Not long ago, American power and beliefs appeared unchallenged in the world. The Soviet Union was gone, generals in developing nations were heading back to the barracks, and democracy was everywhere on the rise. We had, in the famous words, reached the end of history. Open economic and political systems were the only viable systems and all others were vanishing or doomed to soon follow. More recently, uprisings across the Middle East seemed to confirm that a new democratic tide was at hand.
That vision was fleeting. China, under authoritarian leadership, will soon be the largest economy in the world. Russia, after a brief period of democracy and drift, is reasserting its identity as a rival to the West. Saudi Arabia, irritated by the US’s support for democracy in the Middle East and opening to Iran, is moving away from their alliance dating back to the parley between Franklin Roosevelt and King Abdul Aziz aboard an American cruiser in the Suez Canal.
Each power in this emerging triad faces regional security dangers. Russia sees NATO expansion in its direction through the lens of its painful history. China wishes to reduce the American military presence along its periphery and establish its own hegemony there. Saudi Arabia faces threats from the Shia states of Iran and Iraq.
This triad also opposes democracy – stifling it at home, rolling it back where desirable, building ties with like-minded governments, and using foreign policy successes to strengthen their legitimacy at home. Security dangers may be overstated owing to political cultures – and more so as a way of enhancing state power and weakening domestic calls for reform.
Mixing geopolitical ambition and political affinities, the powers will oppose American hegemony around the globe and force Washington to increase its military expenditures, testing the American public’s commitment to globalism. The Eurasian powers will try to make the Eurasian land mass the dominant region that geographers such as Halford Mackinder foresaw and that Russian ultra-nationalists such as Nikolai Danilevski advocated.
There is little likelihood that this triad will always act as one or seek global mastery, though that concern will grow along their peripheries and in the US. Its goals are counterbalancing western power especially along their peripheries, retaining authoritarian rule at home and among key allies, and competing for influence in commodity-rich countries around the world. Its import for world affairs will be considerable.
Authoritarian traditions
Each country’s conservatism draws from different sources. Russian political culture has long admired powerful leaders such as Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Nicholas I, and Joseph Stalin – men who ruled autocratically, defended the nation, and brought national greatness. The absence of a firm hand in the Kremlin is associated with weakness, treason among privileged groups, internal upheavals, and devastating foreign invasions. Tellingly, Vladimir Putin has recently suggested that Volgograd may revert to its former name – Stalingrad, the site of the immense battle in the Great Patriotic War.
China’s ruling elite sees itself as the proper guardians of national affairs. They deem the populace as too numerous and too provincial to share in governance. The rulers pride themselves, and justify their preeminence, by having ousted imperialist meddlers and domestic warlords and turned a backward and vulnerable country into a powerful industrializing giant in only a few decades. Leaders are about to restore their country to its historical position in world affairs – economic, cultural, and military. The prospect binds state and people for the foreseeable future and renders internal calls for democracy into weak echoes of voices from distant, hostile shores.
Saudi Arabia, a country formed by the intersection of a warrior band and immense oil deposits, has no long national history. Outside of defeating the Rashidi and Hashemite clans after World War One, it has no military victories, which historically are the soundest bases of legitimacy. The House of Saud presents itself to its subjects and fellow Sunnis as guardians of the holy sites of Medina and Mecca and defenders of the faith from Shia apostates. Saudi wealth and munificence are not geophysical happenstance; they are signs of divine favor and mission.
The Eurasian triad sees grievous faults in democratic processes and do not want to see them play out in their own countries. This will preserve their rule, ensure national security, and in their view, govern their people in the best manner. Politically, democracy leads to dangerous divisions and often enough brings inexperienced, clumsy, and vainglorious politicians to high office. Economically, democracy has brought on burdensome national debt as myopic leaders accede to popular demands regardless of longterm consequences. Socially, it leads to the erosion of traditional norms and the rise of decadence, immorality, selfishness, crime, and anomie. Martial values and nationalism wane tremendously in democracies, replaced by a hyper-individualism inconsistent with a coherent society and state. These flaws in rival states present opportunities for the new big three.
