Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia to Confront the West?

I'm just putting my clock for an hour because we are supposed to finish exactly at 1900 I am delighted to welcome you all to Chatham House tonight we have a fantastic opportunity to hear first-hand from care Giles who has written a very interesting book Moscow rules which also sounds like Moscow rules which also could be named how Russia really works and could also be named everything you wanted to know about Russia but forgot to ask so I'm very delighted to introduce our speaker tonight King Charles professional experience apart from being associated with Chatham House and Russian Eurasia program includes fascinating experience as a translator stand-up comedian pilot an actor and interpreter librarian twice which you will see represented in the book and the world winning radio journalist National Small Business Award winner editor web designers security guard radio presenter most importantly anatomy teacher which is also absolutely essential for dissecting the complexity of Russia today now finally he specializes in Russian side by an information warfare which is of course everything that we want to know about I would like to mention that tonight is a live streamed event we also are on record so please prepare your questions we will leave at least half an hour for you to quiz care on his fascinating work and if you do ask a question please introduce yourself and state your affiliation but without further ado I suggest we start with an introduction of the book which is actually going to be on sale at a very special price of 20 pounds in the corner over there no need to rush enough copies for everyone and Kyra will also be available to sign after the event over to you Thank You Leona thank you and thanks to everybody for coming to sit in a basement on a beautiful June evening in February it's delightful to see so many of the of old friends and colleagues in the audience particularly the the old friends and colleagues with whom I disagree violently about Russia and how it got that way and what to do about it so it's it's gonna be quite a fun evening the driving impetus for writing the book Moscow rules was a deep and indelible feeling of deja vu that I and colleagues felt when we were invited into policy seminars to ask what to do about Russia and ask the same questions over and over again time and again year after year in fact decade after decade and by and large tended to give the same answers which had next to no impact on policy whatsoever so the defining characteristic of Western approaches to Russia in the post Cold War period has been repeating the same action while hoping for a different result as a well-known definition of that behavior which I managed to resist the temptation of including in the book but the main point is my suggestion is maybe it's time to try something a little bit different because the results of what we've been trying so far are very stable and predictable cycle in the relationship between not only this country and Russia but the whole of the West and Russia there is a reset in the relationship and it starts off with high hopes for a new beginning then those drift and stagnate is the reality of the completely incompatible strategic priorities of both sides start to set in then there is a period of disillusionment when the West continues to pretend that all is well in the relationship and not listen to Russia's increasing frustration and finally there's a point of crisis which in the last two iterations has resulted in an armed conflict with one of Russia's neighbors then there's a reset we're back to business as usual and the whole thing starts all over again now back in the the last part of 2011 I wrote a paper a study about the the relationship between NATO and Russia which described this cycle in some detail then the number of iterations it had already been through since the end of the Cold War and I interviewed European and Russian politicians and officials and experts for it and they described it to me in terms of lyrical allegories they talked about the the phases of the Moon and the the rhythmical progression of the seasons and the coming and going of the tides and I interviewed an American as well and he had his own cultural reference point for it too he said it's like the movie Groundhog Day but the point that came out of that study was that the cycle was entirely predictable and the crises were getting deeper and worse each time and so at the end of it I suggested that based on where we are in the relationship at this moment despite the fact that NATO is still proclaiming strategic partnership with Russia does anybody remember that we probably do for another and worse and deeper crisis and sure enough just under two years later along comes Ukraine and we start all over again now the problem we discern at the moment is that we might be in the phase of the crisis when people are looking for a reset people are looking for a reason to go back to business as usual and not continue with an unsustainable state of confrontation we see language from the Foreign Office saying for example I quote we're thinking more of moving towards being more focused on collaboration the question I ask is why would we assume that this is going to work out any better this time than it has on any previous occasion now in the course of the research for the book what I've found is that these patterns go back not just decades but in fact centuries I've come up time and again with recurring themes about how Russia treats the world and how Russia treats its own citizens as well descriptions from century past which are instantly recognizable today could be transferred word to word into things that we're writing about Russia now some of them were well known and expected others surprised me slightly and what I'd like to do to answer some of the many questions that you've been promised will be answered at this seminar is is trying to repeat some of the questions that we get asked about policy towards Russia and some of the answers we give most of which are explained in greater detail in the book there is for example the constant question of what Russia wants which it's impossible to summarize even in a book many times the size of mine and you all the more so in a 1/2 hour policy discussion but I'll try to boil it down to one sentence in effect Russia wants it to be 1914 again because then the aspiration to great power status that Russia seeks would not be dismissed by other countries as irrelevant but would