Where is Russia’s place in the world?

Our designations of world regions are at best awkward, animated by condescension – or worse. The English term ‘Near East’, formerly, and occasionally still known as ‘the Levant’ or ‘the Orient’, is of relatively recent origin (roughly from the Crimean War) as well as singularly European provenance and orientation: namely, the part of Asia closest to Europe. Could we imagine that Europe might commonly be referred to as the Near West? State borders in the Near East, furthermore, derive in many cases from colonial-era violence and whim, and the region as a whole can be ill-defined, sometimes narrow (Arabia, Persia, Turkey, Israel) and sometimes broad (stretching to North Africa and the Horn of Africa, the Indian Ocean and Afghanistan).

Even this broad definition, however, cannot be found in the writ of the Pentagon’s expansive Central Command. How could such an amorphous description commend itself to us? The borders of one of its entities, the Ottoman Empire, which provoked the coinage ‘Near East’, underwent significant flux, waxing and waning spectacularly before expiring. Then there is the circumstance that the term ‘Middle East’, which arose mostly in diplomatic and military discussions of Persia/Iran around the dawn of the 20th century, initially joined and then largely displaced Near East, though not entirely. The US State Department retains a Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, while the private Washington Institute for Near East Policy follows suit. The US government’s various agencies cannot agree on a definition of the region.

‘No one knows where the Middle East is, although many claim to know,’ Roderic H. Davison explained in 1960:

Scholars and governments have produced reasoned definitions that are in hopeless disagreement. There is no accepted formula, and serious efforts to define the area vary by as much as three to four thousand miles east and west. There is not even an accepted core for the Middle East. Involved in the terminological chaos is of course the corollary question of how the Middle East relates to the Near East – or, indeed, whether the Near East still exists at all.

Should all who enter here abandon hope?

Let us further acknowledge that whatever the shortcomings in origin and usage, and whatever the configuration, a Near East-Middle East exists, including in the minds of people who live there. Indeed, the leading Saudi daily newspaper, al-Sharq al-Awsat, means ‘the Middle East’.

Russia is a Near Eastern country, too. Geographically, this has long been manifest, as evidenced by Russia’s seemingly eternal, and eternally elusive, hankering for domination of the Turkish Straits. Russia also maintains a long-standing presence on the Caspian Sea across from Iran. Russia’s oldest city today, located in the North Caucasus on the Caspian, is Derbent. The city was re-established in the late fifth to early sixth centuries AD by the Persian Sassanids, when it served as a focal point for the spread of Christianity, and was taken in the seventh century by Muslim Arab armies of the early Caliphate, later falling to the Mongols and changing hands many times thereafter. It also had a Jewish population. John Bell, a Scottish physician who travelled from St Petersburg to Beijing, in 1722 accompanied Peter the Great on his mission to Derbent and the Caspian Gates.

The expansive steppe is contiguous with the Near East, as many a besieged Near Eastern/Middle Eastern ruler over a millennium could attest. To be sure, Muslim-majority status is generally the unstated qualification for inclusion in the most expansive versions of the Near East-Middle East – with Israel being the anomaly – and today’s Russia is only around 15 per cent Muslim. By contrast, Albania is just over 50 per cent, while Kosovo is nearly 100. But beyond geography (which might be considered sufficient) and religion, the Russian state was shaped by the Golden Horde, based in Sarai, a Muslim offshoot of the Mongol empire (ulus). The early princes of Muscovy were vassals of the Muslim khan; only in 1480 did Muscovy become fully independent. Russia’s own imperial venture was forged when it turned the tables on other offshoots of the Golden Horde and became an Eastern-Slav and Tatar amalgam. Ivan the Terrible’s conquest of the Kazan Khanate (1552), following which Tatar elites of the Volga Valley were folded into Muscovy-Russia as nobles, effectively launched Russia as a dominant force in Eastern Europe and among Eastern Slavs. Catherine the Great’s military victory over the Crimean Khanate (1783), another Golden Horde successor, extended this amalgam, and it, too, reverberates through the ages (through to the current Russian war against Ukraine). By the 19th-century conquest of Central Asia, where Volga Tatars played an outsized governing and cultural role, the Russian empire boasted the world’s largest number of Turkic-language inhabitants. That’s right, tsarist Russia had more speakers of a Turkic language than did the Ottomans.

