'Splitting' Russia and China Is Harder Than It Looks

Kupchan is offering precisely nothing tangible that the Russian leadership would find appealing.

Charles Kupchan claims to have found the “right way” to split Russia from China:

If Russia is to be drawn westward, it will result not from Washington’s overtures or altruism but from the Kremlin’s cold reassessment of how best to pursue its long-term self-interest. An offer from Washington to reduce tensions with the West will not succeed on its own; after all, Putin relies on such tensions to legitimate his iron political grip. Instead, the challenge facing Washington is to change the Kremlin’s broader strategic calculus by demonstrating that more cooperation with the West can help Russia redress the mounting vulnerabilities arising from its close partnership with China.

Kupchan has to say that an offer to reduce tensions won’t succeed because he isn’t really making that offer anyway. The gestures that he says the U.S. should make are largely rhetorical. He suggests abandoning the “democracy vs. autocracy” framing of Biden administration policy statements. That’s all very well and I agree with it, but Russia isn’t being offered anything real that would convince them that hedging and cooperating with the U.S. and its European allies are worth doing. Assuming that it is still possible to “split” Russia from China, it isn’t going to happen unless the U.S. and its allies can make Russia a sufficiently tempting offer. But Kupchan is offering precisely nothing tangible that the Russian leadership would find appealing.

Kupchan says that “Washington needs to capitalize on that discomfort and convince Russia that it would be better off geopolitically and economically if it hedged against China and tilted toward the West,” but he isn’t proposing making any concessions or accommodations with Moscow on anything. The first thing you would have to do to convince Russia that it is worth their while to “tilt” in our direction is remove at least some of the sanctions the U.S. has imposed over the last decade. The only concession Kupchan is prepared to make on this front is to say that the U.S. and its allies should “think twice” before imposing additional sanctions. I’m sure that will set Lavrov’s heart aflutter. It is telling that there is no mention of the Magnitsky Act in the entire piece, since it was the passage of this act that started the precipitous deterioration of U.S.-Russian relations at the start of the last decade.

If the U.S. really wanted to give Russia an incentive to “tilt” away from China, extensive sanctions relief would have to be on the table. Kupchan can’t even suggest it because the idea is too politically radioactive, and therein lies the problem. U.S. politicians and policymakers have spent the better part of the last two decades vilifying and antagonizing Russia. Having driven Russia and China together with increasingly hostile policies toward both, some of these same people now imagine that the U.S. can pry them apart without having to make any policy changes.

Not that long ago, many American analysts assumed that Sino-Russian cooperation would never be that great because the two countries’ interests were too divergent. The prevailing view just 10 or 15 years ago was that the U.S. didn’t need to worry about driving the two states together because their past conflicts and resentments would keep them separated. In the meantime, the U.S. did almost everything it could to ensure that Russia and China would intensify and deepen their cooperation. Now that Russia and China are drawing closer together, there is sudden, belated recognition that pushing them together wasn’t so clever after all. The problem is that the damage has already been done, and unless the U.S. is prepared to reverse course on its generally hostile policies toward Russia there is little chance of unwinding the ties that Moscow and Beijing have created.

Even now Kupchan maintains that the “two countries are not natural partners,” as if there were really such a thing as “natural” partners in international politics. The two states have deepened their cooperation because they judged that working more closely together is to the advantage of both. The U.S. can’t “split” apart this partnership unless the Russian leadership believes that it can get a better arrangement with the West, and our government has just spent most of my lifetime proving to Russian leaders that the U.S. can’t be trusted and will seek to take advantage of Russian weakness whenever it can.

If the Russophobic consensus in Washington disappeared tomorrow and there was broad support for sanctions relief, Russian leaders would still have a hard time believing any promises that Washington made. Having seen how easily the U.S. has gone back on its commitments to provide sanctions relief to Iran, the Russian government might conclude that it is better to work with a government that they know will never sanction them rather than take a chance on one that sanctions them at the drop of a hat. In that sort of competition, the U.S. is at a severe disadvantage. Constant meddling in the internal affairs of other states is one of the defining traits of our current foreign policy, and Russia will presumably never have to worry about that from China.

All of this is little more than an academic exercise until more policymakers in Washington are willing to rethink core assumptions about U.S. foreign policy. A less ambitious U.S. foreign policy would have fewer conflicts with Russia because it would define U.S. interests more narrowly, but it would also be less obsessed with mobilizing a coalition to oppose China as well. A U.S. strategy that has a decent chance of “splitting” Russia from China is also one that wouldn’t be trying to contain China in the first place.