actually be understood by countries on their own term and the entitlement that they're gives to dominion over your neighbors whether it's expressed as privileged interests or a sphere of influence or a cordon sanitaire anyway a means of limiting the sovereignty of those neighbors so that they do not pose a problem for you and of course the doctrine in not interfering in the internal affairs of other great powers unless of course it's Russia doing the interfering and respect in Russian terms which is almost universally the terms of the 19th century as opposed to those which we consider gather a country respect today but the result of this is the process of expanding Russia's domain reducing threats by pushing them farther away as all possible continues today not through the traditional means of military expansion and occupation but instead through subversion through regime change and the driving attitude underneath it is the end of empire that has been postponed Russia has not traveled as far down the road that other post imperial powers have after losing its external dominions several decades after the end of M we haven't seen the post-imperial shock that for example was Algeria for France or sewers for the UK or 1974 for Portugal there hasn't been the readjustment of attitudes to give Russia the same kind of relaxed attitude to its former dominions as for example Sweden has today and that's just a symptom of the way Russia's understanding of international relations was frozen during the period of the Soviet Union to re-emerge and confront an unsuspecting Europe at the end of the Cold War the world had changed but some Russian preconceptions and assumptions had not and this is one of the roots of the clash of attitudes and assumptions and geostrategic priorities that we see between Russia and the West the underlying question that gets debated perennially is whether Russia believes itself sincerely to be under a threat from the West from NATO whether Russia is in fact an unreconstructed expansionist power or is driven by defensive motivations my suggestion is that while a point is academically interesting the point at which it was relevant is long passed it doesn't matter anymore because perception is reality and is now driving Russian decisions even if the threat was originally invented to distract from domestic pressures or even if we swallow the argument the Russia is always acting defensively when it lashes out the result is the same that Russia sees itself to be in conflict with the West in every available domain except open military clashes and of course it is preparing for open military clashes this intense and immensely expensive program of military transformation and rearmament and reorganization that has now been going for just over a decade is driven by the idea that conflict is inevitable that as put by one of the former Chiefs of General Staff in Russia or a ballet or ski that it is an immutable axiom that war is coming another question we get asked time and again is do we have a Russia problem or a Putin problem and my answer very firmly is that no this is not Putin this is not a country of one person this is Putin enacting long-standing Russian security preoccupations and ideas about how you deal with security problems instead of inventing them but in addition to that we have to bear in mind that President Putin is not the worst leader that Russia could have or has ever had by many different parameters whether it's the economic management or mismanagement of the country whether it's the well-being of the citizens whether it's even human rights Russia has done far far worse in the past in fact the current situation despite this drift towards authoritarianism that we see at the moment where Russia is not imprisoning and murdering its own or foreign citizens on an industrial scale is actually hugely a normal issue in Russian history in fact it's unprecedented we are still however much we complain about what's happening in Russia today in a period of unprecedented liberalism which means we should be careful what we wish for when we wish for change I cite repeated instances of optimism triumphing over evidence in the book people who think that the the end of the Putin regime as they describe it in other words the Russian government is imminent and then of course when their predictions of imminent collapse don't don't materialize there are new and new justifications sought for why exactly it's going to happen next week but we should be careful because change in Russia is not always change and when it is it is most certainly not always for the better one of the things that did take me by surprise when researching for the book was looking back to 1917 and how the apprehension and fear that accompanied the forced abdication of the desire was also a source of jubilation and rejoicing in those countries that had seen Russia as a despotic tyranny from which it was now being released and therefore because that tyranny was removed thing must now get better how wrong they were and how wrong we could be if we wish for change in Russia at any price so I would suggest not aiming simply or even hoping for a replacement full of lighting reports in the alternative may not necessarily be better weather for Russia or for the rest of the world into conclusion what is it that I'm actually suggesting that we do differently in order to break that repetitive cycle that I refer to I'm suggesting that instead of pretending that there are compatible interests and common views on how the world should be run between the Western Russia we should actually recognize the incompatibility the fundamental difference is the fact that the status of the frontline states is something on which Russia and the West are never going to agree and also recognize that Donald Trump wildcards aside neither side is actually going to change in the foreseeable future we may hope for a different Russia but this is not a strategy instead learning to live with the differences would lead to a far more stable relationship returning to the relative stability of recognizing those differences and contradictions as opposed to pretending they don't exist now we describe that situation people tell me that I am talking about something which resembles the late Cold War and I want to emphasize I am NOT one of those people that says we are in a new Cold War the differences are fundamental at the same time there are certain similarities like the ideological gap between the two sides which is often understated the growing isolation of Russians from