Putin's Autumn and a Russian Spring

Preparations for the inauguration of Joe Biden, which led to the unprecedented closure of the Capitol area, coincided in time with the unusual closure of the Kremlin compound, while the plane taking opposition leader Alexei Navalny back to Russia, defying Vladimir Putin, turned on the orders of the air authorities. Although for diametrically opposed reasons, these two situations reveal the internal divisions that will take over the presidencies of the two former Cold War rivals in the foreseeable future, as well as the risk that both will resort to the promotion of internal cohesion.  

From this point of view, the news that the Biden administration has offered Russia a five-year extension of the New START nuclear arms control pact, which has been welcomed by the Kremlin, is reassuring because it dispels a dangerous element of uncertainty introduced by the Trump administration in its haste to insert a wedge between Moscow and Beijing. Concretely, Russia was the only alternative nuclear superpower to the United States, since between them they possessed 90% of the world's nuclear weapons. The importance of an open dialogue process on this issue should therefore not be underestimated.  

The extension of the treaty, which involves formally addressing the limitation and reduction of the world's atomic arsenals, has the added virtue of giving moral authority to the negotiators of a new denuclearisation treaty with Iran, making the task of the newly appointed Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, easier in both Tehran and Pyongyang.  

However, discontent is evident on both sides of the Bering Strait, and large public demonstrations across Russia following Navalny's imprisonment indicate that Putin will have to work hard to overcome the expected urban turbulence until the Duma elections in September, in which United Russia, the ruling party, will face a significant loss of popularity according to the polls. Especially when the chaos of Trumpian, which has conveniently distracted Russians from their own political affairs, ends, the table will be turned and we can expect a repeat of the inflammatory rhetoric against the West to creep into the speeches of Russian leaders, reaching paroxysmal levels if, as is to be expected, Russia ceases to be a party of the West, as is to be expected, Russia ceases to claim to be a democracy and increases coercion against the opposition, taking up the next electoral challenge in Belarus, a plausible scenario that would put on Biden's plate the use of Russia as a counter-example to the liberal values he promised to defend in his inaugural speech. Especially after the immediate precedent of Trump's atypical relationship with Putin, the false closure of the Mueller Report, massive cyber-attacks of Russian origin and the "fish galloping" as a symptom of national polarization, all of these elements will undoubtedly force Biden to pursue a foreign policy that is more effective than transformative. In other words, with more demagogy than action. 

In the years to come, it will therefore be essential to know how to distinguish words from deeds, and to try to understand the motivations of Russian international policy and its internal determinants first, and then to readjust the Western geopolitical dialectic. In both cases, in formulating a framework for relations with Russia, Putin's ideological spurs cannot be dissociated; his credo is pan-Russian and anti-liberal. Putin's reaction to the Arab Spring can be better understood from this point of view than from the narrow theory of "quiproquo" that underpinned Trump's foreign policy.  Indeed, Putin's foreign policy formulation was not determined by the search for a global balance of power, nor by the inertia of the usual bureaucratic diplomacy, often dictated by national economic interests. On the contrary, Putin's external action takes for granted the material losses he suffers and thus goes beyond the classical framework of realpolitik, establishing alliances not only with different nation-states but also with actors within them that have the capacity to influence the institutions and public opinion of third countries, in line with Putin's ideological vision. This seems to have been the case at both n⁰ 10 Downing Street and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, judging by the evidence to date. 

However, discontent is evident on both sides of the Bering Strait, and large public demonstrations across Russia following Navalny's imprisonment indicate that Putin will have to work hard to overcome the expected urban turbulence until the Duma elections in September, in which United Russia, the ruling party, will face a significant loss of popularity according to the polls. Especially when the chaos of Trumpian, which has conveniently distracted Russians from their own political affairs, ends, the table will be turned and we can expect a repeat of the inflammatory rhetoric against the West to creep into the speeches of Russian leaders, reaching paroxysmal levels if, as is to be expected, Russia ceases to be a party of the West, as is to be expected, Russia ceases to claim to be a democracy and increases coercion against the opposition, taking up the next electoral challenge in Belarus, a plausible scenario that would put on Biden's plate the use of Russia as a counter-example to the liberal values he promised to defend in his inaugural speech. Especially after the immediate precedent of Trump's atypical relationship with Putin, the false closure of the Mueller Report, massive cyber-attacks of Russian origin and the "fish galloping" as a symptom of national polarization, all of these elements will undoubtedly force Biden to pursue a foreign policy that is more effective than transformative. In other words, with more demagogy than action. 

In the years to come, it will therefore be essential to know how to distinguish words from deeds, and to try to understand the motivations of Russian international policy and its internal determinants first, and then to readjust the Western geopolitical dialectic. In both cases, in formulating a framework for relations with Russia, Putin's ideological spurs cannot be dissociated; his credo is pan-Russian and anti-liberal. Putin's reaction to the Arab Spring can be better understood from this point of view than from the narrow theory of "quiproquo" that underpinned Trump's foreign policy.  Indeed, Putin's foreign policy formulation was not determined by the search for a global balance of power, nor by the inertia of the usual bureaucratic diplomacy, often dictated by national economic interests. On the contrary, Putin's external action takes for granted the material losses he suffers and thus goes beyond the classical framework of realpolitik, establishing alliances not only with different nation-states but also with actors within them that have the capacity to influence the institutions and public opinion of third countries, in line with Putin's ideological vision. This seems to have been the case at both n⁰ 10 Downing Street and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, judging by the evidence to date. 