Russia is a European country as well, geographically but also culturally. Peter the Great founded his namesake city expressly to underscore both points, and the Baltic Sea, no less than the Black Sea, is an integral part of Russia’s story. At a fundamental level, the Russian language is unequivocally part of the European family of Slavic tongues, and Russian Orthodoxy forms an inseparable part of Christendom (which originated in the Near East, but came to define Europe). Russian rulers long portrayed themselves as the rightful heirs to Byzantium, thereby legitimising not only their designs on Ottoman lands but also their rule, and sought to distance themselves in civilisational terms from the Ottomans and the Orient – even though, unlike representatives of the other great powers in Istanbul, Russian diplomats could use their own native-speaking subjects as interpreters. Russian diplomats in Istanbul, often viewed as outsiders compared with their counterparts from Britain, France, Austria, and Venice, pressed relentlessly to achieve the status of the European powers but met with resistance. Russian translations of orientalising travelogues in the Ottoman lands by Europeans omitted passages viewed as conducive to an obvious orientalisation of Russia.

Alexander I presided over a European grand peace settlement (in Paris) as did Stalin (in Berlin). Try imagining European high culture without Russian literature and painting, music and dance, design and film. But, crucially, Russia is not and never has been a Western country. Being Western involves developing a stable constitutional order with constraints on executive power, rule of law, protection of private property and civil liberties, a free and open economy, a free and open society – a matrix sometimes referred to as democracy, but more accurately described as a liberal order (which in the original cases democratised over time). Japan, by contrast, is not a European country culturally, but institutionally it is Western.

Governance – not culture, ethnicity, or religion – is decisive, which is why Russia is a Near Eastern-Middle Eastern country not only geographically. Of course, not every state in that region is or has been autocratic. And yet, historical and contemporary resemblances between Russia’s political regime and that of a large number of Near Eastern-Middle Eastern ones can hardly be denied. At a basic level many are quintessentially oil- and gas-floated autocracies, repressing domestic political challenges and suffering deficits of legitimacy even when times are good. But at a fundamental level, these are not just petrostates. They exhibit dominant characteristics of patrimonialism, that is, an erasure of the distinction between state interests and state funds and the private interests of the ruler and his family (or clique). The state resembles a family business, or an extension of the ruler’s household.

Russia is geographically an East Asian country as well, its colonisers having reached the Pacific Ocean in the 17th century. Russia went on to fight multiple wars against Japan, imposed a sphere of influence in parts of China, rendered Outer Mongolia independent from China while brutally subordinating the former as the Soviet Union’s first satellite, and occupied the northern half of the Korean peninsula, where it implanted a Communist regime. Still, Russia’s story in the Pacific region has mostly been one of failure. Consider only the relative weight in the world through time of San Francisco or Los Angeles, let alone Seattle or Vancouver, compared with Vladivostok (‘rule the East’). Or consider the relative population of the Russian Far East, which peaked at around 10 million and today stands at under eight million, compared to that of Korea or northern Japan, let alone a single province of northern China. Geography is pivotal but not destiny.

Historical developments have buried the notion of ‘Oriental despotism’, perhaps for good, as an overarching designation, thanks to the advent and endurance of rule-of-law states throughout much of Asia; not just in India and Japan, but in Japan’s former colonies, South Korea and Taiwan, as well as Indonesia, Malaysia, and elsewhere, stretching down to Australia (which, by the way, is physically located in the ‘Global South’). The appeal to ‘Asian values’ collapses on the interrogative, which Asia?: the defiantly illiberal (China, North Korea, etc) or the mostly liberal. True, Singapore, as well as, in different ways, Hong Kong, remain confounding examples (as do a few other former British possessions). Be that as it may, Russia would be lucky to follow an East Asian path to constitutional order and open society.

What might be the implications of Russia’s being a Near Eastern country, today and going forward?

Numerous relevant topics suggest themselves: the Soviet invasion of and ignominious exit from Afghanistan, and the unwitting spur to Islamic radicalism that redounded to Tajikistan and the Russian North Caucasus; the Soviet divorce from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan, which left behind a large Slavic diaspora and would later see significant labour migration to Russia; the historic wars with the Ottomans (more than a dozen), and the contemporary rivalry as well as cooperation with Turkey; Russia’s endemic North Caucasus instability, perhaps the place where Russian dominion could unravel; the epoch of Moscow’s Arab client states, including the on-and-off close ties to Egypt, the once close ties to Iraq, and support for South Yemen, the Arab world’s only avowedly Marxist state; the barbed competition and later rapprochement with OPEC and the striving for closer ties with the Saudis, once an enemy; the vast diaspora in Israel, among the largest and most important Russian-speaking populations outside Russia, alongside that of the UAE; the support for warlords in US-fractured Libya; Russia as a global supply of jihadists; the Russian mercenaries and mineral extraction across the so-called coup belt in Africa’s Sahel; the fallout with Iran following the Islamic Revolution and the recent transactional co-development with Tehran of tools of repression and aggression; and Russia’s peaceful, hardworking Muslim citizenry. The list goes on.

