The Russian National Regime Survival Strategy

 “Only a harmonious combination of strong and human well-being will ensure the formation of a just society and the prosperity of Russia. This requires concerted action to implement the strategic national priorities of the Russian Federation, aimed at neutralizing external and internal threats and creating conditions for achieving national development goals”.

The National Security Strategy of the Russian Federation, July 2021

The Lubyanka complex

July 21^st.  It is the Lubyanka complex in action! The new Russian National Security Strategy is nothing if not a Siloviki-inspired exercise in self-serving Kremlin elite paranoia in which the weak get beaten and only the strong prevail in some endless race down to the zero sum.  It is a manifesto for a no-rules based international order in which only Russian might is right abroad whilst Russia's latest Strong Man is infallible at home. As a European I read the thing both little surprised and disappointed at one and the same time. 

The greatest irony about the ‘Strategy’ is tragic for it only implies what the Kremlin regards as the greatest threat to ‘their’ Russia, the Russian people. Indeed, reading the document what jumps out from the pages is not the strength of Russia or the regime, but rather the dangerous mix of profound insecurity and nihilistic cynicism that is the Kremlin world-view. A cynicism now leavened by a belief that Russia can prevail over its own myriad contradictions by systematically exploiting the openness of democracies through the sustained application of emerging and disruptive technologies in what they see as a form of grey zone ‘perma-war’ across the spectrum of information war, cyber war and the complex strategic coercion that is the threat of hyperwar.

Authoritarian incompetence

As such the strategy comes dangerously close at times to being delusional in that Russian might could be successfully combined with Moscow’s narrative of injured historical right to salami slice NATO and steadily force those in its self-styled sphere of influence into compliance.  It is that desperate sense of a regime desperate for control that comes across most lucidly in the strategy: control of the Kremlin; control of what exists of the Russian body politic; control of Russia’s resources; control of the money; control of the Russian people; and, by extension, control of Russia’s world, with its fake security organisations and alliances. If there is a vision it is one born of a sense of being under perpetual attack, of needing enemies for the Kremlin to justify to themselves and others why the Russian security state is slowly crushing what is left of civil society and taking over all levers of power – political, economic, security, military, even intellectual.  In other words, it is the world-view of a tired regime and a tired leader who offer little hope to the Russian people, little ability or, indeed, inclination to manage inevitable change, and prepare Russia for a successful future, and, critically, no mechanism when the time comes for the peaceful succession from one leader to another.  In other words, it is an exercise in desperate cynicism in which the very idea of ‘power’ at its core reveals deep weakness and which in damning Russia to a future (again) of authoritarian incompetence guarantees its own failure and future danger. 

To assure and ensure control at home this distinctly nineteenth century strategy routinely exaggerates enemies and threats both foreign and domestic. Indeed, it could have written by the anti-reform Tsars Alexander III or Nicholas II. At best, it is Alexander Gorchakov reborn, at worst the Okrhana or KGB at their worst, such is its depressing thesis.  The very threats it claims to counter justify ever more control over all aspects of Russian life, a pre-revolutionary, pre-rupture statement.  A rupture that will not happen tomorrow but one could now imagine another 1905-style Bloody Sunday as the regime moves to suppress all and any dissent in the name of 'cohesion'. President Putin is determined there will be no Russian Spring under President Putin even if his security strategy is a tacit acceptance of that very danger. 

Dark ironies

Thus, the Russian National Security Strategy of July 2021 marks the beginning of another old chapter of Russian tragedy in the style of a Dostoevsky or Pasternak, leavened, as so often in the past, with bucket loads of dark Chekhovian irony. The strategy is, indeed, a Russian tragedy for it implies the fate of Russians and Russia’s unique genius will be forever tragic because ‘order’ can only ever be guaranteed by extinguishing freedom for freedom is chaos.  And, by simply being free Russia’s Western neighbours are a threat to Mother Russia whether they have intent or not.  For the Kremlin Mother Russia’s eternal Rasputin is chaos and the West IS Rasputin, seductive, dangerous and seditious. 

