By Richard Weitz
Why Russia’s Asia-Pacific diplomatic outreach struggles to gain traction.
The Diplomat has helpfully published several articles on the neglected topic of how Moscow has sought to use its Far Eastern Federal District, a traditional backwater, as a foundation for building more comprehensive relations between the Russian Federation and the Asia-Pacific region. These pieces (which can be read here, here and here) are well-written, well-researched, and convincingly argue that, along with many other non-Asian countries, Russia has been pursuing a Pacific pivot. However, like many other articles and statements by Russian leaders themselves, they catalog the large number of Russian initiatives and inputs into Asian processes but obscure the small number of positive results and enduring outputs that they have so far achieved. On balance, Moscow is still very far from realizing Russia’s desired place in Asia.
The Russian government has sought to increase Russia’s integration with Asia for both offensive and defensive reasons. These goals include achieving mutually advantageous economic ties in general, developing eastern Siberia in particular, attracting considerably more investment and high technology into Russia, bolstering Moscow’s diplomatic influence on critical Asian issues, raising Russia’s profile in Asian regional organizations, and promoting multipolarity by constraining U.S. influence in Asia without excessively enhancing that of China. Moscow’s main tools to realize this strategy has been to reaffirm Russia’s often overlooked Asian identity, leveraging Russian arms exports and energy riches, adopting a low-key neutral position on Asian territorial disputes except for its own with Japan, and pursuing flexible diplomatic and economic ties with a realpolitik indifference towards countries’ domestic political practices.
Russia has tried not only to tighten ties with China but also to sustain relations with longstanding partners like India, Vietnam, and North Korea, while cultivating new partnerships with Japan, South Korea, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to bolster Moscow’s leverage and options. In recent years, Russia has hosted the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit and joined the East Asian Summit. Like their peers elsewhere, Russian analysts see demographic, economic, and other trends making the Asia-Pacific the most important economic region in the coming decades. A rising share of Russia’s arms and energy exports are already going to Asian customers.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has led this campaign. In his presidential state-of-the-nation address in early December, Putin confirmed that Sochi would host a Russian-ASEAN summit in 2016. He also proposed studying whether to pursue a massive economic integration project that would encompass the members of ASEAN, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and the Moscow-led Eurasian Economic Union (EEU).
Read the full story at The Diplomat