Here, we shall highlight two dimensions, elaborating on the thrust above concerning both the salience of geography and the decisiveness of governance.

First, it should come as no surprise that Russia’s attempted reassertion of a global role recurred first in the Near-East-Middle East. The Post-Soviet Kremlin prided itself on maintaining friendly relations with every state in the region, even or especially when they did not talk to each other, including the Arabs and Iran, Iran and Israel, Qatar and other Gulf states, Israel and Syria, Turkey and Iran, and factions within Libya.

Yet even then, as Dmitri Trenin acknowledged, the basis of Russian ambitions in the Middle East and beyond was fragile. Note that Nixon and Kissinger grasped the strategic advantages of befriending everyone in the region long before Putin did, although Putin’s regional policy, for a time, marked a distinct improvement on the ideologically driven, rigid Soviet behaviour here. Nixon and Kissinger also managed to push the Soviets out of the region, while America’s post-1991 presidents and diplomats constantly, if unwittingly, created exploitable opportunities for Russia in the Near East-Middle East.

When Putin intervened militarily and saved Bashar al-Assad’s vicious regime from an armed insurgency, the ‘Russia is back’ euphoria exploded. ‘The Middle East is a way to showcase that the period of Russia’s absence from the international scene as a first-rate state has ended,’ crowed the high-profile Russian pundit Fyodor Lukyanov. As I noted at the time, observers mistook temporary tactical gains for strategic gains. In Syria, where the supposed revival of great power status began, the Kremlin’s intervention made it part owner of a civil war, mass atrocities, and a ruined country. To be sure, those who had predicted a quagmire in Syria for Russia were wrong. Russia in fact suffered far worse: outright defeat (as did Iran). Following the Turkish-sponsored overthrow of Assad’s regime, Russia found itself desperately clinging to (Soviet-era) military bases in Syria, including the warm-water Mediterranean port at Tartus, while scrambling to shore up logistics for its tenuous position across the Sahel. Indeed, far from demonstrating its resurgence, Russia’s meddling in the Near East-Middle East revealed the hollowness of its foreign policy, which brought no improvement in the country’s economic growth, underlying human capital, infrastructure, or governance.

Echoes of this Near East-Middle East overreach can be found in Russia’s inability to reconquer Ukraine – a failure that unwittingly helped set the stage for Assad’s downfall – and they reconfirm profound flaws in Russia’s long-term trajectory. Arguably, Russia held far more sway in Ukraine before the attempt to conquer it all than today. Largely as a result of its recourse to force, Russia’s position across Eurasia, among places it used to rule, has been declining. The upshot is that even if a US president wanted to ‘grant’ Russia a sphere of influence across Eurasia, he could not do so. Make no mistake: Russia is estranged not just from those former satellites and former Soviet republics that managed to realise their dreams of joining NATO and the EU. The Kremlin has also alienated Kazakhstan, Armenia, and even Azerbaijan. Grey zone manipulations that are supposed to have delivered leverage to Russia by fostering instability sow deep societal and governmental distrust in the target countries. Even the autocrat in Belarus, who owes his continued hold on power to Putin, remains wary of excessive dependence on Moscow. Tellingly, efforts to force-restore Russian language status in Ukraine reveal a negative trend in language use far beyond that once heavily Russified country. The Eurasian Economic Union and the Collective Security Treaty Organization have both become zombie-like. Beyond former Soviet Eurasia, Russia’s influence in India, predicated on warm cold-war era ties and long-standing weapons sales, has also weakened (though well short of a complete break). Analysts who blame the West, the US, NATO expansion, and the like for Russia’s belligerent behaviour over the past decades have to explain why Russia’s neighbours not even in NATO view Moscow with deep suspicion, or worse, and why Russia’s former soft power in Eurasia continues to fade.