The strategy also reveals Putin’s wilful lack of understanding of the Western liberal order.  For him Russians must be protected from a West that offers snake oil for fear they will be seduced and only by repeatedly demonstrating the moral, spiritual, and eventually power ‘superiority’ of traditional Russian values over the Western vacuity can such seduction be prevented.  A West which to Putin has abandoned any pretence to righteousness or rectitude by embracing what Putin regards as a toxic post-identity, post-patriotic post-modernism.  Post modernism in which the manly values of which Putin sees himself the very embodiment have been abandoned by the Western democracies for what he regards as a disastrous mix of wokeism and multiculturalism which in its assault on patriotism poses as a great a threat to Russia as any NATO weapon system.

He also believes such fissures in Western society provide him with the Great Opportunity to be the Great Equalizer whereby an ostensibly weaker Russia can keep the Western democracies permanently off balance just enough for him to exert the pressure of concentrated Russian power to effect around the margins of both the EU and NATO via the super-highways and byways of Europe’s diffuse power.  An information putsch here, a hard military pull there and decadent Western Europeans will do what Western Europeans always do – talk a lot, do very little, and eventually accommodate Russian in the vain hope that Russia will be different.  Indeed, Russia’s National Security Strategy might well have had a by-line, “sponsored by Gazprom and Nordstream 2: coming to home near you”.  Merkel’s disastrous abandonment of nuclear power in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster so critically undermined Germany’s energy mix that Berlin has walked straight into a Putin trap which the Kremlin will exploit ruthlessly at the appropriate ruthless moment because that is what the Kremlin does. For Moscow exerting control over its ‘Near Abroad’ remains its number two priority (the real priorities are not in the order cited in the strategy) because it makes its number one priority so much easier: exerting control over the Russian people. Germany is about to make that a whole lot easier.

Nixon-Kissinger reversed

However, the greatest deceit (self-deceit?) in the strategy is the way it describes and justifies the Great Power Competition geopolitics it needs to impose such a security burden on the Russian people in their name. The United States is now Russia’s Great Satan responsible for much of the world’s ills and defaming noble Russia in what the strategy describes as Washington’s continuing but doomed efforts to preserve American hegemony.  Paradoxically, the way the strategy describes the Americans is perhaps the strongest metaphor of all for how the Kremlin really sees Russia.  Alright, Russia lacks the ‘corrupting’ cultural influences of the Americans because its soft cultural power does not travel well.  However, to accuse the US and wider West of constantly interfering in Russian internal affairs whilst feigning injured pride that the West should accuse Moscow of such dark arts is almost beyond parody.   

The third priority of the Putin regime, beyond controlling the Russian people and Russia’s ‘Near Abroad’ (including its NATO and EU ‘Near Abroad’ if allowed to get away with it), is the “comprehensive partnership and strategic interaction with China”. This is the stuff of Machiavelli, a reverse Nixon-Kissinger if you will, my enemy’s enemy is my friend. China is more than happy to instrumentalise and exploit Russia’s efforts for geopolitical gain, as Beijing’s July 2021 support for the Assad regime in Syria demonstrates.  However, at the same time Beijing also despises Moscow and Russia is only too aware of China’s long-term, ambitions for the Russian Far East.  Putin’s wet dream of Russia being at the heart of an aligned non-aligned ‘privileged’ relationship with India is also completely paradoxical because the closer Moscow is to Beijing the further from New Delhi. Today, the Indian Navy is exercising with the Royal Navy’s Carrier Strike Group in the Indian Ocean to “forge closer defence relations”.

The Russian National Regime Survival Strategy

The consequence of this most opportunistic of self-serving, self-interested and self-preserving ‘national’ security strategies with its mono-maniacal obsession with an imagined ‘West’ is yet more engineered emergencies on and around Europe’s borders, yet more provocation as Russian aircraft and submarines breach the territorial airspace and waters of NATO allies and EU member-states, yet more information warfare, cyber-attacks and espionage, yet more diversion of Russia’s resources away from civil society to the security state in all its Hydra-headed forms, yet more use of The Wagner Group and its not-so-mercenary mercenaries, yet more attacks on 'traitors' living in foreign countries like the March 2018 Salisbury Novichok poisonings by the GRU's Unit 29155, yet more massive offensive military exercises such as the forthcoming ZAPAD 21 that both ‘celebrate’ Russian power at home and intimidate those abroad, and yet more showpiece hyped up space and artificially intelligent hyper-weapons. All and anything the NATO allies do to legitimately deter and defend themselves against such behaviour will be routinely presented by the Kremlin as ‘aggression’ or ‘containment’ precisely because it is that narrative which is central to the regime’s survival.

