Russia, Eurasia and the New Geopolitics of Energy

Confrontation and Consolidation

Roger E. Kanet, Matthew Sussex, Roger E. Kanet, Matthew Sussex

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349571734, 9781137523723
• eBook ISBN: 9781137523730
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica europea

By combining perspectives from experts in domestic politics, regional politics, and specialists in international security, this edited volume focuses on the central role of energy production and supply in the Russian-Western completion across Eurasia.

Part I

The Geopolitics of Eurasia: Growing East–West Confrontation

1

From Retrenchment to Revanchism ... and Back Again? Russian Grand Strategy in the Eurasian ‘Heartland’

Matthew Sussex

Anyone studying ‘conventional’ power politics today tends to be treated with suspicion by those who view the unreconstructed realist as an academic Neanderthal in a globalized world. And yet both the gradual and more rapid return to prominence of various actors in international politics highlight the ongoing significance of traditional factors linked to material considerations, especially territoriality. The same type of sanctimonious cant – that the 21st century is somehow ‘different’ – was evident in Nick Clegg’s reference to Vladimir Putin as possessing ‘a KGB mentality rooted in the Cold War’ (Watt et al., 2014). But the trend is broader than Russia’s latest adventures in Ukraine. The rise of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the subsequent US ‘rebalance’ to counter it, persistent tensions over the Korean Peninsula, and contestation over energy resources in Central Asia are all symptomatic of the continued importance of power politics in states’ strategic calculations. While the language of both practitioners and scholars now revolves much more around norms, laws and ethics, states’ actual motivations – and the outcomes they seek to engender – appear to have changed little since the end of Cold War bipolarity and the supposed triumph of liberal pluralist ideas that accompanied it.

Although China and its emerging power have dominated attention in international politics, it is instructive to recall that, for much of the past two and a half decades, there has been an equally strong undercurrent focusing on how to manage waning powers. This has been especially the case given the relative decline of the US (Rosecrance, 2013), but earlier it also focused on Russia and even Japan. Indeed, recent scholarship on great power retrenchment stresses that states undergoing acute power reversals are more likely to depend on allies, renovate internal arrangements to recapture solvency, and concentrate their efforts on securing the core rather than the periphery (McDonald & Parent, 2011; Brooks, Wohlforth & Ikenberry, 2013).

Yet, this says little about the conditions under which retrenching states might come to adopt a revanchist position: in other words, to adopt muscular foreign policies as a product of a rapid return to power following a period of decline. Accordingly in this chapter I distinguish the revanchist state from more customary and gradual types of power consolidation. With post-communist Russia as my empirical focus, I examine four conditions associated with revanchist behaviour: a relatively short ‘rebound’ time; a strategic emphasis on territory; re-establishment of local primacy through institutions and alliance structures; and the extent of domestic elite consensus over national interests. I then go on to argue that successful revanchism requires potential local peer competitors to be either absent, or disinterested. The chapter concludes that the rise of the PRC may engender a second – and more gradual – Russian retrenchment in Eurasia.

The revanchist state in international politics

If power is back on the International Relations (IR) agenda, we should be well equipped to address it. Certainly we understand much about how to counter rising nations. An ever-growing list of terms already exists to describe how states can bandwagon (with or without profit), balance, hide, hedge, pursue ‘multi-vector’ foreign policies, pass the buck, or catch the buck in response to changing power dynamics (Pape, 2005, 2009; Brooks & Wohlforth, 2009; Schweller, 1994; Mearsheimer, 2001). Smaller states can seek to ‘omni-enmesh’ through institutional architecture, wrapping aspirant great powers into a web of interconnections that make the costs of cheating greater than cooperating (Goh, 2008). Bigger nations can pursue engagement or containment, or even combine them via ‘constrainment’ (Segal, 1996) to try and achieve the same ends. In doing so, though, they must be careful not to overbalance or underbalance (Snyder, 2002; Schweller, 2004). And when states experience a relative decline in power – either speedily or slowly – we can point to an array of retrenchment strategies employed by the state experiencing decline, as well as strategies that others might utilize to help maintain order.

