Putin

In the meantime, there are buyers, especially for gas and oil. Russia may be pivoting east and Europe may be desperately weaning itself off Russian energy, but their economies are still very much bound up. Though China has surpassed Germany as Russia’s number one trade partner, the EU as a whole accounts for 41 percent of Russian trade, more than four times what China imports. The countries of Eastern Europe—especially Poland and the Baltic states, which feel the most threatened by Russia because of past experience, proximity, and, in the case of Estonia and Latvia, large number of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers—are also countries that depend heavily on Russia for their energy supplies. Poland gets at least half of its gas from Russia and has a supply contract with Gazprom that runs until 2022. Some of them are scrambling for inventive solutions to their problem of dependency on Russia. Lithuania is building a floating terminal to receive liquefied natural gas from the United States. Other gambits included developing domestic shale reserves, as Estonia is doing. And it’s always possible to simply pay more for gas and oil from other sources.

Like Europe’s liberation of itself from Russian gas and oil, Russia’s search for new or enlarged markets in Asia will not be accomplished anytime soon. Alexander Ivanov, deputy head of the state-run bank VEB, put it: “Over the long term, these markets may supplant the European and American markets for us, but it won’t be quick.”

Indeed, the signs have been highly mixed. Russia’s trade with China actually fell in 2015 by some 26 percent. The two countries had hoped to hit the $100 billion mark but came in $32 billion short. On the other hand, China’s import of Russian oil for May 2016 hit a record thirty-eight million barrels.

China, of course, will never allow itself to become dependent on Russia for energy any more than Russia will settle for being a “natural resources appendage” for China. Putin is not about to turn rejection in the West to humiliation in the East. Russia is already attempting to protect itself in Asia by employing the same principle it failed to apply to its domestic economy—diversification. The Kremlin deals with both India and Pakistan, with which it lifted an embargo on arms sales in 2014. Russia sells submarines to Vietnam, also supplying it and India with nuclear power stations. Russia plays India off against China, selling it the first in a series of nuclear attack subs for $1 billion in 2012 under a ten-year contract. India declined to join in the sanctions against Russia in response to the annexation of Crimea and the incursions into eastern Ukraine. It is even possible that Russia will now be motivated to come to terms with Japan over the four southernmost Kurile Islands. The waters off those islands are rich in stocks of fish, gas, and oil, while the islands themselves contain large quantities of gold and rhenium, an exceedingly rare and costly metal used in jet engines. Seized by the USSR at the end of World War II, the islands have prevented Russia and Japan from formally concluding a peace. Wars never quite end and feelings still run high. When then president Medvedev visited one of the Kurile Islands in 2010 the Japanese prime minister, Naoto Kan, called it an “unforgiveable outrage.”

Still, for all its overtures and deals, Russia may not find itself much more welcome or effective in the East than it was in the West. The United States competes there with Russia as a supplier of weapons and a guarantor of security, and there is no question that countries like Japan and South Korea will remain squarely in the American camp. “Russia’s geo-strategic eyes are bigger than its stomach,” says Brad Williams, a specialist in East Asia relations at the University of Hong Kong. “Simply put, Russia doesn’t have the economy to support a sustained presence in Asia.”

And for that very reason, implacable geopolitical logic may compel Russia to employ blunter instruments to achieve its ends in Asia.

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The strategic doctrine known as “March West” was publicly articulated in an article published in Global Times in October 2012 by Wang Jisi, identified by the Brookings Institution as “China’s most prominent and influential foreign relations scholar and a professor at Peking University.” The stated purpose of March West is to move away from possible confrontation with the United States in the maritime region off China’s coast and to accelerate the “Grand Western Development,” a national strategy promulgated in 2000 whose aim is to speed the development of China’s western provinces, which have lagged far behind those on the eastern coast.