Meanwhile you’re pro russian as a European, quite the disgrace
All right, sir, that’s enough. When you barge into our rooms to pester innocent people we boot your ass out the door.
It would be suicidal for Russia to do so.
I certainly hope not but I’m not about to take the word of people who were strung along and suckered by the west so long and who still so desperately want to rejoin them. People can talk of this “turn to the east” and indeed Russia has but also at every chance they state their desire to get in the better graces of the west and work together. China will need to be careful and lucky and we’ll have to hope the western leadership remains inept.
Much as Moscow might call itself a Euro-Asian country the fact is Moscow, Leningrad, etc are all in the far west of the country, the leadership including top bourgeoisie has long sought integration with the west, they buy their mansions in the UK and the EU and docked their yachts there and went on frequent vacations there and loved going clubbing and boozing and picking up people for sex parties. The west will have a strong pull, a siren’s song on Russia for many years, if not decades down the road that Russia will have to resist. There is a faction aware of this and they are in power, but they could lose power just as easily and be replaced with those who’d sell out every Russian child in an instant for the chance to live the European high life again in subservient integration.
I believe Lavrov is sincere and intelligent on this and other matters. But I also believe he’s old and like Putin could die or be replaced or pushed aside.
As well as that superstructural culture angle, there’s also the structural angle of Russia being a monopoly capitalist state which, when opportunity presents itself, is liable to do imperlialism.
While it’s interesting that the Russian leadership would make an explicit statement like this when they have the opportunity to leverage a degree of strategic ambiguity to prey upon the hopes of the Trump admin’s Kissinger-wannabes trying to explicitly manifest such a thing - in my cynical interpretation, this signals a certain anxiety within the Sino-Russian relationship that such a thing might actually be possible, which Lavrov is thereby compelled to go out and publicly reassure - the issue is Russia’s historical track record.
Under Gorbachev, it threw all of socialist Europe under the bus. I’ve been reading Honecker’s prison memoirs lately and he personally attested how the DDR government was not even given a place at the table in the negotiations for German “reunification.” Gorbachev went over a Soviet ally of half a century because he was so desperate for the likes of Reagan, Thatcher and Kohl to shake his hand and chose to negotiate with them directly in the same way, ironically, that the Trump admin is sidelining the Ukrainian regime in recent weeks. A statement like this could very well have the same lack of worth as Brezhnev’s saying that the “USSR would never betray its Warsaw Pact allies.” It’s a frankly trite truism, but also one that already rang true for Russia in the past, which is that no one can predict the personality of future leadership.
The real impediment in the attempts to foment a Sino-Russian split 2.0 is the American desire to have its cake and eat it too by refusing to give the Russians any long-term geopolitical concessions. What the current Russian government led by Putin has always wanted is a “G2” with the US over Europe. This naturally goes against the American objectives in Europe, dating back to the Cold War NATO founding principles of “keeping the Russians out.” A “G2” relationship requires concessions and strategic sacrifices that the US is fundamentally and psychologically unwilling to make. This is what scuppered the Obama era “G2” proposals with China, which basically ordered China to remain in place as a permanent toy and clothing factory while denying the Chinese even the concession of reclaiming Taiwan.
The pathway to “split” the Sino-Russian relationship is actually there, in my view, so long as the following conditions are achieved:
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Allowing Putin the room to attempt to reclaim a sphere of influence over Eastern Europe in the same way Churchill in his memoirs alleged he brokered with Stalin the post-war European orientation on napkin paper.
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Forcibly ordering the economic binding of NATO Europe to Russia and solidifying this dependency to wean Russia off the material conditions of its partnership with China, which is primarily the immensely expanded economic ties.
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Forcing through bi-partisan domestic American allegiance to this “G2” alignment by enshrining it as treaty or legislation, so that it can’t be repudiated by a later presidency, as this would be the only way to ensure Russian trust to any such arrangement.
I’d say this latter point is actually easier done than might be believed: the anti-China agenda is the leading bipartisan consensus in Washington and a coordinated narrative campaign framing such a move as “owning China” and blasting any political opposition as “surrendering to China” would overcome even the Democrats’ Russophobia through their even more fanatical Sinophobia.