sources of outside information there are symptoms of Cold War light but at the same time that late Cold War period when the boundaries and parameters of behavior for Russia and the West were more or less understood and relations were not friendly but stable is a less dangerous position than the one we are in now however in order to get to that if we are in a new pseudo Cold War and at the very early stages there are a lot of interest moments we have to pass first in order to establish those boundaries and parameters there are the wars in Korea in Vietnam there are the Berlin crises of 1948 and 1961 there's the Cuban Missile Crisis there's a whole host of other less spectacular but still important and potentially dangerous defining moments that we have to go through not to mention the patchwork of smaller but still deeply unpleasant proxy wars around the world as each side advised for influence but my suggestion is if we want to arrive at a position of stability while minimizing the damage and the fallout that is caused to both sides the best time to start is now [Applause] well if you could please give me a sign just how many questions we might have thank you and I was also asked to ask you to please switch off your mobile phones if you would and we are going to take questions as they come and I was also asked to ask something to get the discussion going and I cannot help being academic II as an author of some books on Russia I know only too well just how hard it is to package the complexity and multidisciplinarity that is necessary in order to understand Russia in one book and to make it readable and Kerr has done a fantastic fantastic job on that and congratulations I can't help they asking you three things one question which would come from Social Anthropology which is please state your own bias one would come from sociology which would be how did you select your sources and the third one which would come from political science which is how would you know if you were wrong okay bias sources and how would I know if I'm wrong my bias I think is the one that that I've already described the fact of having worked on and with Russia and effectively made a career out of studying and trying to explain Russia for quite a few decades now and detecting these very persistent patterns on each occasion validating the hypothesis that I put in the book that the the people who make the most accurate and reliable predictions about Russia are the people who have the most cynical and pessimistic attitude to start with now there's a long-running debate in the Russia watching community whether you get that way through watching Russia or whether it actually helps to be a cynical and pessimistic in the first place but the best the basic answer is that I am entirely comfortable with being called alarmist because it happens regularly and generally speaking the things that I've been alarmist about generally happen a little while later for instance I've mentioned the the Crimea conflict already they there's one very specific instance that comes to mind with the old conflict studies Research Center that used to work with in the UK defense Academy an of which at least four former alumni are actually sitting in the room at the moment which throughout the the summer of 2008 was briefing outgoing British defence attaches to Moscow that you know there's going to be a war with Georgia this year don't you the point is Russia is not always as unpredictable as it seems there are these familiar patterns there are these familiar responses to stimuli that you see time and time again and therefore it is possible to draw conclusions that if your prezi repeat the same experiments you might get the same result so my bias is having watched it for a long time and realized that there is a certain degree of consistency in what happens and that moves us on to the sources looking through as much evidence as I could find to either support or disprove this theory everything I find actually backs it up and Aliona you know that I've dug particularly deep wherever possible in order to to find the supporting evidence in this book now a an early draft of the of the book was shown to some trusted academic colleagues many of them suggested that it should actually quote people less and have more of my own voice coming through it was described as a crowd-sourced volume because basically was everybody else being quoted but Aliona and I were discussing just in the the ante room before we came in how I quote Leona repeatedly through the books I'm delighted is actually chairing today it turns out I've also quoted stuff that she didn't know existed online or had ever been published so I think that's an indication that I've tried really to delve as far as I possibly can in order to gather the evidence that will either support or disprove final question an extremely important one how would I know if I'm wrong there are plenty of people who tell me that I'm wrong fortunately they are usually the same people and they tend not to change their opinion when it turns out that actually I was right which brings me back to the question of my own bias I have tried extremely hard through this throughout this book to to resist the temptation of determinism and assuming that just because this is the way it has always happened that's the way it's going to happen in the future unfortunately it is hard to push against the compelling weight of evidence that actually that is how it works thank you right we had a question over there somewhere right let's start from the back thank you very much young grant Chatham House member a former law enforcement intelligence analyst covering the ex-soviet States but law enforcement my question for Kier Giles is are there any positive surprises in the reaction to your book or that the findings that were coming out have various people reacted the way you expected or have there been negative reactions where you perhaps expected a positive or positive reactions where you expected a negative particularly perhaps among the Russian community in the West thank you I can do yes shortly okay that's a shame because there's a long answer to that you and yes the the reactions to the book it's been a mixture of the of the entirely predictable and of the mildly surprising the the entirely predictable part was that the the strongest criticism of the book has come from people who either haven't read it or have read it but don't actually care what it says because they're gonna say what they want to say anyway regardless of what's actually in the book