Has Russia Been Shunned by the World?

How isolated is Vlad? As the West has been fighting aggression by using financial warfare-- without very much of a sense of the repercussions-- other nations in other parts of the world have not been shunning Russia.

Putin and his henchmen may be persona non grata in America and Western Europe, but they are not being rejected across the world. Fair enough, Russia has been frozen out of the world economy, and this is causing some considerable hardship, but we will refrain from concluding that this has brought down the tyrant. In truth, without Russian supplies, of energy, raw materials and grain… the world economy will be in very big trouble.

More on that another day.

For now, we remark, following a Wall Street Journal report, that nations in the Middle East, from Israel to Saudi Arabia to the United Arab Emirates are not joining the chorus denouncing Russia. The same is true of Asian nations, from China and India to Indonesia.

The reasons are complex, and have been obscured by the fog of war.

In some considerable part Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have been alienated from America by the Biden administration’s ineptitude. Surely, the Biden administration’s efforts to rescue the regime in Tehran and to allow them to wreak havoc throughout the Middle East has not improved the prospects for diplomacy. 

Saudi Arabia and the Emirates have other concerns. According to the Journal:

U.S. efforts to sway Riyadh have been complicated by the fraught relations between President Biden and Prince Mohammed, known as MBS, who has been shunned by the U.S. president for his role in the death of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.

“The fact that Biden refuses to acknowledge MBS as the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia makes the decision easier for MBS to take the side of Putin, who, despite some hiccups, has been closer to him,” said a Saudi adviser.

It’s cold comfort to know that the Biden team has been working to clean up the mess that it created, but such is the case:

The Biden administration has been working to rebuild relations with Saudis, sending high level delegations to Riyadh and arranging a Feb. 24 call between Mr. Biden and Saudi Arabia’s King Salman, the U.S. official said.

The Biden team also messed up relations with the Emirates by removing the Houthi rebels in Yemen from the terrorist list, the better to suck up to Iran. Said rebels have been shooting missiles into the Emirates, which does not endear its leaders to Joe Biden. 

The administration’s relations with the U.A.E. have seemed even frostier, highlighted by the Emirati abstention from a U.N. Security Council vote condemning Moscow’s invasion, despite direct appeals from U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

“We believe that alignment and positioning will only lead to more violence,” Anwar Gargash, a U.A.E. presidential adviser in a tweet on Sunday. “In the Ukrainian crisis, our priorities are to encourage all parties to adopt diplomacy and negotiate to find a political settlement that ends this crisis.”

Abu Dhabi’s decision to not back the resolution also appeared linked to its effort to win Moscow’s backing for a separate U.N. resolution condemning missile and drone attacks against the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia by Houthi rebels in Yemen.

The story has also made its way to the pages of the New York Times. The Times suggests that the current conflict in Ukraine has pitted the forces of democracy against the forces of authoritarianism. It is not alone in doing so.

If one were feeling cynical, one might say that it’s the boys against the girls. Or better, that it’s the hard power of warfare against the soft power of punishing sanctions. One understands that the greened West has been embracing weakness as a political strategy, and thereby has invited Russian aggression.

So, whose side do you want to be on? That of the boys or that of the girls.

Be that as it may the Times report suggests that Russia has more than a few friends left in the world:

Generals in Myanmar have called Russia’s actions “the right thing to do.” India abstained from a United Nations Security Council resolution to condemn the attack. China has refused to call the assault on Ukraine an invasion. And in Vietnam, Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, is being affectionately referred to as “Uncle Putin.”

While most American allies in the region have fallen in line, authoritarian governments and those with weaker ties to the West have been more reluctant to act on the conflict in Ukraine. Across the Asia-Pacific, only Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Australia have agreed to international sanctions against Moscow. Taiwan, the self-governed territory that China claims as its own, has also agreed to sanctions and voiced support for Ukraine.

The uneven response is unlikely to counterbalance the onslaught of Western anger, but it could test the limits of President Biden’s pledge to make Mr. Putin a “pariah on the international stage.”

Russia’s influence in Asia is minimal compared with that of the United States, though it has grown in recent years, with a particular focus on arms sales. Already, the economic ministry in Moscow announced last Friday that it would seek to expand economic and trade ties with Asia to help offset Western sanctions.

“I don’t think we will shun Russia,” said Bilahari Kausikan, Singapore’s former ambassador to Russia. “It is still a big country and is a nuclear weapons state.” It is also a permanent member of the Security Council, a status that is unlikely to change, Mr. Kausikan said.

