Why it makes sense for Putin to befriend America

Would it really be strange if Vladimir Putin started playing off America against China in geopolitics? If he had greater vision, he would have been doing this in all those years when he fulminated against the US as the global Satan. I wrote about this in 2019 in my book Kremlin Winter as evidence of his long-term ineptitude. But Russian policymakers long ago ceased to offer Putin ideas for a more flexible foreign and security outlook, and his aggressive paranoia dragged Russia into a needless and barbaric war in 2022.

Donald Trump was the one American leader whom he always exempted from his tirades. They continue to get on famously. Now Trump, a worshipper of strong-arm rulers, has delivered him the largesse of a Russo-American rapprochement.

As we are discovering, Trump’s gifts to Moscow include Washington’s adoption of a simulacrum of Putin’s agenda for the Ukraine’s future. The potential deal is a devil’s brew. Putin has apparently promised access for American corporations to Russian markets. At the same time Trump is bullying Volodymyr Zelensky to hand swathes of the post-war Ukrainian economy to America in return for security assurances that may or may not be worth a hill of beans.

But is Putin in a position to balance America and China in the Kremlin’s scales? Three years of war have exposed Russian frailties. Russia is already dependent on technical imports from the Chinese. It relies on exporting oil to India below world market prices. It needs Iran for supplies of drones and North Korea to replenish the stores of cannon fodder. Russia’s autonomy in geopolitics is heavily constrained.

Many American corporations, however, would relish the opportunity to re-enter the Russian economy. When the US operated a commercial embargo on Soviet Russia in the 1920s, there was constant pressure from big business for a change of policy. This also happened under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s when America’s oil companies and tractor manufacturers clamored to end the ban on trading in anything that had a potential military importance.

The Russian people would likely welcome back the Americans even though, according to the opinion polls, two decades of anti-American propaganda have turned the US into the most unpopular power for most Russians. But they are war-weary and want improvements in their standard of living. If Putin snaps shut the fangs of war, it is doubtful that polls would register a decline in his ratings at home.

Putin has called on US presidents from George W. Bush onwards to accept and work within the reality of a multipolar world. Some American thinkers, most notably the late Henry Kissinger, thought the same way. But apart from during Trump’s first presidential term, the convention in Washington has been to assume that Russia — in Obama’s stinging aside in 2014 — is only a “regional power.” Now Russia is back on the global draughts board. Last year was a disaster for it in Syria when Russian forces had to be flown out hurriedly. And the Kremlin in earlier years never quite matched China’s inroads into Africa and formerly-Soviet central Asia.

But Putin’s lips must be slavering at the prospect of a presidential walkabout on Red Square with his friend Donald. Whether he would want to risk a return visit and brave hostile demonstrations in America is another matter.

Should we in the rest of “the West,” if the term still means what it did, be concerned? Russia’s armed forces have been found as much weaker and worse-led than many supposed. Just as in 1914, Russian military defects have been searingly exposed. The difference at the moment is not only that Trump has abandoned assistance to Ukraine but also, when he winked at the cameras in the White House last Friday, that he is not minded to guarantee even Lithuania’s security. He is shattering the all-for-one and one-for-all basis of the Nato alliance, once an unchallengeable Transatlantic credo.

Not everything is a cause for dismal thoughts. In response to Trump’s initiatives, the Europeans — not just the EU — have begun to form a military counter-block. How far this will go is unclear. There are obvious difficulties such as the fact that Britain’s nuclear forces are currently subordinate to American wishes. But just a few years after pulling out of the EU, the United Kingdom is moving back to the center of European policy-making. Yes, Trump is springing big surprises. But one surprise is not of his making, which is the re-emergence of a European willingness to stand up collectively to the Russian threat.

Trump and Putin expected that multipolarity would mainly involve Russia, China, America and perhaps India and Brazil. They may have to think again if old Europe — for the first time in its many centuries — manages to unite for the sake of its survival and well-being.