now that the primary instance of that of course is people looking at the subtitle and saying well how can you say that Russia confirms to the West when it's actually the West that's attacking Russia all the time because they haven't read that it's actually a significant chunk of the book that discusses exactly that issue the the mildly surprising part was the the reaction that wasn't I suppose was an indirect form of criticism of the book which is that the way it was used as bait in a cyber attack on Chatham House a few days after it was actually published Chatham House associate fellows and possibly other staff members received an email saying here are the sample chapters from Kier Jones's book let us know what you think apparently originating from me or from my fictitious assistant followed up by a phone call in a thick Russian accent saying how did you like the sample chapters so it's a is an interesting mix of of technical capability there was at least respectable and social engineering that was absolutely abysmal anyway we I think this assessment is still going on and how many people actually fell for the Russian accent and click the link that the point with that though was that it's um it wasn't actually an attack directly on the book it was using the book as a means to attack Chatham House on either the book nor I were actually important enough to be the targets of this so if I had any form of academic ego it would be severely bruised now however the main onslaught of criticism I think is still to come we haven't heard for instance from the the Russian embassy in London what they think of the book although James Nix he did send them a copy because he thought they'd enjoy it we'll see we'll see what comes out over the next weeks and months and of course in between those two it's mildly gratifying to see that the five-star reviews on Amazon and Goodreads etc racking up but that's that's by the by thank you we have take two questions in this section my question really is about the benefits on otherwise of heads of state and Heads of Government actually meeting we had a meeting here some years ago when Mikhail Gorbachev actually came to London and held a meeting and the quality of his speech and the quality of his answers the questions was most impressive is that an example perhaps for us at the moment thank you my name is Steven port I'm a private member of Chatham House would you say that the period since the collapse of the Soviet Union was accompanied by an almost systemic failure of Western foreign policy specifically American foreign policy towards Russia because for instance at the time of 9/11 I think it's fair to say that the Russian government's expressions of horror were very sincere and there appeared to be very little positive response from the American government towards cornelian a very academic University of Buckingham how would you fit into your thesis the Gorbachev Yeltsin period which would seem to contradict a constant power aspiration thank you meetings between head of states yes I think the the answer that you're looking for and expecting is yes I think it is critically important not only because you might find that a head of state when performing is actually quite impressive all these with Lydia Morton it might be impressive for all the wrong reasons but because of another aspect of informal systems in Russia which Alona has described in her books repeatedly and which I have tried to emulate to my own which is the importance of personal relationships over institutional understandings and agreements which of course has its advantages and its disadvantages if you establish a personal rapport for example with Vladimir Putin this is a benefit but there is the downside that we see in Putin's repeated disappointment that that rapport cannot actually be leveraged into some positive advantage for Russia time it again we see the the one-to-one personal relationships being established and then the disappointment that actually that doesn't translate into the individuals that Putin has reached a relationship with being able to organize to influence their organizations or their countries be it Berlusconi or Barroso or possibly at this point Trump in each case the Democratic checks and balances and the fact that they are based on consensus and and rigid institutional policies means that you cannot have one single individual who's deterred they're acting policy so on the one hand yes it is a potential Avenue for exploring means of communicating directly with the Russian leadership on the other hand there need to be very careful bounds and parameters and management of expectation for what exactly can be achieved through that process in order that we do not have yet another disappointment for President Putin which confirms for him this suspicion that the West is conspiring against him and it is the deep state within each country that is preventing the elected leaders from actually having their way on the Western porous foreign policy failure since the end of the USSR you can point to individual moments when things went horribly wrong the the biggest misconception I think was the assumption and it was widespread and it was entirely forgivable and it happened in Russia as well that once the USSR ended Russia would actually seek to rejoin the the Western community of nations on the same terms as everybody else now that was a perfectly reasonable conclusion under the circumstances of the time but it overlooks and this comes to the second question as well it overlooks the fact that the drivers of Russian behavior whether it is international whether it's social whether its political go far far deeper and the Soviet Union was not an anomalous period in many ways in fact it it enshrined and preserved many of the enduring features of Russian life so there is a lot further to go to bringing Russia to what the West thinks of as a normal country then simply changing the flag temporarily changing the national anthem rewriting the Constitution a couple of times there's much more that needs to be done specifically on that question about the that the attitudes at 9/11 yes it's true Russia I think was entirely genuine in offering help support solidarity because let's not forget that throughout the preceding decade Russia had with some justification argued that it was standing alone against Islamist terrorism whereas countries like the UK were instead offering asylum and support to terrorists so there's that one of those rare moments when Russia sees actually now we're all on the same page because