Sino-Russian Geopolitics With Stephen Kotkin and Orville Schell – The American Spectator

Russia scholar Stephen Kotkin and China scholar Orville Schell, in a fascinating interview on Foreign Affairs, identify the collapse of the Soviet Union as the seminal event that motivates both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping in today’s global geopolitics. Putin views the Soviet collapse as a Russian geopolitical disaster and has embarked on a foreign policy designed to revive Russia as a great power, while for Xi, the Soviet collapse provides a warning against the kind of Gorbachevian liberalization that helped to undermine Soviet power. 

Putin and other Russian nationalists, including the so-called “Eurasianist” intellectuals led by Alexander Dugin, lament the Soviet defeat in the Cold War and the subsequent expansion of Western influence in Eastern Europe up to the Russian border. Xi and other Chinese Communist Party leaders blame Western powers for their “century of humiliation” (1849–1949) and are determined to fully erase that legacy by no later than 2049. Both leaders appeal in some sense to the idea of their nations as victims of Western perfidy. Dictatorship, in Putin’s case, and one-party rule, in Xi’s case, serve the dual purpose of maintaining domestic stability and facilitating expanded global influence.

Both leaders have a common geopolitical outlook that sees Eurasia as the world’s central landmass and the proper seat of the world’s leading powers. The country that blocks their geopolitical ambitions is the United States, an insular power separated from Eurasia by two great oceans. Both leaders share the common objective of reducing American influence on the Eurasian landmass. And Kotkin and Schell note that both leaders view America as a threat to their autocratic systems, despite our protestations that we seek only to maintain the “rules-based international order.”

Both leaders have demonstrated their antipathy to that U.S-led world order. Russian and Chinese leaders view America as an upstart nation that seeks to dominate their much older civilizations. This leaves little room for compromise and explains Russia’s post–Cold War aversion to envelopment in the Western system and China’s refusal to fully integrate into a Western-led world order. (READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: What George Will Gets Wrong About Russia and China)

Russia is not going to give up its goal of preventing Ukraine from joining the West. China is not going to give up its goal of reunification with Taiwan. Those are geopolitical realities that the United States needs to recognize and integrate into our diplomacy. This doesn’t mean that we concede these goals — but, as Kotkin notes, “a policy based on illusion is bound to fail.” The notion pushed by the Biden administration that we can ease tensions by focusing on climate change or some other issue of “global governance” is one of those illusions. 

Neither Kotkin nor Schell place much hope in our ability to exploit potential divisions between Russia and China, the way President Richard Nixon did in the early 1970s. It may be too late for triangular diplomacy — at least as long as Putin and Xi remain in power. Theirs, to be sure, is a marriage of convenience, but it is based on a common world view and similar perceptions of America as the common enemy. And unlike the old Sino-Soviet relationship, today’s Sino-Russian alliance comes with no ideological baggage.

Ironically, Putin’s aggression in Eastern Europe has united the Western alliance, while Xi’s assertive moves in the Western Pacific have strengthened our alliances with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia and caused India and Vietnam to grow closer to the United States. That is the way the global balance of power works.