Russia is not ‘back’. Its efforts in the Near East-Middle East at conflict resolution, energy cooperation, and weapons sales have not developed long-term momentum, and certain Russian arms have fallen precipitously in appeal. In fact, Russia required an Iranian drone lifeline for its war against Ukraine. Sanction-evading trade persists on the basis of mutual opportunism, which could shift. Indeed, Russia has switched sides here too many times to count, from newly founded Israel to Nasser’s Egypt, from Saddam’s Iraq to today’s mullahs in Iran. There are few illusions about whether Moscow might switch again. Russia has been an inveterate foe and rival of Saudi Arabia and Turkey longer than it has maintained cordial ties, and everyone knows it. Countries in the Near East-Middle East maintain relations with Russia less out of optimism and mutual gain and ultimately more out of wariness over the harms Russia could inflict. Russia is a brutal, bullying regime sometimes envied for its inventiveness in authoritarian techniques and its repressive resolve, but no one’s trusted security partner, no one’s provider of FDI or advanced technology.

Second, and related, institutionally Russia shares with many (not all) Near Eastern-Middle Eastern countries glaring over-investment in military and domestic security agencies and corresponding under-investment in human capital or the self-induced hemorrhaging of the human capital they do produce. Years ago I coined the expression ‘Trashcanistan’ to characterise pervasive state capture via both enduring historical legacies (a lack of constraints on executive power) and newfound state functionary ‘self-privatisation’ of state assets at staggering scale, from Russia to Ukraine, Azerbaijan to Kazakhstan, with only Baltic exceptions, resulting in symbiosis between the criminal underworld and officialdom. Patrimonialism goes deeper still. A country’s land, wealth, even people belong in some sense to the ruler, as his ‘patrimony’, to bestow upon or take away from officials and private owners alike. Max Weber popularised the concept of patrimonialism as an ideal type, contrasting personal allegiances, kin ties, patron-client relations, and generally informal approaches to impersonal, written and formal lines of authority (Economy and Society, 1922). Patrimonialism does not imply the absence of a state with a bureaucracy, laws and rules. On the contrary, its state structures can metastasise to strangulation size. But the state becomes a ‘family business’, for the ruler and chosen few. A ‘court’ develops such that government ministers fight for influence not just among themselves but with courtiers, i.e., those with direct access to the ruler regardless of whether they hold formal government positions.

Patrimonialism is not unique to the Near East-Middle East, of course. Nor (like Trashcanistan) is it cultural. Regrettably, a previous effort to describe the phenomenon outlined here as ‘Sultanistic’, made by Juan Linz and his collaborators, fell victim to accusations of ‘Orientalism’. Here, it must be stressed that patrimonialism is a non-ethnic term. Rather, patrimonialism is institutional and flows originally from hereditary rule.

For centuries, under emperors or monarchs, dukes or feudal lords, patrimonial governance was more or less the norm, in Europe and elsewhere, until modern constitutions, professional civil services, impartial judiciaries, and self-organised civil societies gained strength and exercised influence over global norms through their self-evident competitive advantages and soft power. Russia, in other words, did not invent patrimonialism. And yet, even as imperial Russia developed the attributes of a bureaucratic absolutist state under the Romanov dynasty, patrimonialism persisted – deep into the modern period, the phenomenon became something of a ‘path dependency’ that has proven very hard to overcome.

Richard Pipes defined patrimonialism, from the Russian case, as ‘a regime where the rights of sovereignty and those of ownership blend to the point of being indistinguishable, and political power is exercised in the same manner as economic power.’ Richard Wortman, joined later by Ekaterina Pravilova, demonstrated the development of strong state structures, legal consciousness, and property rights in post-Muscovy Russia under the Romanov ‘old regime’, albeit alongside enduring personalist rule. Indeed, the centrality of personalist rule within the highly bureaucratic Communist party-state is striking, as is the revenge of personalism under Yeltsin and then Putin.

Elsewhere, I have explained this Russian trend not in terms of culture (or DNA) but ‘perpetual geopolitics’: how an abiding aspiration to be a providential power, to catch and overtake the powers of the first rank without the wherewithal to do so, has led to excessive recourse to the state to force-modernise the country, producing spurts followed by stagnation, and ultimately resulting not in a strong state but personalised rule and the conflation of the survival of the country with that of the ruler’s regime. Whether Russia can escape its long-standing version of patrimonialism – its post-Communist millenarian ‘mafia state’ – remains to be seen. Putin appears to be, or to have become, the type who must be broken before he bends.