However, discontent is evident on both sides of the Bering Strait, and large public demonstrations across Russia following Navalny's imprisonment indicate that Putin will have to work hard to overcome the expected urban turbulence until the Duma elections in September, in which United Russia, the ruling party, will face a significant loss of popularity according to the polls. Especially when the chaos of Trumpian, which has conveniently distracted Russians from their own political affairs, ends, the table will be turned and we can expect a repeat of the inflammatory rhetoric against the West to creep into the speeches of Russian leaders, reaching paroxysmal levels if, as is to be expected, Russia ceases to be a party of the West, as is to be expected, Russia ceases to claim to be a democracy and increases coercion against the opposition, taking up the next electoral challenge in Belarus, a plausible scenario that would put on Biden's plate the use of Russia as a counter-example to the liberal values he promised to defend in his inaugural speech. Especially after the immediate precedent of Trump's atypical relationship with Putin, the false closure of the Mueller Report, massive cyber-attacks of Russian origin and the "fish galloping" as a symptom of national polarization, all of these elements will undoubtedly force Biden to pursue a foreign policy that is more effective than transformative. In other words, with more demagogy than action. 

In the years to come, it will therefore be essential to know how to distinguish words from deeds, and to try to understand the motivations of Russian international policy and its internal determinants first, and then to readjust the Western geopolitical dialectic. In both cases, in formulating a framework for relations with Russia, Putin's ideological spurs cannot be dissociated; his credo is pan-Russian and anti-liberal. Putin's reaction to the Arab Spring can be better understood from this point of view than from the narrow theory of "quiproquo" that underpinned Trump's foreign policy.  Indeed, Putin's foreign policy formulation was not determined by the search for a global balance of power, nor by the inertia of the usual bureaucratic diplomacy, often dictated by national economic interests. On the contrary, Putin's external action takes for granted the material losses he suffers and thus goes beyond the classical framework of realpolitik, establishing alliances not only with different nation-states but also with actors within them that have the capacity to influence the institutions and public opinion of third countries, in line with Putin's ideological vision. This seems to have been the case at both n⁰ 10 Downing Street and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, judging by the evidence to date. 

However, discontent is evident on both sides of the Bering Strait, and large public demonstrations across Russia following Navalny's imprisonment indicate that Putin will have to work hard to overcome the expected urban turbulence until the Duma elections in September, in which United Russia, the ruling party, will face a significant loss of popularity according to the polls. Especially when the chaos of Trumpian, which has conveniently distracted Russians from their own political affairs, ends, the table will be turned and we can expect a repeat of the inflammatory rhetoric against the West to creep into the speeches of Russian leaders, reaching paroxysmal levels if, as is to be expected, Russia ceases to be a party of the West, as is to be expected, Russia ceases to claim to be a democracy and increases coercion against the opposition, taking up the next electoral challenge in Belarus, a plausible scenario that would put on Biden's plate the use of Russia as a counter-example to the liberal values he promised to defend in his inaugural speech. Especially after the immediate precedent of Trump's atypical relationship with Putin, the false closure of the Mueller Report, massive cyber-attacks of Russian origin and the "fish galloping" as a symptom of national polarization, all of these elements will undoubtedly force Biden to pursue a foreign policy that is more effective than transformative. In other words, with more demagogy than action. 

In the years to come, it will therefore be essential to know how to distinguish words from deeds, and to try to understand the motivations of Russian international policy and its internal determinants first, and then to readjust the Western geopolitical dialectic. In both cases, in formulating a framework for relations with Russia, Putin's ideological spurs cannot be dissociated; his credo is pan-Russian and anti-liberal. Putin's reaction to the Arab Spring can be better understood from this point of view than from the narrow theory of "quiproquo" that underpinned Trump's foreign policy.  Indeed, Putin's foreign policy formulation was not determined by the search for a global balance of power, nor by the inertia of the usual bureaucratic diplomacy, often dictated by national economic interests. On the contrary, Putin's external action takes for granted the material losses he suffers and thus goes beyond the classical framework of realpolitik, establishing alliances not only with different nation-states but also with actors within them that have the capacity to influence the institutions and public opinion of third countries, in line with Putin's ideological vision. This seems to have been the case at both n⁰ 10 Downing Street and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, judging by the evidence to date. 

From this point of view, Russia's intervention in Syria has been marked by a Russian school of political thought whose fundamental frame of reference explains American international policy by its propensity to overthrow regimes that impede the expansion of American corporate interests. This is why the Kremlin opted for the most expensive option, as the conditions of the Syrian civil war deteriorated to the disadvantage of Putin's allies, forcing it to undertake a major military intervention without domestic support, in order to consolidate al-Assad's Ba'athism and prevent the establishment of a new regime supported by the West, which would inevitably reduce Russian influence in Syria's domestic politics and, by extension, in the Middle East. 

The moral to be drawn from Russia's latest military interventions, from Syria to Libya via Ukraine, is that the kind of geopolitical considerations and calculations that usually inform the strategic decisions of Western chancelleries will be of relatively little use as long as a Putin who is not opposed to Pyrrhic victories, in the name of his ideology, remains in control of power in Russia, directly or through interposition. Hence the importance for the new American administration to avoid falling into the trap of the blame game and to renounce a rhetorical escalation that can only end up giving a new lease of life to Putin's supporters. But verbal restraint will be insufficient if the Russian people are not shown an alternative path.  An outcome that will require working with the European Commission to devise a consensual strategy to win the long-term trust and support of Russian citizens by offering them an attractive option to Putinism, which may well involve putting full access to the Schengen area and the single market on the table as part of a roadmap to consolidate liberal democracy in Russia and bury the logic of the Cold War once and for all.