we do for once have a common threat and a common challenge the process by which that opportunity was squandered was long and complex and it wasn't all down to Western policy failures it was also of course the fundamental mismatch of both expected and demands on the world between Russia and the West it was inevitable that the the euphoria that love was not going to last for long however yes I agree with you that there were moments at which a better understanding of the true nature of Russia would have led to fewer policy mistakes and Cornelius question well yes Gorbachev and Yeltsin the early period broke the mold in many ways and one of the things that do we argue time and again is that when considering Russia's options we should not be looking at the last quarter century because that's the anomaly that's the part that stands out from history that's the part which is not typical of Russian behaviors but again one of the the things that I had not fully appreciated before doing the detailed research on the book despite having covered some of these events at the time it it took an effort of memory to recall that Russia's expansionist instincts during the Gorbachev and early Yeltsin periods were just as strong as they are today it's just that they did not have the means and the capability to realize them their instinct to try to regather the countries of the Soviet Union with in some sort of successor organization under recon under Russian control never really stopped we underestimate it because most of the time those efforts were so ineffective we really didn't notice but that doesn't mean that they weren't happening so yes the post Cold War period is is a departure from history for Russia but it has not been a departure from Russian persistent attitudes over time right we've got one question on the left one on the right and one in the middle and you raised your program here I think I would like to push you're optimist a bit more because you analyzed Russia but it's not just Russia we're dealing with it's also the West's own identity and understanding how the world works and you know at so many academic conference around Europe it is the autoimmune disease people academics arguing that the West caused the conflict so what makes you optimistic that your message on Russia is that there's not a degree of determinism in terms of actually how we interpret and Western ability to abandon this Fukuyama moment or legacy that we still live with thank you thank you Joseph Dutson a member here at Chatham House and so from III G which is an energy and climate change think-tank and Russian state revenues around 40 percent from oil and gas if you pose that against the fact that Europe is setting itself on path to potentially Net Zero by 2050 a big part of that is not weaning itself just off its own supplies of natural gas but also that that it imports from Russia and the EU is the largest customer for gasp Raman and vice versa in terms of supply so as that falls away potentially in the coming decades which it needs to to be climate compatible how will Russia respond both financially and with its own balancing its own economy and how will that affect Russia's political engagement not only with transit countries think of Ukraine and Poland but also just generally in terms of how it approaches Central Europe countries which are currently big clients very efforts its gas supplies and we already seeing that effect in terms of climate denialism and how its influencing these countries so how do you see that panning out in the coming decades hi James Richardson Oh from Russia my question kind of concerns accepting these are expansionist kind of ideas you were talking about on the part of Western leaders and maybe wanting to know whether that would we accept that Russia is going to try and be expansionist if we can engage with these desires on a political level if that can be a way of resolving giblet school struggles great so Kashia yes you you said you wanted to push my optimism but I wasn't quite sure in which direction you wanted to push it until until he got to the end of the question I have to say I despite the the impression I may mistakenly have given I'm not really an optimist and that includes in terms of the petty potential impact of this book I don't think we are going to divert from this repetitive cycle I don't think we are going to ever overcome the the suggestion that you referred to by Western academics that actually it is the West that is to blame for pushing Russia into these behaviors as opposed to it being something which has been consistent over centuries before anybody had even dreamed of NATO so I wouldn't like anybody to think that that I'm coming from this from the point of view of no now everything can be different that's that's not the case at all it will continue to be an uphill struggle and the the process of dealing with Russia will continue to be messy expensive and unpleasant in part due to Western policy mistakes that is something we're going to have to deal with no byproduct of that of course is that every time things go horribly wrong in Russia relationship it helps people like me pay the rent but that's that's not really a justification for hoping it continues like that I would like to think that there might eventually come a time when there is a stable relationship with Russia but the experience of the Cold War that I was referring to suggests - this takes decades if not generations with many mistakes along the way the yes Russia's economy and its reliance on on energy supplies and how it might respond when it realizes that that there is a strictly time limited source of revenue I think Russia is in a state of denial on many indicators that suggests that it is going to be a very very different country in a relatively short space of time and I'm talking as short as 20 or 30 years from now if you take one of the the biggest indicators have changed within Russia that has been brewing there already for several decades the demographic I was about to say crisis but the the demographic it's hard to think of a word that encompasses the biblical nature of the demographic collapse at the end of the Soviet Union and the way that is going to feed into every single way about how Russia defines itself as a state in a short period of time whether it is economically or socially or politically or possibly geographically as well and the economic challenges that Russia faces because it has not up until this point grasped the challenges and decided to tackle them are going to be just one aspect of