Resources
The triad of Russia, China, and Saudi Aabia has formidable resources to use in world affairs. It scarcely needs noting that Russia and Saudi Arabia are two of the three leading oil producers in the world. China is fourth, but, like the US, is a net importer. Owing to American production increases and declining demand, the triad’s ability to influence world prices will be highly limited in coming years. However, Moscow and Riyadh can reward supporters around the world with price subsidies and punish vulnerable opponents with price hikes or cutoffs.
Russia and China have large, well trained, and well equipped armies and navies. Each has developed, deployed, and exported ship-killing cruise missiles with which it can check the US navy’s ability to operate near its coastal waters and those of key allies. (The US navy admits having no adequate defense against the more sophisticated of these missiles.) Further, China has purchased three aircraft carriers from Russia and a fourth from Australia. It is also developing a ballistic missile capable of striking enemy carriers at distances far greater than those of cruise missiles, though hitting moving targets with ballistic missiles is a daunting challenge. Russia and China design and manufacture an array of weapons, including assault rifles, armored vehicles, fighters, Manpads, and communication gear. Like oil, arms sales are an effective way to influence nations, especially those embargoed by western democracies.
The twin-fold Saudi military – a national army and tribal guard units – is well-equipped but of dubious effectiveness. It did not perform well during the Mecca revolt of 1979 or in the 1991 Gulf War, and it is geared at least as much toward internal security as foreign threats. Its officer corps comprises too many men whose ascendance was based on personal connections rather than on professional accomplishment. It does have – courtesy of American engineering firms – attractive naval and air bases which could be used by new allies should the Saudi-American breach widen in coming years.
Each power in the triad has useful allies. Russia has considerable influence to its west in the former Soviet republic Belarus, though most countries in Eastern Europe mistrust Russia – all the more so as it is fragmenting Ukraine and perhaps preparing to do elsewhere. However, along its resource-rich southern periphery Moscow enjoys cordial ties with Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan where governments are in the hands of former communist party officials whose attitudes toward democracy coincide with Moscow’s. Kyrgyzstan, at Moscow’s urging, recently closed off the Manas airbase to US use, further isolating American forces in Afghanistan and limiting future US influence in Central Asia.
China is less favorably situated. It’s surrounded by S Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, and India whose wariness could turn to hostility and whose individual passivity could become concerted action. In East Asia, only N Korea is firmly in its camp. While mercurial and embarrassing, it serves China reasonably well by tying down all of S Korea’s military and significant portions of those of Japan and the US’s Asian forces. Russia sees N Korea as serving the same role.
In South Asia, China has ties with Sri Lanka and Pakistan, whose army is as opposed to democracy as anyone’s. China, however, may refrain from attaching strategic import to Islamabad. Pakistan is too close to internal breakdown. Its army is tied to Islamist militancy, including al Qaeda, and has never displayed competence in war. Chinese civilians have been targets of attacks there, especially in Balochistan where an insurgency is simmering.
Saudi Arabia may have greater trust in Pakistan’s military. Riyadh has had Pakistani units on its soil for decades and it funded the country’s nuclear program, perhaps giving it the option to deploy such weapons in the Kingdom someday – say, if Iran should develop nuclear weapons or if an Arab showdown with Israel loomed. Saudi Arabia also enjoys close ties with Kuwait, the Emirates, and Bahrain. Each is fearful of democratic movements at home and in the region and each shares Riyadh’s fear of Iranian-Shia power. Despite lavish arms purchases and lengthy training programs, none has an effective military, though each has attractive bases and of course oil reserves and financial resources.
