Текст книги "Implosion. The end of Russia and what it means for America"

Автор книги: Ilan Berman

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CHAPTER SEVEN

MISUNDERSTANDING THE MUSLIM WORLD

In October 2003, in a move that went mostly unnoticed in the West, Vladimir Putin traveled to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to attend the annual summit of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, known today as the Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC). Putin’s mission was clear. As he told the assembled delegates, “Russian Muslims are an inseparable, full-fledged, and active part of the multiethnic and multi-denominational nation of Russia.” ¹Accordingly, the Russian president said, his government should be granted observer status in the fifty-seven-nation bloc.

Although Russia’s request was denied at that time (it was granted in 2005), Putin’s voyage was nonetheless significant. It signaled a concrete recognition by the Kremlin that Russia is, or soon will be, an “Islamic state.” ²The fact that it was carried out despite significant opposition from entrenched elites in Moscow—from the siloviki, members of Russia’s security and armed forces whom Putin saw as his traditional power base, to the oligarchs that had grown rich from the country’s energy sector—made it all the more telling. ³

RUSSIA’S RETURN

It also represented a historic reversal. For much of the past century, Russia’s relationship with the Islamic world has been both complex and acrimonious. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union attempted to engage a variety of anti-Western regimes and actors in the Middle East, from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization. It had some success, mostly thanks to the efforts of Yevgeny Primakov, the wily spymaster who served as the KGB’s point man for the region during the 1970s and 1980s. ⁴But the Soviet Union’s atheist ideology, and its 1979 intervention in Afghanistan—an act that prompted the world’s first global jihad—made it a focal point of Muslim anger throughout much of the USSR’s later years.

The Soviet Union’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, and its subsequent dissolution, reconfigured Moscow’s relationship with the Muslim world, which was quick to embrace the five majority-Muslim republics of Central Asia. Russia, however, remained a problem, with the conflict in Chechnya drawing significant ire from Islamic states in the Russian Federation’s first years. During the same period, a pro-Western foreign policy (championed by then foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev) helped to relegate Russia to the sidelines of regional politics. ⁵

But beginning in the mid-1990s, the removal of Kozyrev, and his replacement with hard-line Arabist Yevgeny Primakov, reestablished Russia’s imperial and anti-Western approach to the region. “The world is moving toward a multipolar system,” Primakov explained to Rossiyskaya Gazeta, a Russian government daily, shortly after his installation as foreign minister. “In these conditions we must pursue a diversified course oriented toward development of relations with everyone . . . [and] we should not align ourselves with any particular pole.” ⁶For their part, more than a few Middle Eastern countries—increasingly discontented with Western policy—turned to Russia as a political balancer and alternative to America and Europe in the region. Moscow thus reverted to (mostly) Soviet behavior.

Over the past decade and a half, Russia has progressively assumed the role of balancer and pro-Arab broker in the long-running peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. This includes support for the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) participation in regional forums, including Arab League summits, ⁷as well as serving as a consistent backer of the PA’s bid for international recognition at the United Nations. ⁸Moscow has simultaneously pivoted toward support for the more radical elements of Palestinian politics, undermining Western diplomacy by unilaterally engaging with the Hamas movement. ⁹It has done so despite warnings by Russian experts that the Kremlin’s outreach to Palestinian radicals was at odds with its approach to the breakaway republic of Chechnya—and that this double standard could end up damaging Russia’s image in the eyes of moderate Muslims. ¹⁰

Russia also expanded its role as a key strategic partner and political enabler of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq—a relationship that continued until Saddam’s ouster by Coalition forces in 2003. At that time, oil and drilling contracts held by Russian companies were estimated to be worth nearly $44.1 billion. ¹¹Over the course of Saddam Hussein’s regime, half of Iraq’s arms came from Russia. So did shipments of electronic jamming equipment, night vision goggles, and anti-tank weapons, provided in violation of UN sanctions. ¹²

In 2003, a cache of captured documents revealed that Moscow was even sharing intelligence with, and providing training for, Iraq’s intelligence operatives. ¹³With Saddam’s removal, however, Moscow found itself progressively shouldered out of political developments in the former Ba’athist state. Its massive economic stake in Iraq—developed during the decades of Saddam’s rule—was largely nationalized by Iraqis who saw Russia as a foe because of its backing of the ancien régime. It took the Kremlin years to reestablish a commercial foothold in the country.