And also:

“Indonesia does not see Russia as a threat to global politics or as a foe,” said Dinna Prapto Raharja, an associate professor in international relations at Bina Nusantara University in Jakarta. “Unilateral sanctions limit the chance for negotiation and heightens the sense of insecurity to the affected countries,” she added.

Last Thursday, Teuku Faizasyah, a spokesman for Indonesia’s Foreign Ministry, suggested that the country had no intention of imposing sanctions against Moscow, arguing it would “not blindly follow the steps taken by another country.”

Of course, the issue in Asia must be China. I suspect, without possessing any insider information, that if China’s president had not given Putin the green light, none of this would have been happening. We have been denouncing China for genocide and for systematic oppression, but then we cannot figure out why, when the Biden administration asked China to prevail on Russia not to invade, the Chinese passed on the intelligence to Russia. Actions have consequences, even self-righteous rhetorical actions.

Countries in the region might very well see China as the future and decadent America as the past. As I suggested, the boys versus the girls.

And then there is Russian ally, India:

In India, Moscow has been seen as a reliable military partner for decades. New Delhi is the world’s second-largest importer of Russian arms, which account for about half of its military supplies. When Mr. Putin visited New Delhi late last year, Russia detailed the sale of a $5.4 billion missile defense system to the country.

India has been careful not to condemn Russia over Ukraine and upset a time-tested friendship at a moment when China is threatening to encroach on its northeastern border. Moscow repeatedly used its veto power at the Security Council to block resolutions critical of India over Kashmir, a disputed territory India shares with Pakistan. In return, India abstained from a U.N. resolution condemning Moscow over its annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Indian officials said last week that they may even help Russia find workarounds for the new sanctions by setting up rupee accounts to continue trade with Moscow, similar to what it did after the annexation of Crimea.

To expand on the point Gerald Seib, of the Wall Street Journal, assessed the reactions of India and China to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

China and India, the world’s two most populous countries, are squirming yet not united with the West in isolating Russia. Potentially, they could provide a critical lifeline. Increasingly, a key question for Mr. Putin and his economy is going to be where they land.

Will they be a lifeline that saves Russia from the financial warfare the West has unleashed?

Both countries abstained on a United Nations resolution condemning the Russian invasion. That seems particularly galling, coming after decades of lectures directed to the West from both China and India about the need to honor nations’ sovereignty and territorial integrity. It’s hard to imagine an action more in violation of those principles than the drive into Ukraine.

Seib offers the views of Harvard professor and expert in all things Chinese, one Graham Allison. He remarks, sagely, that Russia and China have been thrown together by American rhetoric demonizing them equally. One likes to imagine that threatening the reputation of world leaders is an innocent exercise in free speech. Unfortunately, such actions often have dire consequences. Threaten the face of such leaders and you might have to pay a price:

Mr. Allison argues that the Chinese leader has “defied political gravity” by building a strong bond with the leader of Russia, with which relations had previously been tense and even confrontational. “This has been done largely by the art of Xi, and by us demonizing both of them,” he says. China and Russia, Mr. Allison says, are constructing what the late strategic thinker Zbigniew Brzezinski feared they might: a coalition in which they are united by shared grievances against the U.S.

China is being cagey and subtle in its diplomacy, suggesting that it wants to be a world leader:

This doesn’t mean China will publicly endorse the invasion. “The Chinese will wiggle and stumble where they can because this is an unambiguous, gross violation of their principles for the international order,” Mr. Allison says.

But beyond the public ambivalence, he believes, China will provide Mr. Putin economic relief: “Every bit of gas he doesn’t sell to Europe the Chinese will buy.” Beijing might provide help for a Russian tech sector cut off from the West. Beyond that, the Chinese probably figure they benefit from a prolonged U.S.-Russian confrontation because American military resources are diverted away from Asia and toward Europe.

For the record, Robert Gates disagrees:

Still, Robert Gates, former CIA director and defense secretary, isn’t so sure. He thinks Mr. Xi may have been unpleasantly surprised by how far Mr. Putin has gone in Ukraine, and is unhappy about that. “He wanted a calm 2022” for his Olympics and a coming Communist Party congress where he will win another term, says Mr. Gates. “I think this is a disruption and a unification of the West that he didn’t want.”

Seib concludes that Putin is certainly not as isolated as we like to imagine:

So yes, Mr. Putin faces a united economic backlash from the West. But he also knows the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would act to directly help Ukraine militarily only by unanimous consent, which isn’t happening. And he knows two countries containing a third of the world’s population aren’t signing up for the economic war against him. Perhaps he doesn’t feel as isolated as some think.