Amidst this explosion of scholarship it is much less common to find a focus on a particular kind of return to power: rapid resurgence after decline. At the risk of adding another category to the foreign policy analysis/balance of power menu for choice, I term this revanchism. The first criterion differentiating revanchism from the power fluctuations with which we are more conventionally familiar is time. Rising powers generally undergo a gradual process of internal transformation during which – using Mearsheimer’s (2001: 35) terminology – they translate latent or potential power into actual power. This provides other states with plenty of strategic warning, and enables them to devise methods to deal with it through institutions, through ideas and/or through more conventional balancing mechanisms. At the same time, the rising state itself becomes accustomed to its increasing influence and can construct alliances, create regional economic structures and either coerce or reassure neighbours accordingly.

The rapid rebound of the revanchist state leads to the second main difference between such nations and those undergoing regular power transitions. This pertains to the nature of their strategic policies. For the revanchist state, such policies revolve fundamentally around territory. By way of illustration, the slow emergence of postwar Japan was entirely unlike the swift rise of Israel during the same period. As a defeated nation, Japan had peace imposed upon it. In practice this meant adopting a restrictive constitution, Article 9 of which – even after revision in July 2014 – only allows it to deploy military forces overseas for collective self-defence purposes (Japan Times, 2014). It also meant keeping a low regional profile in order not to inflame enduring historical memories. And it meant pursuing a foreign policy aimed at promoting economic cooperation rather than enforcing compliance. Israel, although an entirely new state, faced a similar situation to Japan, given that hostile neighbours surrounded it. Yet, Israel underwent a rapid power transition relative to others in its region (Organski & Kugler, 1989; and for an alternative view see Lebow & Valentino, 2009), and consequently focused on capturing sufficient territory necessary to ensure a modicum of stability. Nuclear weapons acted as power maximizers for Tel Aviv to embed Israeli territorial integrity, and its qualitative advantage in military capabilities enabled it to maintain tight control over its key strategic approaches.

Third, revanchist states do not try very hard to fit into anything other than those existing institutional structures that are critical to their interests. Moreover, they attempt to create their own regional architecture. In doing so they seek to reinforce the territorial focus of their policy by establishing local primacy. This facilitates the creation of geopolitical buffer zones and frees the revanchist state from treaty obligations that might impede the process of re-territorialization. A useful distinction can be made here between the PRC and post-communist Russia. Beijing has certainly attempted to break out of the de facto US containment policy afforded by Washington’s bilateral ‘hub and spokes’ alliance structures in East Asia. But its much-vaunted ‘string of pearls’, as well as attempts to create an overland Silk Road to ensure the flow of trade and vital strategic resources remains unencumbered, will take time to consolidate. Likewise its so-called ‘smart power’ strategies failed to lure US allies in Southeast Asia into hedge postures, especially once the CCP began to throw its weight around on the issues of the South China Sea and the Senkaku/Diaoyou Islands. Indeed, China has been much keener to establish itself within regional trading agreements, and has only recently begun to leverage the East Asia Summit – as an outgrowth of ASEAN + 3 – for more strategic purposes. Russia, in contrast, faced a newly-expanded NATO whose members had no wish to allow Moscow to join, but equally little desire to allow the CIS states into either its military–security arrangements or the political–economic structures of the EU. Russia therefore sought to bind states, formerly part of the USSR, closely to it through a series of new institutional ties. This was accompanied by strong language making it clear that anything more than economic multi-vector foreign policies on behalf of former communist states in the Near Abroad would not be tolerated.

Structural considerations are not the sole indicators of revanchism. In fact, domestic political context is equally important in differentiating a potentially revanchist state from others. In particular, a state with an internal consensus amongst foreign policy elites over national interests (and the means by which they might be achieved) is arguably more likely to adopt a revanchist posture than one in which such considerations are still matters of debate. This means also that illiberal states or phony democracies are more susceptible to becoming revanchist in nature than pluralist ones. The simple reason for this is that they are better able to manipulate identity through a variety of multiple channels, as well as to use domestic instruments of coercion to silence or marginalize dissent. But this alone is only a sufficient criterion rather than a necessary one. Even authoritarian states have internal debates on foreign policy: witness, for instance, the significant differences in China between technocrats and nationalists. By the same token, there is broad-based consensus on national interests in the UK (with the exception of the question of the extent of its EU engagement), and it is highly unlikely that Whitehall would attempt a revanchist foreign policy posture.