And today, Russia’s standing in the Muslim world has been progressively undermined by its strategic ties to two countries.

EMBRACING IRAN

In Moscow’s Mideast policy, no country matters more than Iran. Over the past three decades, Moscow and Tehran have formed a major partnership—one that so far has endured both September 11 and the expanding global crisis over Iran’s nuclear program.

The contemporary Russo-Iranian entente can be traced back to the collapse of the Soviet Union, which unleashed a wave of ethnic and religious separatism in Russia’s turbulent “southern rim” of Central Asia and the Caucasus and raised the prospect of Iranian interference there—something Moscow was eager to mitigate. Russia saw practical reasons for the partnership. Its defense industry had not weathered the post-Soviet transition well, and Iran—then emerging from a ruinous eight-year war with neighboring Iraq—promised to be a significant source of income for the battered Russian armaments sector. (One leading expert would later admit that Russia “should be grateful to Iran for having provided tens of thousands of Russian companies with 70 percent of their work.”) ¹⁴The resulting arrangement between Moscow and Tehran during the 1990s included a pledge of Russian sales of conventional arms (and later the sharing of nuclear know-how) to Iran in exchange for a tacit understanding that Tehran would steer clear of meddling in Russia’s near abroad.

Under the stewardship of Vladimir Putin, this partnership has strengthened yet further. In November 2000, in a public show of support for the Iranian regime, Russia officially abrogated the 1995 Gore-Chernomyrdin Agreement, under which Moscow had agreed to curtail new nuclear-related exports to the Islamic Republic. The importance of Russia’s ties with the Islamic Republic also became a feature of the foreign policy blueprint issued by the Russian Foreign Ministry that same year. ¹⁵

Despite the events of September 11 and the ensuing War on Terror, ties between Moscow and Tehran remain strong. Over the past several years, fears of a long-term Coalition presence in Eurasia (fanned by U.S. and allied activity in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Central Asia) have led Moscow and Tehran to begin discussions of a common political and security agenda for the post-Soviet space. ¹⁶Nuclear cooperation likewise continues, with Russian officials supporting Iran’s atomic effort in the face of mounting international concerns.

Yet this does not mean that Russia trusts Iran. Many Russian experts believe that the Islamic Republic could someday soon pose a real threat to their country. Officials like Andrei Kokoshin, the influential chairman of the Russian State Duma’s Defense Committee (and a former Russian National Security Advisor), and Alexei Arbatov, leader of Russia’s liberal “Yabloko” political faction, have publicly questioned the prudence of their country’s partnership with the Islamic Republic. ¹⁷So has Yevgeny Velikhov, the secretary of Russia’s Civic Chamber and the country’s top nuclear scientist. ¹⁸Indeed, today, the view that Iran cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons is increasingly common among officials in Moscow. ¹⁹

Yet cooperation with Iran’s ayatollahs continues to be seen as necessary, for both practical and strategic reasons. Officials in Moscow are wary of severing ties with an increasingly capable Islamic Republic, and emphasize the need to maintain good relations with neighboring states. ²⁰Indeed, Iran’s ability to stir up trouble on Russia’s periphery, or within Russia’s own restive Muslim regions, remains a real concern for policymakers in Moscow. ²¹As a result, Moscow has sought to keep the Iranian regime pacified—and peaceful—through economic and diplomatic outreach.

Trade with Iran also remains a boon to Russian industry. In the years after September 11, Russia’s vast energy sector—and the high world price of oil—helped fuel the country’s revival. Since the onset of the global financial crisis in late 2008, however, Russia’s economic fortunes have faded. Paradoxically, Iran’s nuclear program has provided a bit of assistance in this regard. Since Iran’s nuclear program broke into the open, there has been an explosion of interest in the atom in the greater Middle East, with at least fourteen countries in the Middle East and North Africa openly beginning to pursue some level of nuclear capability. ²²

Russia, the world’s leading exporter of nuclear technology, has capitalized on this trend, inking nuclear cooperation deals with a number of these nations, including Algeria and Jordan. ²³Russia’s conventional arms trade has benefited, too. Growing international concerns over Iran’s nuclear program has led to an upsurge in investments in arms and defenses in the already volatile Middle East. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, arms sales to the region rose by nearly 40 percent between 2004 and 2008, with Iran’s neighbors among the most active clients. ²⁴As a result, Russia’s arms industry is now in the midst of a major expansion in the Middle East. ²⁵In other words, Iran’s nuclear program has turned out to be very good for Russian business.

Strategically, meanwhile, Iran helps Russia to further a key geopolitical priority: continued hegemony over its near abroad. Officials in Moscow are deeply worried over the encroachment of the United States and its NATO partners into the post-Soviet space. These fears were made explicit by NATO’s formal declaration at its June 2004 Istanbul summit that it plans to expand its activism and involvement in Central Asia and the Caucasus, ²⁶and by the so-called color revolutions that have taken place throughout the post-Soviet space in recent years.

Iran provides a way out. A West preoccupied with containing and managing a crisis in the Middle East, the thinking goes, is far less likely to meddle in Russia’s traditional sphere of influence. The West likewise will be unable to seriously challenge Russian efforts to reassert its dominance over parts of the former Soviet Union, either politically (as in the case of Ukraine) or militarily (as in Georgia, for example). This, in turn, has reinforced Russian convictions about the prudence of cooperation with the Islamic Republic.

STANDING BY SYRIA

Russia’s second major regional partner is Syria. Relations between the two countries date back to the Soviet era, when the USSR saw Hafez al-Assad’s regime as its most durable and lucrative client state. Indeed, from his rise to power in 1971 until the early 1980s, Assad ran what scholars have termed “the most consistently pro-Soviet state in the Middle East,” ²⁷building a formidable arms and strategic dialogue with Moscow. (Thereafter, the outbreak of Syrian hostilities with Israel chilled its external relations, at least for a time.) A centerpiece of that partnership was a 1971 agreement to house the Soviet navy’s Mediterranean flotilla in the Syrian port city of Tartus. ²⁸The Syrian regime also became a major consumer of Soviet arms. By the end of the Soviet era, Syria’s debt to Moscow was estimated to have totaled a whopping $9 billion. ²⁹

Strategic ties survived the collapse of the USSR. In fact, after a brief weakening in the early Yeltsin years, they grew stronger, as Moscow came to see its partnership with Damascus as part of a counterweight to U.S. policy in the region. ³⁰This focus was reinforced in subsequent years by the Clinton administration’s repeated efforts to engage Syria as part of the Middle East peace process—efforts that the Kremlin vociferously opposed.

The 2000 death of Hafez al-Assad held out the promise of a Russo-Syrian divorce—and of a Syrian rapprochement with the region at large. But Bashar al-Assad, Hafez’s son and successor as president, chose to maintain the status quo. This included perpetuating Syria’s strategic relationship with Moscow. Between 2000 and 2010, Damascus acquired roughly $1.5 billion in arms from Russia, making Syria Moscow’s seventh-largest contemporary arms client. ³¹This was made possible in large part by a 2005 agreement that wrote off the bulk of Syria’s debt to Russia, providing some much-needed relief to the Syrian economy. ³²In exchange, Syria has continued to serve as a staunch ally of the Kremlin and to provide its navy with vital access to the Mediterranean.

The Russia-Syria relationship has deepened still further since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in March 2011. Moscow has greatly aided the brutal campaign of repression Assad is waging against his own people. It has continued to provide Damascus with critical arms and weaponry—matériel that has been used against the Syrian opposition. ³³Russia likewise has run interference for Syria at the UN Security Council, complicating international efforts to create a durable coalition by which to pressure the Assad regime to end the war. ³⁴And, despite mounting evidence of a fundamental rupture between Assad and his domestic opposition, Moscow consistently has sought a political solution that would preserve the Syrian strongman’s hold on power. ³⁵

ADRIFT IN THE ARAB SPRING

In late December 2010, a Tunisian street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi, frustrated over being prohibited by government functionaries from peddling his wares, set himself ablaze as a sign of public protest. The spark ignited a popular protest in the North African country, inciting demonstrations that forced the resignation of the country’s long-serving president, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, in January 2011. From there, the Arab Spring spread to Egypt. That month, popular protests erupted against the rule of Hosni Mubarak in Cairo, leading the Egyptian president to step down in February 2011 after roughly three weeks of street clashes and political disorder.

Like Western nations, Russia was caught off guard by the rapid changes taking place in the region and as a result hewed a cautious foreign policy line toward the political transformations taking place in Tunis and Cairo. ³⁶But the outbreak of unrest in another North African country, Libya, caused a significant rupture between Russia and the West.

There, the resilience of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime and the growing prospects of a civil war in the country progressively provoked discussion of Western intervention. The Russian government strongly opposed such a course of action, warning of its destabilizing potential. ³⁷Western nations nonetheless went ahead, and the eventual outcome, the ouster of Gaddafi’s regime and his death at the hands of rebel forces, infuriated Russian officials, who saw it as a violation of NATO’s supposed neutrality.

It was also a tangible economic blow, since Gaddafi’s Libya owed Russia some $4.5 billion in debt, which Moscow now appeared to have to write off. ³⁸Ongoing arms sales and infrastructure projects worth billions of dollars were also called into question, significantly increasing Russia’s potential losses. ³⁹Russia thus aggressively pursued and secured new arms contracts with Afghanistan and Oman, as well as countries outside the greater Middle East (such as Ghana and Tanzania). ⁴⁰

This policy, Russian officials argue, is both prudent and pragmatic. Since the outbreak of the Arab Spring, Islamist forces have been gaining momentum from Mali to Egypt. These changes, as seen from Moscow, threaten important Russian interests and allies in the Middle East. They also have the potential to represent a mortal threat to the Russian Federation itself, insofar as Islamist tendencies could further mobilize Russia’s already-restive Muslim minority. As a result, Moscow has pursued outreach as a way of “controlling through investments,” as one former Kremlin official puts it. ⁴¹

Yet Moscow’s approach has increasingly placed it on the wrong side of the Arab Spring—and of the Muslim world writ large. Moscow has become embroiled in a civil war that is taking place within Islam itself because its two principal Middle Eastern allies, Syria and Iran, are both Shi’a Muslim states (although the former only loosely so), while the rest of the Muslim world is overwhelmingly Sunni (who make up some 85 percent of the planet’s 1.57 billion Muslims). As a result, Russia is now pursuing what one official in Moscow says amounts to an “accidentally Shi’a” policy in the Mideast. ⁴²And in response, Russia’s regional image has plummeted precipitously.

Just how much was illustrated by the late 2012 announcement of Yusuf Qaradawi, a spiritual leader of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and arguably the most influential Sunni cleric alive, that “Moscow has become the enemy of Islam and of Muslims these days.” ⁴³Qaradawi’s comments augur ill for Russia’s standing in the Middle East, where its policies—although historically consistent—have begun to make Moscow a pariah among the countries of the Arab Spring. But they could easily also portend Russia’s future, particularly if the Kremlin’s Middle East policy becomes a rallying point for Russia’s own radicalizing Muslim masses, or if the narrative of Russia as an enemy of the Sunni world is exploited by Islamist forces seeking to mobilize them.

But the Middle East is not the only place where the Kremlin is losing ground. Despite crafting an ambitious strategy to emerge as an Asian nation in recent years, Russia now finds itself in retreat there as well.

CHAPTER EIGHT

IN RETREAT IN ASIA

In early 2012, the Obama administration went public with a major shift in defense and foreign policy focus. “U.S. economic and security interests are inextricably linked to developments in the arc extending from the Western Pacific and East Asia into the Indian Ocean region and South Asia, creating a mix of evolving challenges and opportunities,” the policy planning document unveiled by then Defense Secretary Leon Panetta noted. “Accordingly, while the U.S. military will continue to contribute to security globally, we will of necessity rebalance toward the Asia-Pacific region.” ¹Since then, the so-called “pivot” to Asia has consumed American strategic priorities on many levels.

But the United States is hardly the only nation to have fixed its attention on the Asia-Pacific of late. A number of other countries have begun similar turns to the East. The list includes the Islamic Republic of Iran, which views Asia as an economic and strategic lifeline in the face of mounting Western sanctions over its nuclear program. ²But Russia also ranks high on the list of Asian aspirants. Since at least mid-2010, the Kremlin has made a similar shift to the East a major focus of its own foreign policy.

WHY THE KREMLIN COVETS ASIA

It has done so for practical reasons. The instability that accompanied the 2008 global economic downturn has made Europe, Russia’s traditional trading partner and arena for commerce, less lucrative and attractive than it once was for Moscow. The Asia-Pacific, Russian policymakers contend, has replaced Europe as the engine of global economic growth. Thus the region is valuable to Russia because it houses “[new] markets for energy, raw materials, technology, [and the potential for] new areas of bilateral and international cooperation.” ³

Asia, moreover, is increasingly seen in Russia as a safer investment bet than is Europe. “Asian countries are . . . leaders in terms of gross savings, which actually determine an economy’s investment potential,” a July 2012 study by the influential Valdai Discussion Club points out. “China is far ahead of others here (20.7%). Other Asian countries included in the top ten are Japan (3rd), India (5th) and South Korea (10th). These four countries together account for 34.5% of global savings.” ⁴

Russia’s interest in Asia has been reinforced by Moscow’s increasingly problematic relationships with Europe. Over the past decade, energy diplomacy and extensive business interests have significantly broadened Russia’s stake in the EU, and vice versa. But political ties between Moscow and European capitals remain fraught. They were only made worse by European disappointment over Vladimir Putin’s return to the Russian presidency after what many in Europe had hoped would be a period of liberalization during the tenure of his protégé, Dmitry Medvedev. ⁵(More recently, the economic turmoil that has proliferated in places such as Greece and Cyprus, where Russia’s oligarchs maintain considerable assets and interests, has convinced more than a few Russian policymakers that their high degree of investment in Europe constitutes a distinct liability.) ⁶

Strategic problems also abound. Russia today has rising conflicts with the West on a wide array of issues. Foremost among these is missile defense. Russia has vociferously opposed NATO plans to erect a Europe-wide anti-missile capability to defend against rogue state ballistic missile threats (such as the one from Iran). It has rejected Western assurances that the shield is not meant to neutralize the Russian Federation’s strategic arsenal and has attempted to use the issue to divide Europe and the United States. “Progress toward genuine partnership between Russia and the North Atlantic alliance is still being hampered by attempts to exploit the Soviet threat idea, which has turned into the Russian threat idea now,” Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov told audience members at the forty-ninth Munich Security Conference in February 2013. “Even during a shortage of financial resources, we can see increasing military activities in the north and the center of Europe, as if threats to security were growing in these regions.” ⁷

This acrimony has persisted despite the efforts of European capitals and the White House to alleviate Moscow’s mistrust. Even the Obama administration’s March 2013 announcement that it plans to table the fourth phase of its European Phased Adaptive Approach—on which the NATO shield depends—due to budgetary considerations appears to have done little to mollify the Kremlin. ⁸

These disagreements and a host of others—over Moscow’s continued support for the Assad regime in Syria, its continued military presence in Georgia, and the country’s deepening domestic drift toward authoritarianism—have led Europe to increasingly rebuff Russia’s diplomatic and commercial advances. ⁹In response, Russia has sought to distance itself from Europe in favor of greener economic and political pastures in Asia.

All politics is ultimately local, however, and Russia’s shift toward Asia has a distinctly domestic component as well. Some two-thirds of Russian territory is located in Asia, making a tilt toward the East intuitive (if not necessarily politically desirable among many in “European Russia”). Russian officials, moreover, increasingly have focused on the Far East as a gateway to global prominence. “The main potential for Russia becoming an Asia-Pacific power lies within its own boundaries,” a recent Valdai Club study notes—to wit, the massive expanses of arable land and abundant renewable resources (such as lumber and water) available in Siberia and the Far East. ¹⁰Indeed, the report concludes, “[i]t would be no exaggeration to say that Russia’s regions east of the Urals and in the Far East are the last ‘virgin lands,’ one of the few regions left in the world fit for arable farming that are still a long way off being fully exploited agriculturally.” ¹¹

This potential, the thinking goes, has the ability to make Russia indispensable to the countries of the Asia-Pacific and a global player in a new arena.

AMBITIONS, NOT STRATEGY

Yet, beyond the atmospherics, Russia’s turn toward the region is still mostly notional. A “long-term and comprehensive Asian strategy is yet to be devised,” Sergei Karaganov, one of Russia’s preeminent political scientists, has admitted. ¹²Privately, senior Russian diplomats share that view and see the Putin government’s push into Asia as a political “exaggeration.” ¹³

However intuitive Russia’s entry into Asia might be, such a step is far from assured. Russia has made some inroads into the region in recent years. At a 2010 bilateral summit, for example, South Korea pledged to significantly increase its imports of Russian natural gas, and Seoul’s state-owned Kogas has since proposed the construction of three pilot liquefied natural gas plants in Russia’s region of Primorski Krai and on Sakhalin Island. ¹⁴Two years later, Russian state-controlled gas conglomerate Gazprom inked a notional deal with the Japanese government to build a $13 billion natural gas terminal in the Russian Far East city of Vladivostok as part of the Kremlin’s efforts to expand energy sales to Asia. ¹⁵Russia even has begun to explore expanded ties to Myanmar (formerly known as Burma); in 2007, the two countries agreed in principle to the Russian construction of a light water nuclear reactor on Burmese soil, and Burmese nuclear scientists are rumored to have been trained at Russia’s nuclear institutes for more than a decade, ¹⁶although concrete steps toward a real strategic relationship have yet to truly materialize.

In the main, however, Russia’s regional footprint can still be considered small. “[B]y degree of involvement in the Asia-Pacific economy Russia is second lowest among APEC countries—only ahead of Papua-New Guinea,” note Timofei Bordachev of Russia’s National Research University and Oleg Barabanov of Moscow State University. “The Russian Far East is virtually absent from the economic map of the region. The other Asia-Pacific countries see no need to turn to Moscow for a discussion of various free trade zone projects.” ¹⁷

This is true institutionally as well. With the exception of APEC, Moscow exhibits a comparatively modest diplomatic presence in the region. It participated in the East Asia Summit as an observer nation at the bloc’s first meeting in 2005 but didn’t receive full membership until comparatively recently—in 2011. Russia and the Association of South East Asian Nations, meanwhile, have had a formal diplomatic dialogue since the mid-1990s, yet robust trade and strategic ties are still lacking. ¹⁸In other words, Russia, for all of its efforts, is still very much a newcomer in the region.

Politically, too, Russian policymakers lack a comprehensive approach to Asia. Rather, Russia has promoted the idea of what its Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov has termed “network diplomacy.” Russia seeks “an extended partnership network” in the region, Ivanov told the 2011 Shangri-La conference in Singapore: one that relies on Asia’s “existing structures and forums.” ¹⁹

Russia’s Asia policy is also impeded by a series of disputes—chief among them its long-standing and acrimonious tug-of-war with Japan over the Kuril Islands. The island chain has served as a source of tension between Russia and Japan for more than 150 years, with sovereignty changing hands between the two countries repeatedly (in 1855, 1875, and again in 1905). During World War II, the Soviet Union and Japan found themselves on opposite sides of the conflict. In the final days of the war, the USSR occupied the islands (as well as the territory of Sakhalin), and Japan subsequently ceded its rights to all but four of the islands (which Tokyo asserted were part of Japan proper). In 1956, a joint declaration between the two countries suspended the conflict and solidified Japanese sovereignty over two of the four. Competing claims over the remaining two islands, however, prevented the codification of a formal treaty. ²⁰

So the situation has remained. To date, Moscow and Tokyo have yet to sign an agreement ending their dispute over the islands. To the contrary, both countries have steadily hardened their positions, damaging bilateral relations in the process. Over the past half-decade, the dispute has become much more serious. In 2009, the Japanese parliament adopted a law declaring the islands to be national territory, unjustly usurped by Russia. The Kremlin responded by orchestrating a state visit by then President Dmitry Medvedev to the Kurils, leading Japan to recall its envoy to Moscow. ²¹Russia has since mapped out an ambitious development program for the islands, partnering with China to create a common investment fund for the area that’s worth $4 billion. ²²

The conflict is about more than mere territory. A lucrative fishing industry and prospective underwater oil deposits make the islands desirable for both countries. Their proximity to the Japanese mainland, moreover, makes the Kurils an important geostrategic outpost for Russia. The dispute has taken a toll on diplomatic relations between Tokyo and Moscow and has hampered serious Japanese investment in Russia’s Far East—at least so far.

These factors have caused Russia to pursue a reactive policy in the region—one driven by self-interest and ignorance of regional realities. Moscow’s goal in Asia, as elsewhere, is to balance American power and to expand its own room for regional political and economic maneuver under the banner of “multilateralism.” ²³