that and I think it's a the the thrust of your question was how will Russia actually seek to address these challenges when it when they become critical because the the past performance indicates they're not going to be addressed before they are critical let's not forget this as a country which three times either two or three depending on how you count 1905 during the 20th century spent itself interstate collapse pursuing completely illusory state goals we already see some of these soft targets being taken on you you mentioned the the rearguard actions for example against energy independence the constant and insistent anti-fracking campaign for example trying to maintain those sources of revenue for Russia is it possible there be more damaging actions in the future as Russia sees its power declining past a critical point I think it's highly likely but that brings us on to the third question how exactly do we in time before that set the parameters for what Russia actually calculates for itself it can get away with in terms of damaging other countries because it doesn't matter whether 80 is an expansionist urge or whether it is defensive instincts that cause Russia to lash out that actually doesn't make any difference for those who are in the path of the blows and that includes primarily but not only the frontline states that you're referring to I think you put in a slightly more elegant way the the Mearsheimer argument that actually we should abandon these countries to Russia if for the sake of a better relationship with Russia which goes against not only all moral considerations but also the weight of historical evidence that when has it ever been the case that if you give Russia half the cake it's satisfied doesn't what the whole thing but also it's overlooks the fact that there are quite a few millions of people in those countries who might actually want to have their own say in the matter it goes to the root of the conflict that we see at the moment and that is Russia wishes to see these countries foreign and security policies constraint in order that they do not pose a challenge to the Russian way of making money and to the Russian way of proposed reflecting its own security the West at the same time thinks that these should be sovereign independent nations and that that is sacrosanct those two views are entirely incompatible and when we talk about the problem of NATO enlargement the problem is that NATO in the previous couple of decades made under moral choice without having to actually consider the practical implications because Russia at the time was not in a position to do anything about it now we're faced with the practical implications and people are proposing the choice of abandoning our morals and our values and the people in the countries in between for the sake of acquired life I can see the policy attractiveness of that as a moral choice I find it repellent we've got to cool that's for you then I'd like to go a little bit thank you very much John Aykroyd independent member Chatham House with regard to the confrontation question how much weight you put on the fact that Russia sometimes feels hemmed in by countries surrounding their borders and also the effect of NATO and you and the expansive nature of European Union thank you thank you for being so short good good please sir gentlemen all of you asked their questions quite sharply Thank You max Dubois hanger-on - a member of Chatham House sanctions what is their impact in the medium and long term and the person who invited him Dominic Cara - you talk about some of the European border states what about China because in the 70s obviously that was used by Nixon and Kissinger as a bulwark to Russia there was one more question there Steve Coony from Chatham House and more relevant to this discussion I worked for six years for Siemens and the question I have is what's your opinion on the strategy of the Nord Stream to project the usual suspects session okay well I will try to be risk as well NATO feeling after Russia feeling hemmed in and surrounded by NATO and EU fortunately we have a map here behind us because the the first recommendation to anybody that is suggesting that Russia is surrounded by NATO is to have a look at a map but the serious point is yes this is put forward as a justification to to Russia lashing out and defending itself NATO coming closer to Russia's borders and potentially not actually threatening its military security the EU coming closer to Russia's borders and as a result threatening the Russian way of making money because it brings market rules transparency rule of law etc everything that is inimical to how the Russian leadership and its business leadership works however again we have to look back further than the immediate period we're looking at today to understand what the Russian behaviors are and then we see Russia lashing out and conducting small Wars around its periphery without the excuse of NATO being anywhere nearby and without even the first thought of EU indulging an Eastern Partnership or anything else that threatens Russia it simply is not the case that Russia has ever needed NATO as an excuse to do what it does to its neighbours it simply has arrived at a convenient excuse now that NATO is ever so slightly closer sanctions in their impact well I have some highly intelligent far more numerous colleagues from Chatham House in the room who have written extensively about sanctions and the impact I'm particularly refer you to the the other output from the the Chatham House our EP Russia and Eurasia program who have written on this persuasively and at length the the bottom line that I would like to reduce is my assessment having looked at it as sanctions must be hurting otherwise Russia would not be putting so much effort into pretending that they're irrelevant all of the campaign's that we see to to laughs off sanctions which have been growing in intensity and pitch and volume recently I think if I found it on a realization that they if you can get people to believe that sanctions aren't working then they will be more willing to abandon them however the evidence is to the contrary no the sanctions were never supposed to be a quick fix or a quick means of inducing Russia to change its behavior instead they were a long considered and calculated process of adjusting Russia's calculus for how exactly it should behave itself in the future and to that extent just like deterrence we never know to what extent it's working we know for sure when it hasn't worked but sanctions overall I would suggest are