The outcome, however, would not be a Russo-American grand Christian white alliance against “the East,” that Nicholas II dream of the Republicans, but a geopolitical paradigm where Russia is incentivized to openly hedge against China and the US as a much more “neutral” party.
The issue for the US is that it is fundamentally unwilling to pay the high price for such an arrangement. Going from having defeated the USSR, shattering it into partitioned pieces and successfully making those pieces fight against each other for US interests to being forced to share Europe with the territorially diminished Russian successor state is too much dramatic a psychological transition for Washington’s foreign policy blob to contemplate. This Western chauvinism of being unable to accept a relationship of true equality with a non-Western state, with all the implications and sacrifices that entails, is the colossal impediment to the “Reverse Kissinger” aspiration of “getting Russia to betray China.”
I’d argue that you’re missing a really important piece of the puzzle in the analysis. The post-WW2 order was built on the fact that the US largely sat the war out, its industry developing while Europe and Asia lay in ruins. This unchallenged industrial dominance that was fueled by war profiteering and a continent-sized domestic market allowed the US to architect a global system that served its interests. The Soviet bloc, though ideologically formidable, was always on the back foot economically.
Today, the West is a shadow of its former self. BRICS now eclipses the G7 in purchasing power, and the gap continues to widen yearly. Europe, shackled by deindustrialization and an energy crisis it helped engineer, is entering recession. The US, drowning in $34 trillion debt and political dysfunction, isn’t riding to the rescue. Instead, it’s busy looting Europe’s corpse. The Inflation Reduction Act was a corporate raider’s playbook, poaching EU industries with subsidies while Germany’s factories are closing at a record pace.
This collapse of Western cohesion has profound implications. Russia, having outlasted NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine, no longer needs to negotiate. The US is pivoting to Asia, and they view Ukraine as a sunk cost. Europe, meanwhile, is trapped in a panic spiral. Having bet its entire security strategy on a Ukrainian victory, it now faces empowered Russia that will dictate terms.
The US is executing a fire sale as it retreats from Europe. By abandoning Ukraine, US frees up resources for its goal of containing China. But this desperation exposes the new reality that the era of unilateral US hegemony is over. Russia, aligned with the rising BRICS economies, no longer needs a “G2” condominium with America. Why bargain with a declining power when you can pick off its allies?
Europe’s political decay will accelerate this shift. Pro-Russian parties are gaining ground from Hungary to Slovakia, capitalizing on voter rage over inflation and austerity. The EU’s response is predictably to use increasingly Draconian measures to “protect democracy”. It’s a strategy that exposes their weakness and fuels domestic discontent in Europe. Russia need only wait as the bloc fractures under the weight of its own hypocrisy.
The US will soon plead for off-ramps in Ukraine, offering concessions to Russia to salvage its Asian pivot. But Russia has no incentive to deal because they hold all the cards. On top of that, BRICS offers better returns. The West’s unipolar fantasy is dead. The future is multipolar, and utterly indifferent to America’s nostalgia for dominance.
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I’m glad they just outright stated it, of course I am not wholeheartedly believing them but the sentiment is nice.
Edit: the comments on the article are super fucking weird, some are downright offensive.
RT has a major bot problem with a lot of anti-Semitic bot comments
“My ‘I will never betray China a second time’ shirt is raising a lot of questions already answered by my shirt”
So much for trump trying to separate russia and china
At this point for Russia to “betray” China would be economic suicide; the US and Europe would have to provide the cruical replacement trade which they clearly do not have the capacity to do so at this stage.
The capital factions in Russia that prefer trade with China over ones that prefer trade with the West now have the upper hand, and there is a massive sunk cost in establishing trade routes such as in the Arctic Circle for trading with the global south that is effectively enabled by China. What can the West offer at this point? Crypto? They can’t buy gas, oil and metals at volumes that could replace a growing market of the global south compared to the stganant markets of Europe and US.
Everything else; such as concessions with Nato and territorial claims all hinge on the above trade concerns. Remember capitalists serve at the altar of capital, including Russian ones.