How should the Western Allies respond? It is clear that Moscow will continue to push peace to the very limits with all sorts of extra-jurisdictional action.  It is also clear that China and Russia in concert will seek to make geopolitical life as hard as possible for the Americans.  First, in spite of the many post-Covid 19 pressures faced by the European Allies they must collectively recognise they are in the front-line of Great Power Competition.  Second, Britain, France and Germany must overcome their post-Brexit differences and lead Europe towards a new form of credible ‘independent’ minimum deterrence across the 5Ds of perma-war – deception, disinformation, destabilisation, disruption and destruction. Third, NATO’s Next Strategic Concept must be a determinedly proportionate response to all the acts of intimidation and threats faced by the Alliance.  Fourth, NATO leaders must understand what they are signing up to and mean it.  It is not at all clear that some of them understand the deterrence and warfighting concepts in the June NATO Summit Communique or mean them. Fifth, remember Harmel and somehow keep talking with and to Russia because deep in my consciousness there is still the hope that one day Russia will decide that a rules based order is in the Russian interest and that arms control is an essential part of Russia’s legitimate defence strategy.

Rather, reading the Kremlin’s National Regime Survival Strategy is an extremely depressing exercise in ‘here we go again’ politics in which nothing is what it seems.  It is to read history and futures bound up in one in which no lessons have been learned that are worth learning.  In which the needs of a narrow oligarchy are presented as the interests of a Great Power.  Russia IS a Great Power but the very manner by which THIS National Security Strategy defines ‘greatness’ is a sure-fire way to ensure Russia’s greatness is greatness denied.  That, perhaps, is the most depressing aspect of this strategy because it reveals a leadership that deep down does not believe in Russia nor its people, least of all in what Russia could become if even half decently led. Rather, it is the manifesto of a fearful Kremlin that having lost an empire has still to find a role beyond almighty, bloody spoiler.  As such, the Russian National Security Strategy actually says very little about Russia and its future, but everything about the regime which runs it. The best that can thus be said of it is that the Russian ‘emperor’ has new clothes.

Julian Lindley-French

China, Red Nationalism and the Xi Doctrine

 “The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try the world is beyond winning”

 Lao Tzu

The Xi speech

July 8^th, 2021. As the Royal Navy’s new Carrier Strike Group passed through the Suez Canal and ‘Global Britain’ once again headed East of Suez the Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga issued a stark warning to President Xi of China: Japan will regard any attack on the Republic of China (Taiwan) as an “existential threat”.  This Analysis addresses three questions. Is a Chinese military attack on Taiwan imminent?  What are the forces driving Chinese nationalism?  What are the constraints on China?

In his speech of July 1^st to mark one hundred years since the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and speaking from atop the totemic Tiananmen Gate, President Xi Jingping was uncompromising. He said that the “blood and flesh” of 1.4 billion Chinese citizens would repel at attempt by the West to “bully, oppress or enslave us” and that “bloodied heads” would be the result of any interference in Chinese affairs. He also said that the re-unification of Taiwan with the Mainland was “…an historic task to which the party is firmly committed and it is a common wish of the Chinese people to resolve the Taiwan issue and achieve the total reunification of the motherland”.  Ominously, he went further, “We [China] will have a world class army so that we can safeguard state sovereignty, security and development interests with greater abilities and more reliable methods”. 

Is a Chinese military attack on Taiwan imminent?

No, but the threat posed by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to Taiwan cannot be discounted.  In spite of the impressive progress in modernising China’s 2.7 million strong active service force a joint air-maritime-amphibious assault on such a scale would be an immense risk for Beijing. First, Taiwan’s forces, the Chinese National Armed Forces (CNAF), have 290,000 active service personnel which is reinforced by 1.65 million reserves.  Second, the CNAF are reinforced by 30,000 US personnel, including a sizeable contingent of Special Operating Forces or SOF.

