Russia’s Grand Strategy — House of Commons, 2022-01-06
Topic: International Affairs
Bernard Christison Jenkin (Conservative, Centre-right): I beg to move, That this House has considered Russia’s grand strategy Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for safeguarding a touch more than the three hours that we were promised for this most important debate. I am very grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for providing time for it at this most crucial moment, with developments in Ukraine and elsewhere The term "grand strategy" may seem something of a relic from previous centuries, and one that became irrelevant with the end of the cold war, but to think so would be to ignore what is happening in today’s world. There are many Governments around the world today who practise grand strategy, but sadly very few are allies of the west. Most are despotic regimes that are constantly challenging the rules-based international order on which western security and the global trading system depend. The most immediately threatening of such powers is, undoubtedly, Russia Today’s Russia has inherited an admirably precise and uniformly understood meaning of the term "strategy". "Politika", meaning policy, stands at the top of a hierarchy of terms and describes the goal to be achieved; "strategiya" describes how the goal is to be achieved. Military strategy is merely a subset of global, national or grand strategy So what is the goal behind Russia’s grand strategy? Putin’s goal is nothing less than to demonstrate the end of US global hegemony and establish Russia on an equal footing with the US; to change Russia’s status within Europe and become the pre-eminent power; to put Russia in a position to permanently influence Europe and drive a wedge between Europe and the USA; and to re-establish Russia’s de facto control over as much of the former Soviet Union and its sphere of influence as possible. As the strategy succeeds, Putin also intends to leverage China’s power and influence in Russia’s own interests. China, incidentally, will be watching how we defend Ukraine as it considers its options for Taiwan On 17 December, the Russian Foreign Ministry unveiled the texts of two proposed new treaties: a US-Russia treaty and a NATO-Russia treaty. Moscow’s purported objective is to obtain "legal security guarantees from the United States and NATO" Moscow has requested that the United States and its NATO allies meet the Russian demands without delay This is, in fact, a Russian ultimatum. Putin is demanding that the US and NATO should agree that NATO will never again admit new members, even such neutral countries as Sweden, Finland and Austria, which have always been in the western zone of influence; that NATO should be forbidden from having any military presence in the former Warsaw pact countries that have already joined NATO; and that the US should withdraw all its nuclear forces from Europe, meaning that the only missiles threatening European cities would be Russian ones. The ultimatum is premised on a fundamental lie, which Putin has promulgated since he attended the Bucharest NATO summit in 2008 as an invited guest. That lie is that NATO represents a threat to Russian national security As Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov explained: "The two texts are not written according to the principle of a menu, where you can choose one or the other, they complement each other and should be considered as a whole." He described the NATO-Russia text as a kind of parallel guarantee, because "the Russian Foreign Ministry is fully aware that the White House may not meet its obligations, and therefore there is a separate draft treaty for NATO countries." Putin’s intention is to bind NATO through the United States, and bind the United States through NATO. There is nothing to negotiate; they just have to accept everything as a whole Russian media are already triumphant, proclaiming: "The world before, and the world after, December 17, 2021 are completely different worlds… If until now the United States held the whole world at gunpoint, now it finds itself under the threat of Russian military forces. A new era is opening".