far less ineffective and you will often hear media discussion suggesting so there's a question what about China I think that's probably a book that should be written at much much greater length than the one I've written here yes it Moscow rules the book is about how Russia sees the West as the primary determinant of how Russia defines itself how Russia deals with China is going to be far far more important for Russia's future as a country for Russia's existence as a country and half a century from now not actually what the book is about far more complicated topic and one which we we do need to study urgently because it is going to be critical to what happens in Moscow again in a relatively short time from now certainly within all of our lifetimes I think what Russia wants to avoid at the moment through keeping its friends close but its enemies as close as possible including China is the Finland ization of Russia by comparison with China to being an adjunct of China that in fact is not able to determine its own foreign and security policy for fear of offending its main market its main producer its main place for exporting energy its biggest threat along its longest border the China relationship will be critical but that's probably a subject for another seminar another day and finally Nordstrom - my views on Nordstrom - are completely uncontroversial I think it is a project which is entire political has no basis in economic reality whatsoever and is just one of the many ways in which Russia seeks to increase its leverage over its neighboring states by collaborating with whatever interests it can find in Europe to further its aims thank you we have one question here one mérida risky after this gentleman and then we need more questions from the back please good evening my name is Yasiin from JP Morgan and Alesi student in International Strategy and diplomacy looking in the future how do you see the Arctic playing out in the relationship between Russia and the West do you see it as a potential conflict or just coercion Mary - obscure journalist and I fit in all your stereotypes somebody who hasn't read your book who would answer your question what drives Russia to confront the West a lot of what the West has done but I'd like to pick up one phrase that you used you're talking about Russia today and about how Putin was less of a problem in a way than the Russia age old habits and then you said that what came after might actually not be quite to our heart's desire and that actually Russia was currently going through a period of what you called unprecedented liberalism I wondered whether you could maybe expand on that and say why you see Russia through as it were the all the traditional stereotypes going back way before the Cold War nonetheless you admit that the current climate is actually one of as you said unprecedented liberalism thank you that's all okay great will the Arctic be a problem between between Russia and the West almost certainly yes primarily because Russia has already said it will be it sees this as they as a domain of competition and it might take two to tango but it doesn't take two to start a geopolitical conflict so we have again to cast our minds a little bit further back than the the current focus on on the Arctic and see that Russia has been thinking about this for far longer than most other people they have been considering the implications of the the melting of the Arctic ice cap and they have been thinking of the Arctic as rightful compensation for the loss of Eastern Europe in other words even if you can't make a legal argument for ownership of all the mineral resources there you can at least make some kind of moral justification for grabbing it in the first place now put that in the context of Russian military thought leaders talking about the inevitability of resource conflict again in a very short space of time space of the coming couple of decades and that being a driving factor for why Russia is modernizing its military and again you have the situation that I think probably in part leads to the the release of the Russian nuclear target list in the United States just this week where Russia is sometimes a little bit disappointed that we don't notice all of the bellicose rhetoric and we don't notice all of the preparations for conflict and therefore has to rattle the cage a little bit more just at weather will actually pay attention and once again Accord Russia respect as a potentially dangerous military power even if that's not really how we define respect these days so yes the Arctic will be a problem yes it requires attention but we need to frame it again in the way that Moscow sees the problem as opposed to any post nationalist Western idea of cooperation Mary Dee I always enjoy your questions and I'm serious I do because let me let me roll back and explain that a little bit we we have regular sessions at Chatham House that they get together in a small format and discuss Russia and and what to do about it and Mary attends regularly it's very important she does because we we might think that we we operate in a shared space of assessing the same evidence and reaching the same conclusions from it but then we always need the the the conclusions that come from somewhere else and represent a different body of a different body of opinions what we might take for granted in this case yes I do say that this Russia is currently in a prison area of unprecedented liberalism and I do admit it as you say and I do say that this this is not like the Russian traditional stereotypes what I didn't quite grasp from the question is what's the contradiction there the yes Russia has always made a habit of imprisoning and murdering its citizens on a mass scale now it's not doing that now I do sympathise with those people who point to the individual targeted murders that are carried out by the Russian state and I do condemn them as unequivocally as anybody else but I do also point out that they are now the exception not the rule unlike any previous period in history you have to have done something particularly effective to annoy the Russian leadership or to cost it money in order to be murdered by the Russian state these days as opposed to being simply picked up off the street and dispatched to Siberia has would have been the case in any previous age so to reiterate I sympathize with those people who are deeply unhappy at Russia's drift towards authoritarianism and I am also concerned at the the apparent preparations for dealing with mass unrest in Russia particularly the the establishment