Third, the shortest crossing between mainland China and Taiwan is 110km, or almost 70 miles.  Hitler baulked at the prospect of risking three army groups crossing the English Channel in 1940 against a British force that had just been effectively defeated at Dunkirk. The Luftwaffe could not guarantee control of the air space and the Kriegsmarine had no chance of controlling the sea space against the Royal Navy, even though the distance was only 34km or 21 miles. Moreover, China could only ever use a fraction of its force for an assault on Taiwan across what would be a heavily contested space.  To reduce the risk for such an operation China has illegally militarised a series of reefs and islands around the perimeter of the South China Sea to effectively lock the US and its allies out in the event of a Chinese attack.  This is the reason quite a few Western powers regularly conduct freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea to deny Beijing any de facto, let alone de jure control over a vital strategic sea space.

Fourth, the Chinese have never before conducted such operations on anything like the scale required. Yes, they have conducted some impressive show-piece maritime amphibious exercises.  However, China lacks both blue and brown water experience and there is a world of difference between exercises and operations.  For China to undertake a D-Day plus operation without any prior experience would be an enormous military gamble in which defeat would have the most profound of political and strategic consequences.  All military operations go wrong but large air-maritime-amphibious operations normally take place in a ‘sea of wrong’ because there are so many moving parts. In the midst of such chaos it is usually experienced operational commanders who make the difference.  

Therefore, in spite of the bombast of Xi’s speech Beijing would much prefer to gradually influence Taiwan from within and create the conditions for an eventual, and relatively peaceful re-integration of Taiwan with the mainland.  Much of the effort will involve subversion of the political class, reinforced by implacable opposition to any attempts by Taipei to achieve full independence, and the use of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to exert strategic coercion.

What are the forces driving Chinese nationalism?

There is a tendency, particularly among Europeans, to consider the strategic options open to the likes of Putin and Xi through their own geopolitical myopia.  There are two forces that reinforce the need for prudence and which could lead to a military confrontation between China and the US far sooner than many anticipate: Han Chinese nationalism and the paranoia of the CCP.  It is the heady mix of Han Chinese nationalism and CCP paranoia, allied to the growing influence of the armed forces and their state enterprises that could in certain circumstances create the ‘perfect’ conditions for military adventurism, particularly if the Xi faced losing power at home.  

Nationalism is a powerful driver of policy. The Han Chinese represent some 91% of China’s population. As the ideological fervour of the Mao years receded, and particularly since Xi took power in 2012, the main source of Beijing’s power has become suppressed Han Chinese nationalism.  The result is what might be described as a ‘chip on the shoulder, this is our moment’ attitude to foreigners, particularly Westerners (Gweilo), the Japanese and the wider world.  This is hardly surprising.  From the so-called Unequal Treaties with the British in the wake of the Opium Wars of the 1840s to the Rape of Nanking in the 1930s, and the brutal Japanese occupation between 1941 and 1945, the Middle Kingdom with its ancient civilisation has been treated as little more than a chattel to be shared around between conquerors.   

In spite of the appearance of total power of the CCP, which Xi’s speech tried to reinforce, the ‘Party’ remains eternally paranoid about the threat from enemies both within and without China.  It is such paranoia why Beijing broke the ‘one country, two systems’ model and the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration in which Beijing agreed to permit Hong Kong to maintain its distinct political institutions for fifty years following Britain’s 1997 withdrawal.  What makes the CCP particularly worried is a fear that Hong Kong’s protesters might trigger a repeat of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. These were not simply a consequence of the pro-democracy movement.  They were also caused by a combination of inflation, economic reform, political corruption and nepotism, all of which are apparent in China today.  In the wake of the June 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre the CCP established a form of post-Tiananmen contract as part of the social economic reforms of the Deng Xiaoping era.  Put simply, the CCP created the conditions for growing prosperity so long as the newly-rich and the burgeoning middle class did not threaten the absolute control of the Party.  The sine qua non of the policy became the need to maintain economic growth and rural development at almost any cost for fear that if China stalled so would the CCP.  

What are the constraints on China?

The first constraint is President Xi’s own world-view.  Xi is a ‘Princeling of the Party’, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, Chairman of the Central Military Commission and Paramount Leader. He also had a tough upbringing. In an interview he gave in 2000 he said, "People who have little contact with power, who are far from it, always see these things as mysterious and novel. But what I see is not just the superficial things: the power, the flowers, the glory, the applause. I see the bull-pens and how people can blow hot and cold. I understand politics on a deeper level."

