June 5, 2014 6:44 pm
What Xi and Putin really think about the west
Stable relationships will require understanding and a willingness, when necessary, to be tough
The other day China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin signed a gas supply deal in Beijing. Business concluded, one could imagine them settling down to swap notes on their various quarrels with neighbours and with the west. The exchange would have been a cheery one.
Beijing is very much the senior partner in the Sino-Russian relationship. Mr Putin needed to sell his gas more than Mr Xi needed to buy it, so the Kremlin was obliged to slash its price. More generally, the Chinese are unimpressed by Russia’s failure to modernise. Mr Xi, though, is conscious of Mr Putin’s fixation with “face”. So he would have indulged his Russian guest by inviting him to speak first.
Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its destabilisation of Ukraine, Mr Putin boasted, had confirmed what he had always known. The US and Europe were “soft”. The US administration had set as its lodestar the avoidance of conflict. Barack Obama wanted history to remember him as the US president who ended two wars and avoided a third.
As for Europe, one had only look at its collapsing military spending to grasp the continent’s psychology. Russia’s march into Ukraine had impelled EU governments to choose between short-term business interests and preservation of the post-cold war order. Once business luminaries such as Joe Kaeser of Siemens and BP’s Bob Dudley had pledged fealty to Moscow, it had been no contest. The annexation of Crimea was all but accepted as a fait accompli.
The sanctions imposed by the US and EU were no more than an irritant; and the occasional tactical feint was enough to avoid any hardening of western resolve. Most recently, Moscow had deliberately softened its rhetorical tone – as a cover to pour in more military support for secessionist ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine.
China, of course, disapproves of the annexation of Crimea. Secessionist movements jangle the nerves of a leadership that puts China’s territorial integrity at the top of its strategic priorities. One imagines Mr Xi voiced his concerns.
The two leaders’ ambitions are not quite the same: Mr Putin wants to surround Russia with weak states; China is content with strong neighbours as long as they are ready to pay tribute to Beijing. Mr Putin pretends he can turn back the clock 25 years and reinstate Russia as a great power. Mr Xi’s much more plausible “China dream” aims to erase the humiliation of 150 years of western hegemony.
By and large, though, they have a shared assessment of the weakness of the west. Mr Obama’s bromides about leadership, Mr Xi would have remarked, failed to grasp China’s intention to upturn the present US-designed order. The president’s much vaunted “pivot to Asia” had made life a little more complicated for Beijing.
Washington also had measurable military superiority. But China understood that power resides in a willingness to deploy it.
Having extracted the US from Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr Obama would do everything possible to avoid being drawn into a conflict in Asia. Sometimes it seemed to Beijing that the president worried more about his headstrong Japanese ally Shinzo Abe than China’s intentions.
Just as Mr Putin had changed the facts on the ground in Ukraine Mr Xi calculated China could change them in the waters of the western Pacific. Given US diffidence, collisions with neighbours such as Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines over competing maritime claims in the East and South China Seas served two purposes. They at once demonstrated China’s resolve and Washington’s weakness. As for Europe, it was scarcely worth mentioning so easy did Beijing find it to play divide and rule.
We cannot be sure, of course, this conversation took place, but it is as well to look through the other end of the telescope from time to time. This week William Hague, Britain’s foreign secretary, told the inaugural London Conference hosted by Chatham House that the world was not simply going through a difficult patch, but had entered a period of “systemic disorder”. Put another way, the advanced democracies of the west have a rough ride ahead.
This is not to say that the US and Europe should seek confrontation with rising powers such as China or revanchist states such as Russia. But building a stable relationship requires understanding the other side’s mindset and a willingness, when necessary, to be tough.
Not so long ago policy makers in the west assumed that China and Russia would eventually decide they wanted to be like “us”. China would develop as a responsible stakeholder in the existing international order and Russia, albeit with missteps, would see its future in integration with Europe. Mr Xi and Mr Putin have decided otherwise. The world is waking up from postmodern dreams of global governance to another era of great power competition.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2014.
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