Not all other authoritarian Near Eastern-Middle Eastern states are predominantly patrimonial. Iran (for now) remains a theocracy (exhibiting some structural similarities to the Bolshevik regime), while Egypt is a military junta (something common around the world), though in both cases certain families exercise inordinate power and informal arrangements can often trump formal ones. At the same time, patrimonial practices can also be found in North Africa, in Tunisia, or Algeria, or Morocco, where they spurred popular revolts as part of the so-called Arab spring.

Not all states in the region are consolidated authoritarianisms. Some are partially shattered (Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq). A few, such as Israel and Turkey, are rule-of-law democracies albeit subject to self-inflicted erosion to different degrees. The island state of Bahrain as well as Kuwait and Jordan are semi-constitutional monarchies with quasi-parliaments, but also with highly pronounced patrimonial qualities. Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, and Oman most resemble patrimonial regimes; indeed, they have hereditary ruling families with sprawling numbers who dominate the state and the economy. Russia’s case has come to involve patrimonialism without inherited rule. Putin’s Russia has attracted more than its share of envy and imitation, even though this kind of system is highly debilitating, especially for the well-being of the populace, but also for quality of governance and political stability (including succession struggles).

Let us be absolutely clear: the Near East-Middle East boasts ancient civilisations of exquisite beauty and attainment. These are cultures of wondrous architecture, enduring epics, surpassing song, textiles, instruments, enterprising merchants and talented people. A case could be made that the Arabian-peninsula littoral constitutes its own distinct Arab phenomenon – mercantile and pragmatic. These are qualities shared not only by Qataris, Bahrainis, and Emiratis, but also Yemen’s Hadramautis, not to mention the inhabitants of Aden and the Hijaz historically. This is in stark contrast to the Arabian interior, where the dominant authoritarianism and piety emanate and fuse.

Be that as it may, in the domain of politics, and as a result, economics, the countries of the Near East-Middle East have too often undermined themselves. True, these places have suffered predation from without, and outside powers have colluded in local failure. Still, the region’s predation cannot be reduced to outsiders’ malign interference. Near Eastern-Middle Eastern states tend to distrust and mistreat their own peoples, to enact violence not just internally but also externally upon their neighbors, in sum, to waste lives, natural endowments, and potential. Often, this patrimonialism is denounced as corruption, because of the blatant private appropriation of public office, but it should be considered pre-corrupt. Attaining the stage of corruption would constitute an achievement, as it were, for that would mean there were identifiable violations of regular, ordered, law-protected economic and political behaviour, not an all-encompassing system-defining activity.

Some Near Eastern-Middle Eastern ruling circles have publicly embraced an imperative to alter their trajectories by investing far more in domestic human capital, even as they continue mostly to purchase it on the global market, and in establishing innovation ecosystems driven by science and tech industries, partly by partnering with Israel and India, the United States and China. Personalised rule need not be predatory. Rulers can decide to heed some limits, appoint competent loyalists and technocrats, commit to development and peoples’ well-being, use their power to force-advance social change and female empowerment. But those are choices, and they can shift at the determination of the ruler, who is, in any case, mortal. Even when rulers hold steady to a developmental course implementation can also fall short, given state capacity challenges and self-dealing. And, for all the positive changes in parts of the Near East-Middle East, promised and real, governance is not one of them. State-driven or state-indulged societal and economic change has been accompanied, predictably, by political tightening. Few beacons of institutionalised freedom, or enduring non-extractive prosperity, stand out in the wider region.

Readers of this essay might note that one could just as well argue that Russia is African, too, given that patronage-driven, illiberal, and natural resource-sustained Trashcanistans can be found on that continent as well. Indeed, some African countries are also quintessential hydrocarbon autocracies. Consider the eerie similarities between phenomena in Angola and in Russia: an oil-dependent and commodity-exporting economy, domestic repression, staggering corruption, China’s dominant influence. The key difference, though, is geographical location. Part of Africa could be said to be in the Middle East, but most is not. To be sure, a huge swath of Russia, because of Siberia, is not anywhere near the Middle East, but Siberia is largely empty, unlike sub-Saharan Africa.

