Author's Response: Russia Is Not as Weak as We Think

I want to thank Marcin Kaczmarski, Robert Sutter, and Alexander Korolev for their thoughtful comments on Russia Resurrected. I also greatly benefited from their insights into Russian-Chinese relations in their simultaneous examination of my book with James Reilly's Orchestration. As Kaczmarski noted at the outset of his review, China and Russia mirror each other in many ways in their behavior in the international system, but their ultimate destinies, and the ways in which their respective leaders pursue and perceive their roles in any future international order are rather different. As I move my own scholarship forward from Russia Resurrected, I am increasingly intrigued by the budding synergies and cooperation (if not a formal alliance) between the current regimes ruling Russia and China. The comparative exercise in the review essays here are helpful in thinking about different ways in which Russia and China behave and interact in the current international system.

I am pleased that this distinguished group of authors found the book useful and generally compelling. At the same time, all three reviewers raised interesting and difficult questions about some of the implications of my argument that I will try to address briefly in this essay.

Kaczmarski notes that while Russia's current leadership has done well in using far fewer assets than has China in "translating latent power into instruments of influence," the question of what the leadership's long-term strategy may be still remains. He notes that Georgia and Ukraine have leaned more toward Europe and the West despite Russia's best efforts. While this claim is true to a large degree, Russia under Vladimir Putin has managed to stymie their membership in NATO and the European Union by maintaining low-boil conflicts (and sometimes high-boil in the Ukrainian case) in both countries, making them less desirable prospective members for Western military and trade alliances. As my book describes in chapter two, Russia's tentacles reach very deeply into both countries, and even into the three Baltic republics that are already members of NATO and the European Union, in part because of the hangover of existing Soviet infrastructure and influence. In many cases, gas, oil, and water pipelines still run through Moscow, and significant portions of the populations in these countries still speak Russian, read the Russian press, and are bombarded with Russian-language television programs due simply to proximity. Additionally, as noted in chapter two, Russian investors (both state and private, although the lines between the two are often indistinguishable) have significant economic assets in many countries of the former Soviet Union. So while the elites and even majorities of citizens in Ukraine and Georgia bend toward Europe and the West, Russian instruments of influence have managed to prevent them from actually joining Western institutions—at least for now.

Further, Kaczmarski argues that when it comes to the Russia-China relationship, Russia is surely the "junior partner" and that to the extent that there is cooperation between the two in terms of international relations and foreign policy, it is due to "Beijing's restraint…in their shared Eurasian neighborhood." Similarly, Sutter asks about the power balance between these two now global powers in Central Asia in particular, although he endorses my skepticism by indicating that "the risk of China treating Russia as a junior partner is low." But both reviewers imply directly or indirectly that there is an obvious conflict of interest between the geopolitical goals of the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) and China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which, after all, was announced by President Xi in Astana, Kazakhstan, in 2013.

But is there really a conflict of interest here able to create a barrier to even closer cooperation between these two "great powers"? Or is China's BRI more complementary than potentially conflictual with Russia's EEU and other Russian-led regional cooperation institutions? I would argue the latter. The EEU and BRI are different sorts of initiatives—one is a trade organization while the other is an infrastructure investment policy. The EEU was not formed in response to China...