The Russian bear is out of the woods
Feeding the Russian bear (mage created in Shutterstock)
The end of World War II marked the unravelling of empires and the arrival of full-on nationalism. Spheres of influence during the Cold War replaced colonisation as a means of control. But the notion of sovereignty and the right of a people to decide how they wanted to live became the post-colonial world’s guiding axiom — even if it was more honoured in the breach than the observance.
Is this about to go into reverse? And if it is, what does this mean for countries in Europe and elsewhere whose freedom to live as they choose is threatened by a new world order in which the US, China and Russia call the shots?
President Emmanuel Macron thinks so. He told French voters in a stark TV address this week that Russia would not stop at Ukraine. The “threat from the East is returning”, he said. The use of France’s nuclear arsenal to protect Europe was now open for debate.
Is this alarmist talk by a leader whose popularity is at an all-time low? Or is it realism in the face of Vladimir Putin’s threats and the unmistakeable signs of a profound change of values in Washington?
The question of values isn’t wishy washy theory. It lies at the heart of what a country stands for, what it wants and what it’s willing to defend. The things that Donald Trump has been saying and doing suggests that something more than the art of the deal is in play.
It isn’t just his ludicrous offer to buy Greenland, take over the Panama Canal and coerce Canada into becoming America’s 51st state. There are other things going on which wouldn’t be out of place in Putin’s Russia.
He has shut down the Justice Department’s anti-kleptocracy programme, which seizes the assets of sanctioned Russian oligarchs; scrapped the requirement for shell companies to declare their beneficial owners; set Elon Musk onto the Internal Revenue Service, where thousands have been summarily fired. The FT’s Edward Luce describes this, not unreasonably, as a heist.
Trump may come a cropper. The price of rehabilitating Putin may eventually prove too much for apple pie Republicans. But, for now, it’s best to assume, as Macron says and Keir Starmer implies, that Joe Biden was the last transatlantic US president and that Europe is on its lonesome.
Trump’s embrace of Russia comes with more than a whiff of antipathy towards Europe. “The European Union was formed in order to screw the United States.” JD Vance, his Vice President, told European leaders to get in line with his boss’s “values”. This is political mafia speak intended to coerce. It’s not a conversation between friends.
And just in case Europe didn’t get the message, the US sided with Russia, Belarus, North Korea and other assorted autocrats at the United Nations general assembly, voting against an EU-Ukrainian resolution blaming Moscow for the 2022 invasion of its neighbour. The worm has well and truly turned.
As Europe scrambles to make sense of all this, the burning question is this: what drives Putin? What might he do next? And what might a deal be worth?
Empires do not give up their possessions willingly. Gauging what Russia lost when the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991 gives us a clue to what it might want because its losses amounted to a great deal more than wounded pride.
The first loss was territory. Draw a line from the shores of the Baltic at Priwall, just north-east of Lübeck in Germany, to Sarandë on the Albanian Riviera, 1,726 km to the south. That, give or take the odd curve, was the Soviet empire’s western frontier. Now draw a line from Narva, in now independent Estonia, to the ancient Russian city of Rostov-on-Don.
The area in between those two lines measures roughly 18 million square kilometres. That’s a loss of 4 million square kilometres, the equivalent of 16 United Kingdoms, 11 Germanys or 1.2 Indias. And that’s not including the “Stans” to the east.
East and west of the empire’s line, 27 newly independent states have sprung up. Most were part of the Warsaw Pact, established in 1955 by Nikita Khrushchev in response to the creation of Nato and now defunct.
Second, with the loss of this vast territory came the loss, not just of strategic depth, but of valuable minerals: gold (Kazakhstan is the world’s largest producer); Ukraine’s 22 rare-metal formations; Estonia (oil shale) and so on.
Third was population, people, the indispensable resource of a growing economy, without which ambition is meaningless. Russia faces a population crisis. The Soviet Union had one of the largest populations in the world after China and India. This halved when the USSR collapsed.
Declining fertility, high abortion rates, increased mortality (aggravated by the war in Ukraine), an ageing population and poor health care foretell a bleak demographic future for a shrunken empire.
Russia’s meat-grinder offensive in Ukraine has provoked an exodus of young IT-savvy Russians, causing severe labour shortages. Russia is not alone in facing a declining population. But what the Economist calls Russia’s demographic doom loop will hinder Putin’s ambition to make Russia great again, to coin a phrase.
Faced with these losses and a bleak economic future, what would you do if you were in Putin’s shoes? You’d want more. And if the President of the United States threw you a lifeline, you’d grab it with both hands, promising pretty much anything to tether yourself to this new world.
This places Europe squarely in Putin’s cross-hairs. The EU is the largest trading bloc in the world. It’s also a thorn in the side of Trump’s high-tech allies. Musk and his tech-bros have a vested interest in weakening the ‘Brussels effect”on their lucrative social media platforms. All this is music to Putin’s ears.
Europe’s relationship with the US has, of course, had its ups and downs. The transatlantic alliance that has underwritten peace in Europe for 80 years may be truly broken. Or this may just be a fracture which, in time, will heal.
Friedrich Merz, Germany’s next Chancellor, believes this America, led by Trump, is “largely indifferent to the fate of Europe”. His central mission, he says, will be to strengthen Europe and achieve independence from the USA.
Right now the only given is volatility. Europe made the fatal mistake of thinking that it was locked in a mutually beneficial relationship in buying natural gas from Russia. It wasn’t. It was merely dependent. That’s a lesson worth heeding. Another is the all-too-obvious one that Putin’s word isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.
Europe (including the UK) must now do three things: hold its nerve; work with the new lineup in Washington as best it can; and devise a comprehensive strategy to stand on its own two feet.
A Message from TheArticle
We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation.