Where does this leave us? Several decades ago, a big boost to understanding patrimonialism, and what was dubbed neopatrimonialism, sprang from reexamination of newly independent states borne of colonial rule (in Latin America, Asia, Africa). A second boost followed more recently with reexamination of post-Communist cases, spearheaded by Daniel C. Bach, Miachael Bratton, Nicolas van de Waller, Joel S. Hellman, and others. Now scholars have pronounced a ‘global patrimonial wave’, including in the developed West. There is something to the latter point, at the level of individual leaders, their aspirations and assaults on institutions that constrain executive power, their indulgence of rhetorical anti-elitism and shameless graft. Still, such usage threatens to render patrimonialism so general as to risk becoming useless. And for all their earnestness and erudition, such analyses are generally founded upon dubious inequality statistics and mischaracterisations of ‘populism.’

A system’s nature remains the focus here. In that connection, part of the resemblances within the Near East-Middle East derive from isomorphism (similar responses to similar circumstances) and part from deliberate emulation and borrowing – what might be called perceived authoritarian best practices. These regimes provide inspiration and self-interested support to each other, although their interests and ambitions clash as well. Such processes merit further elucidation. Here let us note that the circumstance of Russia being a Near Eastern country with a patrimonial regime testifies to undeniable failures of strategic purpose and performance.

Putin and his defenders depict Russia’s increasing dependence on China as a strategic choice, and a brilliant one, but it more resembles a trap, and a self-imposed one, necessitated by his decisions to blow up relations with Europe and the United States, and blame the West for the blowup. In this context of anti-Westernism, Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations (1996), first delivered as a lecture in 1992, can be read less as an analysis of existing reality at the time and more as a guide to action seized upon by the Eurasian powers Iran, Russia, and China, all of which cast themselves as ‘civilizational states’, more ancient than the West and therefore ostensibly more legitimate. One sees a similar temptation in today’s India and Turkey.

The shared anti-Westernism that binds Russia to China, reinforced by the Putin-Xi bromance, is poison for Russia’s future. It might seem paradoxical that a patrimonial state constitutive of a lingering Near Eastern-Middle Eastern pattern must be closely linked to the West for its success, but historically Russia has never enjoyed sustained prosperity, even in relative terms, without deep economic ties to Europe and even the US This is partly a matter of complementarity. But it goes beyond that to the positive influences that accrue from interacting with higher quality governed states and Russia’s need for European and American technology transfer (a dire necessity for all commodity exporters). Beijing’s technology transfer to Russia remains circumscribed, and mostly magnifies Russia’s dependence on Beijing, enhancing not just China’s geopolitical leverage but also its surveillance into Russian communications. China exacerbates Russia’s estrangement from Europe, even as it seeks to rebuild its own ties to Europe (which frayed badly over its support for Russian aggression).

The staggering bilateral imbalance is well known inside both countries. China accounts for more than one third of Russia’s foreign trade; Russia makes up a microscopic four per cent of China’s trade. Roughly 80 per cent of the latter is energy (and minerals), which is currently discounted, and which has little room to grow (China limits its total reliance on any one supplier). China’s FDI in Russia remains below $20 billion annually (less than one per cent of Russia’s GDP), compared to nearly $350 billion from the EU before Russia’s wider aggression against Ukraine in 2022. Yes, China supplies irreplaceable inputs and dual use goods at scale for Russia’s war machine. But China’s model continues to damage Russian manufacturing, too, especially machine building, flooding the Russian market with Chinese capital goods. Putin has no choice except to view the upsides of the embrace as outweighing the downsides, but his security services remain hard at work to counter Chinese espionage against Russia, with counterintelligence (part of the FSB) secretly referring to China as ‘the enemy’. One internal FSB document with such language warns of Chinese espionage targeting Moscow’s military technology, the recruitment of Russian officials and scientists, preparations for territorial revisionism against Russia, and vaulting Arctic ambitions at Russian expense. At the same time, the FSB document warns its field operatives not to jeopardise China’s support or the relationship while guarding against it.

Transfer from Russia of its most coveted technologies – military jet engines, quiet submarine capabilities – can occur only once. China’s weapons imports between 2020 and 2024 plummeted by two thirds compared to the five previous years.

And so, here we are: Russia is a Near Eastern country, too, which despite its long history of patrimonial governance has most prospered when closely tied to Europe but is now subordinated to East Asia.