of the Russian National Guard notionally internal security force but equipped for inflicting mass casualties on a huge scale on Russia's own population or indeed as part of its mission on the populations of newly occupied territories I hope and pray that they will not actually be called on to use those capabilities because if they are that represents a return the Russian historical norm which is very dark and very bloody indeed thank you can I ask something it sounds like you might agree with the fact that Russia is better in planes a game of confrontation with the West than the West sometimes worse but I think the defining factor is that Russia always senses that there is a confrontation Russia is aware that there is a problem even when the West collectively as a whole with honourable exceptions like the frontline states who are confronted with it is actually either not recognizing it or pretending that it doesn't exist I referred to to NATO's aspirations for strategic partnership earlier and this was at a time when it was already clear that the relationship was in serious trouble and yet it's thought that actually declaring that all this time is a way to to ameliorate the relationship that unfortunately is not the case and what I'm suggesting is instead a policy of slightly more honest appraisal of the differences between what Russia wants and what the West once you order that those differences on what to do about them can in fact be effectively communicated not just to Russia but also to the West's own publics to explain just what is going wrong thank you we do have four minutes remaining and we do have three questions could we collect them quickly and give care a chance to sum up okay I'm my name's where I cave him and I hope this isn't a stupid question I'm a bit concerned about the deterministic nature of your argument partly from personal experience and having lived in Russia in the 90s in the 2000s and it seemed there was a multitude of possible outcomes that could have happened and it doesn't seem to me entirely linear that we would have ended up in the situation we are second that the policies of what we're calling the Russian state seem to be so detrimental to the long-term future of Russia whether it's the high cost of capital and lack of investment or something like arresting my Kavi and shutting down smart money in high-tech investment which is supposed the future of Russia and I wanted to suggest is there an alternative explanation that you've considered that we're actually considering a special interest that the syllabic er a particular groups that have managed to see state power and as such they're really representing their own interests and things like Ukraine aren't actually trying to push the borders but trying to create a political distraction I could go on but I supposed to be sure a question but that's what I wanted to propose Thank You Vincent champion herb journalist and independent Chatham House member how do you contextualize Russia's enormous contribution to European culture over many centuries in terms of music art literature and so on and this ever-present conflict only Bach Bills of fod do you think the West missed a great opportunity to work a hand-in-hand with Russia but literally with the Syria crisis okay great there's no such thing as a stupid question plenty of stupid answers sometimes but am I being determinist I'm trying not to be is it possible that there may have been other outcomes from where Russia was going in the 1990s and 2000's you would like to think that yes however the the persistent Russian Asst of Russia prevailed over those other possible outcomes we saw the rien of those very persistent terms of behavior not only of Russian society but also of its governing elites and it is the governing elites in particular that go to the root of the second part of your question so many things that are being done that are detrimental to the long-term future of Russia but we need to distinguish between the long-term future of Russia and the long-term future of people who own Russia at the moment because one of the the patterns of behavior that we see returning again is managing or governing the country being more or less indistinguishable from owning it farming out the the country's resources it's wealth to people to manage and to curate and to enrich themselves in the process now those people are not necessarily going to be concerned with the long-term future of the country after they have died unlike people who actually want to curate the national interest and that I think is the the root of that distinction that you noted and you talked about the is it captured by the syllabic II I think it's far more complex than that but I've just been given a 90 second warning so maybe we'll talk afterwards European culture art literature from previous centuries yes where there has been a where it has been allowed to integrate with Russian culture with European culture it has flourished however let's not forget most of the time it hasn't this is a country that has repeatedly throughout history seen the spread of ideas and opinions and knowledge from abroad as so damaging that it has banned the import or possession of foreign books in much the same way that now Russia is now preparing and practicing to cut itself off from the internet so again we need to you said how do i contextualize it i contextualize it as isolated flashes of things going right for a change finally did we miss an opportunity to work with with Russia in Syria no because the end state that Russia wanted in Syria and the means by which Russia wanted to get there were again basically incompatible with anything that we find morally acceptable or practically implementable let's not forget that the template for how Russia wanted to pacify Syria was Grozny which in Russia is a success story flatten it kill everybody you can see install a feudal Overlord things are nice and peaceful that success is that really what we wanted in Syria a big Club and if you'd like to ask more questions care is going to be here signing his books thank you very much for coming tonight [Applause]

Channel: Chatham House

Views: 4,079

Rating: 4.2258062 out of 5

Keywords: youtube, russia, russia relations, the west, conflict

Id: BbE2NWUjSuE

Length: 60min 36sec (3636 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 26 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/communities]

The West opposing them for most of the last century certainly couldn't have anything to do with it (Russian Civil War, Cold War, etc.)