His reference to ‘bull-pens’ reflects his experience as a young man during the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s when his father, a high ranking official, was denounced as a counter-revolutionary and thrown into prison.  At the age of fifteen, after a life of relative ease Xi was also sent to work in the countryside where he learnt how to survive and also began to learn how to ‘play’ the often brutal internal politics of the CCP.  Xi is also a Chinese patriot schooled in the immense history of the Middle Kingdom with all the associated frustrations that many Chinese feel about the lack of respect afforded China by the West and others over the centuries.  He means what he says that China will repel any attempt to “bully, oppress or enslave us” and his need for absolute control over the Party, the country and much of the world around him makes Xi’s China a potentially dangerous power that can trust nothing or no-one.  That lack of trust also extends to Putin’s Russia, a relationship which Xi is perfectly happy to instrumentalise if its helps his China secure its interests.  

However, perhaps the greatest constraint on China is Xi himself and his demand for absolute conformity.  China boomed when Deng Xiaoping managed for a time to strike a delicate balance between the centralised control of Beijing and the Party, on one side, and the entrepreneurial power of Hong Kong and Shanghai, on the other.  The latter drove the export led boom but also led to a very Chinese form of pluralism which played its part in the 1989 revolt.  The momentum from that boom is still apparent in China’s many amazing achievements over the past thirty years.  However, Chinese entrepreneurship is slowly being strangled by the imposition of Xi’s renewed statist culture that over time could well erode China’s economic dynamism.  In the wake of the pandemic the Asian democracies and the West, the main source of China’s economic power surge, are also increasingly wary of Xi’s Beijing. Rather than move to ease such concerns Xi has taken the opposite course of action and become increasingly belligerent and aggressive. This suggests that Xi is incapable of striking that balance between some personal liberty and economic activity that unleashed China’s long suppressed potential.

Does China pose a threat?

All of the above leads to a final question: does China pose a threat to the region and the world?  It could.  Xi’s power-base is the People’s Liberation Army, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) and the People’s Liberation Army Air Force and he ensures that they are at the core of his very concept of China the Mighty.  The PLA is thus being equipped and modernised at a quite remarkable pace shifting the global balance of military power with huge implications for the Americans and NATO that most Europeans seem quite incapable of grasping.  Much of the PLA’s leadership like Xi also have a world-view that encapsulates much that is modern China: a potent mix of Han Chinese nationalism, Party orthodoxy, and a world-view born of a sense of centuries of disrespect, injury and humiliation at the hands of powerful foreigners.  It is also a perfect recipe for political miscalculation, particularly if the domestic situation of the CCP worsens.

This essentially zero sum world view in which Xi and the Party can only survive if they control all opponents and enemies both foreign and domestic driving Xi’s ambition for China to become the dominant world power by 2049, a century after the founding of Communist China.  Indeed, Xi’s speech marking the centenary of the CCP was a road marker on the route to such power.  Such an uber-competitive world view also means that for Xi China the true test of power will be the eclipse of the US and the kow-towing of Europe and by whatever means necessary.  It is for that reason that Western powers are daily under industrial level of cyber-attack and espionage and why Beijing routinely flouts rules over intellectual property theft.  All that matters is the search for critical comparative advantage at a time and place of Beijing’s choosing. 

Is it possible to deal with China?  Yes, if Beijing is accorded the respect its power and status deserve.  However, each and every breach of a treaty and every abuse of enormous power must be responded to.  China also invented what the West today calls statecraft and tradecraft and unlike such regimes in the past, and for all the forces acting on Xi, there is also a sophistication which creates the possibility for mutual interest to be engineered, but if one presumes war with China the Chinese will one day oblige.  Before that happens all and every opportunity must be explored for relatively peaceful coexistence, even if intense strategic competition between China and the Global Democracies is inevitable.  

In other words, when dealing with a China that is steadily moving from authoritarian to totalitarian the West and its leaders must be respectful and pragmatic, but also clear-eyed and look well beyond Chinese money.  Belt and chains?  And, always carry a very big stick! 

Julian Lindley-French