The unity of this side of the world regarding Russia and its war is not in doubt beyond certain suspicions, but there are nuances. If you look closely, you will see that the West wants to continue advancing on Vladimir Putin because of his barbarity in Ukraine, but a large part has no interest in defeating him. Nor that he succeeds.
Moscow’s warlike attack sought to restore its status as a global power, but it is paying off with the opposite effect. The consequence will be a weak Russia and supplier of commodities that the western side imagines adjusted to your interests. That plan acknowledges one difficulty: China. The almost centenarian Henry Kissinger has just remarked it wisely in Davos.
Let’s see the context. The recent European agreement that almost completely stopped buying Russian oil aims to break the economic backbone of the Kremlin in the medium term. In this effort, the disposition of the global north is homogeneous against an unpredictable player that blows up the accumulation scheme and the global economy.
The goal of cornering Moscow is likely to be met in the case of a Russia that has burned “in a single day, most of the economic gains it had made since 1991,” remarks the Swedish economist Anders Aslund, a thoroughgoing connoisseur of the field: it was simultaneous adviser to the governments of Russia and Ukraine.
In any case the Russian Federation will not be the same. “When the fighting stops, as it must eventually, the situation will never go back to where it was”, acknowledges George Soros, still defiant at 91 years old.
In recent days, an audacious proposal from the eternal Kissinger has circulated in analytical and chronic columns. At the Davos Economic Forum he advised Ukraine to negotiate with Russia to return to the status quo before the war. That is to say with the Kremlin dominating the eastern provinces and the Crimean Peninsula that it controls since 2014.
Chinese President Xi Jinping and Henry Kissinger, in Beijing, China, in 2018. Photo EFE
“Continuing with the war would no longer have anything to do with the freedom of Ukrainebut it would become a new war against Russia itself”, he warned in one of the paragraphs that have transpired the most and are repeated the most by analysts. But that was not the most important.
Nor when he recalled one of his old reflections that Russia has been “an essential part of Europe for 400 years” and “the guarantor of the structure of the European balance of power at critical moments.”
Fury in Kiev
For Kissinger, Ukraine should remain the bridge between Europe and Russia, a point of balance that would be broken if “there is no wisdom among Europeans” and in Ukraine, to resolve this dilemma.
These comments reasonably infuriated the political establishment in kyiv, which registered them as a betrayal of their sacrifice. The countries in the Russian neighborhood also reacted furiously, translating as a victory for Moscow and the green light for a broader offensive in their territories, any negotiation with Putin like the one defended by the Germans and French,
These crossings express divergences in the western alliance that many analysts warn as destabilizing. The differences exist, it is true, to the point that they came to confront the two main US newspapers, The New York Times y The Washington Post.
The first, calling on Biden not to pressure kyiv to “pursue an illusory victory” and the second editorializing that “it would be a disaster, both moral and strategic, if Putin were invited to a defining negotiation before their main objectives have been frustrated.”
In the context of this discussion, the threat of the conflict spreading into a third world war, with atomic artifices, constantly stands out.
As part of these nuances, a few days ago the Times, which has been a battering ram in escalating war support for kyiv, published an impassioned column by an analyst, Christopher Caldwell, who warned that “European countries under myopic US leadership are sleepwalking into all-out war with Russia”. Of course with the inevitable mention of the atomic denouement.
Henry Kissinger Richard Nixon. Imagen de 1973.
Kissinger, perhaps mischievously, also marks this danger when he alludes to an eventual war escalation. But he does it possibly to point to another, more substantial goal of his discourse, to which less attention has been paid.
The winner?
“European leadership should not lose sight of the longer-term relationship with Russia and (in that sense) neither should risk pushing Russia into a permanent alliance with China.” warned at Davos.
It is a key vision. It means that the nuances in the coalition would be fueled less by the specter of an extended war than by a strategic failure that ends up crowning the People’s Republic as the great winner of this conflict.
In these labyrinths, it would be necessary to accept Joe Biden’s recent column, in which he affirms with novel and credible caution that he has no interest in a war against Russia or in contributing to the fall of Putin.
The concern to prevent common enemies from associating has been a permanent axis of Kissinger’s thought and doctrine of a stage. In 1972, as national security adviser and impending foreign minister, he led Richard Nixon to a historic dialogue with Mao Tse Tung in Beijing.
Mao Tse Tung and Richard Nixon during the US President’s visit to China in 1972. AFP Photo
With that gesture, he founded a relationship fueled by the differences that then separated that impoverished communist space from the most bombastic of the Soviet Union. Those were times when Nikita Khrushchev compared the legendary Chinese leader to Hitler while the troops of both countries faced each other on the binational border.
In the midst of the Cold War, the USSR was the real rival of the US on the other side of the world. So widening the gap between Beijing and Moscow was helpful. At the same time, Kissinger observed, this did not preclude negotiating with the Soviets despite their mistrust and consolidating influence over China to guarantee a balancing counterweight in the geopolitical balance.
It is worth asking whether it would now be possible to take advantage of the weakness to which Russia has submitted itself to repeat that process with the investment of the players. Nobody knows. Kissinger simply says that the opposite must not be done: allow these muds a China-led alliance emerges with an extraordinary hegemonic weight.
A territorial victory that guarantees Russia control of what it had before the war with some serious addition, such as the port of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov, would restore the balance that Kissinger proclaims for prevent Chinese expansion.
The interests
From its interests, Beijing would make the same assessment. A weakened Russia would be a reward for the patience of the Asian giant in the face of the costs of trust in the world that its ambiguity with Moscow has cost it.
Russian autocrat, Vladimir Putin. Photo EFE
Kissinger’s argument intersects with some additional factual issues. Russia has long been in a cycle of decline, hence in part also this war. The invasion of Ukraine has turned the Kremlin into a peculiar subject, weak but dangerously armed.
For this very reason, NATO will no longer withdraw from the territories it has added to its influence with the instability that this extended presence implies. Kissinger has always professed that Ukraine join that Alliance.
In turn, the economic crisis associated with the war promises a domestic impact on Russia that will encourage hidden political rivalries. It is always important to remember that Russia is a capitalist country with capitalist objectives that prevail over symbolic ones. Putin’s stability depends on the confirmation of this identity datum.
As Kissinger somehow suggests, no one would seem to want the Russian leader to fall, with the clear exception of Ukraine. In the case of China, one of the biggest risks for Beijing was that the crisis usher in a pro-Western leadership in Russia. But in this speculative scenario, it is more likely that the opposite will happen if it happens. The West knows it. Beijing too.
As the Hungarian Sinologist Csaba Barnabas Horvath points out, “During the elections of the last decade, the two strongest Russian opposition parties were not pro-Western, but the extreme right of Vladimir Zhirinovsky and the communists”.
“So even if Putin’s United Russia party falls from power, Zhirinovsky, the communists or an alliance of the two will most likely take control of the country.” That’s where Kissinger’s watchful eye seems to be looking. when you talk about Russia while you talk about China.
© Copyright Clarin 2022