish-projection rather than a feasible project; it is as illusory as the belief of some on the Left, 75 years ago, that Stalinism was a form of social democracy.
Fifteen or 20 years from now, whoever is ruling the Kremlin may indeed welcome a rapprochement with the United States to confront China. But if China’s plans will have succeeded by then, Beijing will already have achieved a dominating sphere of influence in most of central Eurasia. At that juncture, an alliance will be too late for a Russia reduced in influence to a level similar to 14th century Muscovy, and pointless for America.
Mike Lofgren was a career congressional staff member for national security issues on the House and Senate budget committees and author of The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted.