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Domestic Politics as the Driver and the Limitation to Statecraft

2021; National Bureau of Asian Research; Volume: 16; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/asp.2021.0049

1559-2960

Marcin Kaczmarski,

International Relations and Foreign Policy

Domestic Politics as the Driver and the Limitation to Statecraft Marcin Kaczmarski (bio) Russia and China have been "fellow travelers" in the emerging post-U.S. global order. The worldviews of their ruling elites have grown closer over the last decade, fueled by the processes of power centralization. Regime survival remains the top concern in both the Kremlin and the Zhongnanhai. Russia's and China's actions often mirror each other, creating the impression of coordination, as in the case of military pressure placed simultaneously on Ukraine and Taiwan. The trial and sentencing of Russian key opposition figure Alexei Navalny along with the crackdown on his supporters coincided with China's introduction of the National Security Law in Hong Kong and an effective liquidation of the city's autonomy. Under such conditions, scholars and policymakers alike have unsurprisingly directed greater attention toward Moscow and Beijing. Still, China's and Russia's ultimate destinies in the international order appear to differ. The two books discussed here, Russia Resurrected: Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order by Kathryn Stoner and Orchestration: China's Economic Statecraft Across Asia and Europe by James Reilly, clearly indicate that Moscow and Beijing perceive their respective roles and places in international politics through different lenses. The two states also deploy their influence in distinctive manners: one focuses on translating wealth into power, the other on amassing power with limited wealth. Questions such as what constitutes power, how states exercise power at their disposal abroad, and how this power is linked to domestic political and economic arrangements are at the heart of both books. Stoner and Reilly reject the eternally popular metaphor of great powers as billiard balls defined by their material resources and acting rationally and strategically in the international realm. Instead, both authors strive to nuance popular understanding of state action and geopolitical and geoeconomic statecraft. Exploring the relationship between the domestic political-economic context on the one hand and engagement with the external world on the other, the two books delve into the limitations of successful statecraft and the obstacles encountered by states trying to convert their resources into influence. [End Page 218] Stoner's first principal argument concentrates on the power at the Kremlin's disposal. She challenges a widespread belief that Russia has been a "power in decline" for the last three decades. Instead, she argues, Russia has managed to rebuild a substantial part of its power projection portfolio (Stoner, p. 235). This resurgence did not take place as part of a retrenchment strategy; on the contrary, Moscow "resurrected" itself against the backdrop of U.S. and European sanctions imposed after the 2014 annexation of Crimea. Stoner vows to pay much more attention not only to assets of the Russian leadership but also to the leadership's "desire and ability" to use those assets for foreign and domestic policies purposes (Stoner, p. 236). Even if the Kremlin's assets are limited and incomparable in scale to those of the United States, China, or (economically) the European Union, its current leadership shows determination to translate latent power into instruments of influence. The question that remains relates to the long-term strategic aims of Russian leadership (assuming that such aims exist). Despite rebuilding its influence in the neighborhood and employing a full repertoire of foreign policy instruments, Russia has neither managed to reverse the pro-Western orientation of Ukraine or Georgia nor prevent the rise of China's influence both in Central Asia and in other parts of the post-Soviet space (Stoner, pp. 67–68). It is Beijing's self-restraint more than anything that explains cooperative relations between Russia and China in their shared Eurasian neighborhood. In the second part of the book, Stoner links Russia's assertive policy, especially since Vladimir Putin's return to the presidency in 2012, with the ruling regime's search for a new source of domestic legitimacy. While Russia's foreign policy is often interpreted as a poster child of the realist tradition of international relations theory, Stoner persuasively argues that domestic political considerations are at least as important in driving Moscow's engagement with the external world. Assertive foreign policy has become the means...