By restricting oil sales and financial aid, Riyadh has recently helped the Egyptian army oust the democratically-elected Muslim Brotherhood government and return the old oligarchy to fuller control. Riyadh promptly restored aid. The Egyptian army is beholden to Saudi Arabia if not highly dependent on it, and will remain so for many years. Saudi Arabia is also trying to coalesce Sunni forces in Iraq and Syria – a difficult undertaking which if successful, will give Riyadh substantial influence with three of the most formidable armies in the Arab world.
China and Russia each have seats on the United Nation Security Council, ensuring that no effort to create a peacekeeping mission, impose sanctions, or censure a country can take place without their approval.
The three Eurasian states are poised to develop stronger ties with developing countries in Africa and Asia – especially the resource-rich and largely undeveloped areas of Central Asia from Turkmenistan to Kyrgyzstan. Authoritarian regimes there wish to stay in power. They look about the Middle East and see efforts to build democracy lead only to chaos, extremism, and fragmentation. They also look to the West as persistent meddlers in internal affairs and occasional advocates of human rights. The Eurasian triad will perform no such advocacy and with partners in the authoritarian developing world they can gain better control over not only the world’s oil supplies but also other commodities such as copper, Iron, and rare earths.
Strengthened authoritarian rule
A cooperative arrangement regarding oil, capital, armaments, and trade will help the economies of the triad and their allies. This in turn will strengthen the legitimacy of ruling elites. Russia, however, may face greater difficulty here as its westernized youth and recent property seizures and arbitrary arrests have already made the economy sluggish. Brain drain and the flight of capital and wealth have accelerated since the Ukraine campaign began last year. China and Saudi Arabia have been helpful with major arms and oil purchases to bolster their emerging Russian partner.
Prosperity is a sound basis of political legitimacy, but demonstrating power in the world has been stronger, as kings, emperors, and presidents have long known. The three authoritarian powers will gain prestige through forceful actions which draw upon venerable national myths of military feats.
Since the fall of Constantinople (1453) Russians have thought of themselves as defenders of civilization. The West had become weak, divided, and decadent. Russian autocracy and force of arms held the Turks back, repelled Napoleon’s army, and crushed the Third Reich. The venerable myth of Russian virtue and power serves the present day well as liberalism and capitalism have, in the Russian view, undermined western societies and are doing the same in much of the rest of the world. Russia, again from its perspective, retains the moral and military strength to prevent the spread of western culture. (Curiously, French nationalists point to Putin’s Russia as a bastion of decency worthy of emulation.)
China’s national myths simmered during two centuries of weakness, intermingled with Marxist messianism in the second half of the twentieth century, and are now reasserting themselves to the public’s delight and wonder. The “Middle Kingdom” between heaven and earth was the dominant economic power for most of recorded history and its technology and ideas helped fuel the rise of the West. Under elite guidance it will soon surpass the United States and become the strongest economic power, after which it will seek to push the American military out of East Asia and reclaim the breakaway province of Taiwan.
Saudi Arabia has no longstanding national myths, though idealized ones of a magnificent Islamic past abound. It is difficult to assess how boundless the House of Saud’s ambitions are with so much wealth and powerful new allies but they are unlikely to believe that full unification of the Islamic world is possible. That may be the fanciful goal of al Qaeda, ISIL, and kindred dreamers.
Instead, Riyadh sees the Arab Spring breaking down old regimes but bringing no stable new ones. Chaotic and badly in need of reconstruction aid, these lands will eschew the old colonial powers and the US in favor of the country that guards the holy sites and share its wealth. Saudi Arabia, as noted, has a weak if well-appointed military. Nonetheless, it can coalesce the forces of Egypt and Sunni parts of Syria and Iraq into a federation with Riyadh its political and financial center.
Posture toward democracies along the periphery
The concert system that sought to manage European affairs after the wars of the French Revolution, opposed popular movements and sought to destroy them, root and branch. The triad will have a less rigid approach, at least in some cases.