Many Russian elites prefer to imagine their state as neither Europe nor Asia, but sui generis, an entity unto itself, a pole in a ‘multipolar world’ (a deceptive euphemism for coercive spheres of influence). Indirectly, however, even they acknowledge the dilemmas of such a vision. A few Russian commentators have taken to relating the story of Alexander Nevsky, who in the 13th century reigned as prince of Novgorod (a city-state later conquered and absorbed by Muscovy). When confronted with a two-front challenge, Nevsky chose to fight the crusaders of the West, defeating the Teutons in the Battle of the Ice, but to accommodate the invading Mongols of the East, travelling across central Asia to the capital of the Golden Horde at Sarai to be recognised as grand prince. In this view, the Western Christians were determined to undermine Russia’s Eastern Christian identity, while the Mongols merely wanted Russia to pay tribute.

Notably, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow underscored this very point in September last year, after the Hermitage Museum, under pressure, finally returned Nevsky’s monumental silver sarcophagus to the St Petersburg Lavra to join Nevsky’s remains. ‘And it’s amazing: Alexander Nevsky did not fight with the Khans because the Khans needed our money and gave a powerful rebuff to the Teutons because they wanted our souls; he sorted out very smartly these enemies and adversaries,’ Kirill remarked in the presence of Putin. Nevsky had been pronounced a saint in 1549, and later Peter the Great chose him as his namesake city’s patron saint. It was Empress Elizabeth who had Nevsky’s relics transferred from Vladimir to St Petersburg (in 1723). She also commissioned his sarcophagus (1743), which is the largest silver monument in the world.

By implication, today’s accommodation of China does not require Russia to relinquish its identity, whereas a failure to confront the West would. This is a dangerous reading of history given that for centuries Russia prospered from its ties to Europe while never altering its identity – though perhaps not the most dangerous one. Some Russian elites quietly harbour a fantasy of China-US mutual annihilation in war, which would rescue Russia’s calamitous strategic position – China and the US would bring each other way down toward Russia’s low level.

That elites of a country which fancies itself a power of the first rank would require a cataclysmic Third World War to close some of the gap with actual countries of the first rank speaks volumes. If such a war were to be avoided, Russia would be left to fall still farther behind, but even if war is not avoided, it would do nothing to enhance Russia’s human capital, innovation, infrastructure, and governance, the attributes that attain and sustain great power status. Competitors might temporarily drop closer to Russia’s dismal condition, but they would still have the wherewithal to recover from anything short of nuclear annihilation and rise to new heights. Be that as it may, the sobering history of great-power wars ought to inhibit anyone from willing one into being, and warn against illusions of reaping gains, as opposed to the whirlwind.

A sense of tragedy haunts these trends. Bringing a tamed Russia into a Transatlantic community, an American pipedream, dates back at least to the early 20th century, even before formal Transatlantic structures existed, in the writings of Herny Adams. ‘Russia was a problem ten times as difficult [as Germany]’, the grandson of America’s sixth president and the great grandson of the second wrote in The Education of Henry Adams, printed privately in 1907 (and published posthumously in 1918). Adams noted the ‘fascinated horror’ that Russia provoked and speculated that the highest triumph of history would be inclusion of it into the Atlantic combine.

France’s Charles de Gaulle defined a Europe ‘from the Atlantic to the Urals’ in 1959, while Germany’s Willy Brandt initiated a multi-decade Ostpolitik around ten years later. Again and again, however, Americans and Europeans discover that Russia does not want to become just another country, like post-Second World War France or Germany, part of a community of equals (today, in terms of the EU, that would mean a country equal to, say, Poland or Estonia). This refusal to be just another country is the principal reason why even less clumsy efforts at Russia’s ‘integration’ than the ones earnestly attempted after 1991 would have failed. At the time, Dmitri V. Trenin perceived that Russia would not join the West (even if he nonetheless somehow imagined Russia was becoming Western).

To be sure, Gorbachev’s fêted ‘common European home’ stressed cooperation rather than confrontation, but it remained fundamentally an American-Soviet condominium for Europe, not something widely acceptable on either side of the Atlantic. Putin (like Stalin) fantasises about evicting the US from Europe entirely. Whatever the future of Russian leadership, or the disposition of the Americans, or the French, or the Germans, Russia’s road back to Europe is now much harder than ever, given the admission into the European Union and NATO of countries predisposed to see menace based on long, painful history. Putin and his apologists, in the meantime, proactively sabotage these bodies and pursue their dissolution, or at least rollback, as a matter of the survival of his personalist regime.