What motivates revanchism? Clearly it is a foreign policy choice rather than a condition imposed upon a state by a combination of internal and external forces, even though it can become path-dependent once adopted. Here it is tempting to take the constructivist line that revanchism is fundamentally a product of identity and ideas. From Weimer Germany to Putin-era Russia one could potentially make a strong argument in favour of such a position. Ample evidence exists in either of these examples in the form of the reification of great power images that accompanied a rapid rise to power after a period of decline. Under such circumstances, prominent nationalistic totems and myths – whether driven from above or below – become part of popular culture, and they can cement a national ethos hostile to outside intervention and bent upon recreating past imperial glories. Often this is accompanied by a disconnect between perceived and actual power, which makes strategic rivalry (or even war by miscalculation) a distinct possibility.

Such reasoning is flawed at best. At worst it is downright dangerous. Not only does it risk producing cartoonish stereotypes of a state’s foreign policy, it conflates a symptom of a state’s resurgence as the cause of it. The observation by Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth that necessity is the mother of invention – in other words, that ideas and identity tend to change when material circumstances do (Brooks & Wohlforth, 2001) – is the primary reason why an ‘ideas and identity’ framework fails adequately to capture the causes and character of revanchism. Hence, the final marker of revanchism is that states must have the wherewithal (and not just the will) to achieve their territorial ambitions, even if only to a limited extent. But because revanchist states have not experienced a long build-up of latent power, there tends to be a briefer window of opportunity for them to exploit regional circumstances for their own ends. This means that the revanchist state is more likely to adopt an assertive posture toward its neighbours than the gradually rising state.

The emergence of a revanchist state can, therefore, be summarized thus: a rapid rise in power engenders a territorial policy focus. This, in turn, prompts a disinclination to integrate on others’ terms. At the same time, an elite-driven consensus on interests seeks to establish local primacy as quickly as possible, in order to ward off potential spoiling behaviour by external powers. Below I evaluate these factors in more detail, using post-Communist Russia as the single focused empirical case. I find that Russia’s grand strategy in Eurasia is indeed a product of weakness rather than sustained strength. More importantly, I find that the return of great power contestation to the Eurasian territory of the former USSR – in an area once regarded as the geopolitical ‘heartland’ – means that Russia is unlikely to have the capacity to sustain a revanchist posture as a long-term strategy. In fact, the rise of China, not to mention counterbalancing by the US and EU, may well prompt another Russian retrenchment.

Russian grand strategy in Eurasia: from retrenchment to revanchism

To what extent does contemporary Russia fit the characteristics of the revanchist state outlined above? In the face of Russia’s stage-managed incursion into Crimea during February–March 2014, and its subsequent campaign of maskirovka to aid separatist rebels in the Donbas region of Ukraine, comparisons with interwar Germany are probably inevitable. In fact, even during the Yeltsin years Russia analysts in the West feared a ‘Weimer Russia’. Those fears resurfaced most recently when former US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton likened Russia’s move into Crimea to the occupation of the Sudetenland by the Nazis (Kralova, 2014). However, it is drawing a long bow to assume that Putin has similar motivations to Hitler. To begin with, Russian power is by no means comparable to that of Western nations in the way that Germany’s massive military rearmament gave it an edge (which was rapidly closing by 1939) over France, Britain and Russia. Second, although Russia’s focus is very much on territory, and it has gone to great lengths to prevent Western encroachment on what it sees as its sphere of influence, its vision for regional stability is much more localized than Hitler’s designs for a greater Germania spanning both East and West. And, while it is popular in some circles to point to the influence of shadowy figures like the academic ideologue Alexsandr Dugin, the former leader of the proto-fascist Russian National Bolshevik (RNE) party in the 1990s, Putin and his cadres have shown themselves to be foreign policy pragmatists rather than empire-builders transposed from Peter the Great’s court. Moreover, in its intervention in Ukraine, its campaigns in Chechnya, the Five Day War against Georgia, and its often bellicose posturing toward its neighbours and the West, Russia has been acting very much as an aspirant great power rather than an established one. Hence it is mistaken to see Putin as a bully driven by Russian chauvinism, seeking to emulate Peter the Great by recreating an empire where the USSR once stood (Tymoshenko, 2007).

Revanchism and the reconsolidation of Russian power

The main factor facilitating revanchist behaviour by Russia in Eurasia has been its turnaround in material power. Put simply, the Russia of 2014 is significantly different in relative capabilities from Russia in 1992. To get a sense of this, it is worth noting...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Russia, Eurasia and the New Geopolitics of Energy
• Part I  The Geopolitics of Eurasia: Growing EastWest Confrontation
• Part II  Resource Diplomacy and Energy Security in Eurasia
• Conclusion
• Index