Saudi Arabia will oppose democracy at home and in the region. Russia will try to keep authoritarian regimes along its Islamic periphery to the south where democracy could give rise to Islamist majorities that would encourage Muslim minorities in Russia and spread into thinly populated parts of central Russia. However, there will be more latitude elsewhere. Russia sees limits on its ability to alter domestic politics in neighboring states and, opportunistically, sees advantages to democratic polities in nearby states.
In recent months, Russia has used a pseudo-democratic referendum to fragment Ukraine and annex parts of it. However, there was considerable support in the Crimea to break free of Kiev and a fair referendum might have yielded a majority favoring Russian annexation. The referendum, and its predictable outcome, were displays of Russian power, not democratic processes. In coming years, the same process may take place in ethnically-Russian parts of Latvia and Kazakhstan. It will of course be the last articulation of public sentiment.
Russia and China will prefer democracy in at least some of its neighbors, often for the social and political reasons they oppose democracy at home. Hyper-individualism, political immobilism, and weakened martial virtues make most democracies less disposed to use force against the triad and more obliging toward concessions. From the triad’s perspective it is better that neighboring states be diverted by the domestic problems that democracy brings.
Democratic governments and publics will value the comforts from trade arrangements and oil supplies over their stated principles. One or more political parties will oppose sanctions, let alone armed conflict, and point to the need to avoid economic retaliation and irritating a country that holds much of its national debt.
What will the Crimea mean to the world in a few years? What will barren islands and expansive waters in East Asia mean? Latvia? Taiwan? Better to keep the hydrocarbons flowing and the possibility of greater access to 1.4 billion Chinese with growing disposable incomes.
In this respect, the triad would be following the example of French autocrats who humbled their own parliaments and subjects yet preferred to see the same institutions prevail in adjacent German principalities. Constitutional governments prevented strong kings and the armies they might one day use against France.
Iran
The Eurasian bloc may be joined by a fourth member, Iran, though the Islamic Republic has more ambivalence toward reform at home than the others – at least for the moment. With Iran as a partner, the bloc would comprise four of the five largest oil-producing countries and three of the top four oil exporters (assuming Iran returns to pre-sanctions levels.)
Iran’s military is large, well-equipped and -trained, though of uncertain fighting capacity after a quarter century of inactivity. Further, it has two branches – the regular army and the Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The former is a conscript force that represents the country’s demography, the latter is an elite volunteer formation with much greater religious and political zealotry than the regular army or the public at large. In that the IRGC gets the best equipment and has presented itself, groundlessly in the eyes of many Iranians, as having been largely responsible for repelling the Iraqi invasion of the eighties, there is tension between the two. The IRGC has fielded training missions which developed Shia militias in Iraq and the formidable Hisbollah of Lebanon which wore down and ultimately repelled the Israeli army in the eighties.
Eight years of internecine warfare with Iraq ended with at least a semblance of victory as Saddam’s army was ultimately brought to the negotiating table. This brought legitimacy to austere theocratic rule that it might not have enjoyed after years of peace. The postwar decades have brought weariness with the rule of the mullahs, resentment over the IRGC’s presence in the state and economy, and growing pressure for liberal reform. This is especially so in urban middle classes, far less so in the working class and rural dwellers.
Accordingly, Iran is less attuned to authoritarian rule than are Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia. Closer cooperation with the bloc may signal entrenched elite opposition to liberal reforms, and lead to unrest.
Iran is already reasonably close to Russia, from whom it buys weapons, and China, to whom it sells oil. The third part of the Eurasian bloc, Saudi Arabia, is a bitter rival for hegemony in the Gulf. Iran supports Shia groups in Saudi Arabia and along its periphery, especially in Yemen. Saudi Arabia has supported Baloch separatists in southeastern Iran.
