CHAPTER EIGHT

IN RETREAT IN ASIA

In early 2012, the Obama administration went public with a major shift in defense and foreign policy focus. “U.S. economic and security interests are inextricably linked to developments in the arc extending from the Western Pacific and East Asia into the Indian Ocean region and South Asia, creating a mix of evolving challenges and opportunities,” the policy planning document unveiled by then Defense Secretary Leon Panetta noted. “Accordingly, while the U.S. military will continue to contribute to security globally, we will of necessity rebalance toward the Asia-Pacific region.” ¹Since then, the so-called “pivot” to Asia has consumed American strategic priorities on many levels.

But the United States is hardly the only nation to have fixed its attention on the Asia-Pacific of late. A number of other countries have begun similar turns to the East. The list includes the Islamic Republic of Iran, which views Asia as an economic and strategic lifeline in the face of mounting Western sanctions over its nuclear program. ²But Russia also ranks high on the list of Asian aspirants. Since at least mid-2010, the Kremlin has made a similar shift to the East a major focus of its own foreign policy.

WHY THE KREMLIN COVETS ASIA

It has done so for practical reasons. The instability that accompanied the 2008 global economic downturn has made Europe, Russia’s traditional trading partner and arena for commerce, less lucrative and attractive than it once was for Moscow. The Asia-Pacific, Russian policymakers contend, has replaced Europe as the engine of global economic growth. Thus the region is valuable to Russia because it houses “[new] markets for energy, raw materials, technology, [and the potential for] new areas of bilateral and international cooperation.” ³

Asia, moreover, is increasingly seen in Russia as a safer investment bet than is Europe. “Asian countries are . . . leaders in terms of gross savings, which actually determine an economy’s investment potential,” a July 2012 study by the influential Valdai Discussion Club points out. “China is far ahead of others here (20.7%). Other Asian countries included in the top ten are Japan (3rd), India (5th) and South Korea (10th). These four countries together account for 34.5% of global savings.” ⁴

Russia’s interest in Asia has been reinforced by Moscow’s increasingly problematic relationships with Europe. Over the past decade, energy diplomacy and extensive business interests have significantly broadened Russia’s stake in the EU, and vice versa. But political ties between Moscow and European capitals remain fraught. They were only made worse by European disappointment over Vladimir Putin’s return to the Russian presidency after what many in Europe had hoped would be a period of liberalization during the tenure of his protégé, Dmitry Medvedev. ⁵(More recently, the economic turmoil that has proliferated in places such as Greece and Cyprus, where Russia’s oligarchs maintain considerable assets and interests, has convinced more than a few Russian policymakers that their high degree of investment in Europe constitutes a distinct liability.) ⁶

Strategic problems also abound. Russia today has rising conflicts with the West on a wide array of issues. Foremost among these is missile defense. Russia has vociferously opposed NATO plans to erect a Europe-wide anti-missile capability to defend against rogue state ballistic missile threats (such as the one from Iran). It has rejected Western assurances that the shield is not meant to neutralize the Russian Federation’s strategic arsenal and has attempted to use the issue to divide Europe and the United States. “Progress toward genuine partnership between Russia and the North Atlantic alliance is still being hampered by attempts to exploit the Soviet threat idea, which has turned into the Russian threat idea now,” Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov told audience members at the forty-ninth Munich Security Conference in February 2013. “Even during a shortage of financial resources, we can see increasing military activities in the north and the center of Europe, as if threats to security were growing in these regions.” ⁷

This acrimony has persisted despite the efforts of European capitals and the White House to alleviate Moscow’s mistrust. Even the Obama administration’s March 2013 announcement that it plans to table the fourth phase of its European Phased Adaptive Approach—on which the NATO shield depends—due to budgetary considerations appears to have done little to mollify the Kremlin. ⁸

These disagreements and a host of others—over Moscow’s continued support for the Assad regime in Syria, its continued military presence in Georgia, and the country’s deepening domestic drift toward authoritarianism—have led Europe to increasingly rebuff Russia’s diplomatic and commercial advances. ⁹In response, Russia has sought to distance itself from Europe in favor of greener economic and political pastures in Asia.

All politics is ultimately local, however, and Russia’s shift toward Asia has a distinctly domestic component as well. Some two-thirds of Russian territory is located in Asia, making a tilt toward the East intuitive (if not necessarily politically desirable among many in “European Russia”). Russian officials, moreover, increasingly have focused on the Far East as a gateway to global prominence. “The main potential for Russia becoming an Asia-Pacific power lies within its own boundaries,” a recent Valdai Club study notes—to wit, the massive expanses of arable land and abundant renewable resources (such as lumber and water) available in Siberia and the Far East. ¹⁰Indeed, the report concludes, “[i]t would be no exaggeration to say that Russia’s regions east of the Urals and in the Far East are the last ‘virgin lands,’ one of the few regions left in the world fit for arable farming that are still a long way off being fully exploited agriculturally.” ¹¹

This potential, the thinking goes, has the ability to make Russia indispensable to the countries of the Asia-Pacific and a global player in a new arena.

AMBITIONS, NOT STRATEGY

Yet, beyond the atmospherics, Russia’s turn toward the region is still mostly notional. A “long-term and comprehensive Asian strategy is yet to be devised,” Sergei Karaganov, one of Russia’s preeminent political scientists, has admitted. ¹²Privately, senior Russian diplomats share that view and see the Putin government’s push into Asia as a political “exaggeration.” ¹³

However intuitive Russia’s entry into Asia might be, such a step is far from assured. Russia has made some inroads into the region in recent years. At a 2010 bilateral summit, for example, South Korea pledged to significantly increase its imports of Russian natural gas, and Seoul’s state-owned Kogas has since proposed the construction of three pilot liquefied natural gas plants in Russia’s region of Primorski Krai and on Sakhalin Island. ¹⁴Two years later, Russian state-controlled gas conglomerate Gazprom inked a notional deal with the Japanese government to build a $13 billion natural gas terminal in the Russian Far East city of Vladivostok as part of the Kremlin’s efforts to expand energy sales to Asia. ¹⁵Russia even has begun to explore expanded ties to Myanmar (formerly known as Burma); in 2007, the two countries agreed in principle to the Russian construction of a light water nuclear reactor on Burmese soil, and Burmese nuclear scientists are rumored to have been trained at Russia’s nuclear institutes for more than a decade, ¹⁶although concrete steps toward a real strategic relationship have yet to truly materialize.