Paradoxically, Iran’s least aggressive yet most promising and potentially devastating method of destabilizing Saudi Arabia would be extensive political reform at home. A democratizing Iran would underscore the anti-democratic nature of Saudi Arabia and allied Sunni principalities to their own populations, especially in youthful urban cohorts who have carefully watched the Arab Spring and ruefully seen Riyadh’s efforts to stifle it. Western democracies may play upon Iran’s potential for democracy and encourage it to hold back from the authoritarian triad.
Tensions and weaknesses
The triad comprising Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia, while enjoying a community of interest in many regards, has numerous sources of conflict. Every alliance and alignment does. The concert system of nineteenth-century Europe began with the promise of enduring consensus, but disagreements arose and brought decline and eventual collapse. Rivalries reemerged and led to the Great War which brought most of them down.
Religion – or its absence – will be one source of contention. Saudi Arabia’s theocracy conflicts with the secular governments in Moscow and Beijing. Russia’s president feigns piety as a means of legitimizing his neo-tsarist power with the mantle of Russian Orthodoxy, which historically supported autocracy as a bulwark against western decadence and Islamic foes.
Chinese authorities look warily at religion, especially Islam, which is percolating in Xinjiang province, home to the restive Uighur minority – and to promising oil fields as well. Newer religious movements such as Falun Gong remind the wary leaders of older cults such as the Taipings, who brought war and ruin a century and a half ago. (According to some calculations, the Taiping Rebellion was second only to World War Two in deaths.)
Saudi Arabia is the wellspring of Salafism, the austere and militant sect that seeks to restore unity in the umma – a vast region that includes large swathes of China, Russia, and their peripheries. Salafi adherents are battling Russia in Chechnya and Dagestan and are increasingly active in China’s northwest.
Siberia is a second source of tensions. Sino-Russian conflicts over the Siberia expanses reach back several centuries. Indeed, China sees parts of that resource-rich but underdeveloped region as having been stolen from them by the tsars. The new ruler in the Kremlin himself has expressed concern over the growing Chinese presence in the Russian Far East, and Russians there are frightened and angry over the influx of Chinese.
For now the two powers, perhaps with the aid of Saudi petrodollars, will develop the region – a long process that will undoubtedly see a rapid influx of Chinese engineers and workers. The region will be economically linked more to Beijing than to Moscow.
Succession poses an immediate problem for Saudi Arabia and a distant one for Russia. However, China is governed by the old communist party which has dispensed with most of Marxist ideology but retained a preference for elite guidance. The party is well organized and its members highly disciplined, thereby making for smoother successions than in countries run by individuals or cliques.
Neither Saudi Arabia nor Russia can ensure a smooth succession in coming years. Indeed, the House of Saud will face a difficult one in the next few years. The Kingdom has been ruled by the sons of Abdul Aziz ibn Saud since the warrior-king died in 1953. They are now in their eighties and must hand power to a younger generation of princes amid political ferment, sectarian rancor, a growing women’s movement, the disintegration of neighboring states, and the probability of determined though uncoordinated efforts by Iran and Israel to cause turmoil amid the transition.
Succession has historically been problematic in Russia, with aristocratic intrigues, assassinations, foreign interventions, and two jarring civil wars. Putin rules in conjunction with an oligarchic clique and though presently hale and hearty, he will face the matter of succession within a decade or two.
A further problem is the lack of innovation and creativity in Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia. Though this can be overstated and alloyed with ethnic and racial stereotyping, those countries have relied greatly on purchase, borrowing, and theft to attain their levels of technological sophistication and economic achievement. (Creativity and innovation may be intertwined with the discord and hyper-individualism they decry in the West.) This is all the more reason the triad will prefer to see openness abroad, though not at home.
Perhaps the most notable weakness inside Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia is the significant numbers of younger people who find authoritarian rule historically outmoded, politically incompetent, and personally insulting. They may soon weary of the state’s constant invocation and exaggeration of foreign dangers and the need for deference to a ruling elite. They maybe the democratic world’s greatest asset inside the Eurasian triad.
©2015 Brian M Downing