Russia, China, and the Power of Institutional Habits

Reading this week about joint Russian-Chinese naval exercises in the Mediterranean, I thought of something I read a little over a year ago.  In April of 2014, while visiting Hamburg with my wife, I was flipping through the Financial Times at breakfast, and saw an article about a new Russian natural gas sale to China.  At the time, Russia's invasion and annexation of Crimea was very recent, and debates about sanctions raged in Washington and Brussels.  Disapprobation, in any case, was being heaped on Russia from all sides (and deservedly so, of course).  Except from Beijing.

Whatever this sale of natural gas was (I, and everyone else, have long forgotten the salient details of the particular deal), it was a blip, and was not necessarily caused, or even occasioned, by the prospect of shrinking markets for Russian gas in Europe.  What struck me at the time, rather (nor would it have taken a PhD in the history of international relations to pick up the scent of this trail), was not the potential economic impact of Western sanctions against Russia, but the potential geopolitical consequences.

As analyst Ian Bremmer pointed out on Charlie Rose recently, it is nearly always a mistake to divide international relations into discrete sectors -- economic, political, military, cultural, etc. -- as if each has no effect on the other.  For example, as Bremmer pointed out, failure to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, particularly as a result of myopic political jockeying in Congress, would have not only economic repercussions, but geopolitical resonance as well -- it would make explicit that which is surely already sensed in friendly and unfriendly capitals around the world, namely that the American government is near paralysis.  (See my earlier comment on the TPP, here.)

My premonition in early 2014 regarding the implications of expanded natural resource links between Russia and China was very much about the possible bleed-over of institutional habits from any given sector (in this case energy) into the mindset of the parties generally.  It was, in essence that without hard work to tend the U.S.-China relationship, a chill between the West and Russia would provide an impetus for Russia to begin building the kind of broad and deep working-level and administrative-level relationships that can solidify into habits of thought.  In this sense the very forgetability of whatever Russo-Chinese gas deal I read about was what made it a signal -- for such are the kinds of institutional arrangements that gradually become normative in the collective thinking of national bureaucracies.  And if you doubt the ability of bureaucracies to influence national policy by means of sheer intransigence, well, read pretty much any political leader's memoir and you'll see.  As Henry Kissinger has quipped, Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat denied his prerogatives.

Because international relations do not proceed in direct causal lines, it is not the case that this week's naval exercises are the result of a Chinese-Russian relationship strengthened by the West's economic sanctions against Russia.  Since the fall of the Soviet Union, China and Russia have maintained all manner of relations, including military relations. Russia has sold China tremendous quantities of arms, and the two countries have even worked together on civilian nuclear power projects.  These joint exercises are not the first instances of naval cooperation, nor are they, apparently, on a scale like anything the U.S. might conduct with its NATO allies.

The question instead is whether there is developing between Russia and China a pattern of habitual cooperation that could result in new assumptions about the shape of the international situation among their leaders, their bureaucracies, and their general populations.  As well as among the rest of the international community.  Those habits, those assumptions, those defaults, precisely because they are subconscious, are tremendously powerful.  It is the task of leaders to intuit these implicit realities, and then to shape them.

Quo Vadimus, or The Long Bridge

Two years ago around this time I had 30 staples in my side after a pair of nasty surgeries.  The day before Thanksgiving I had the staples out.  One of them didn't want to let go - the doc had to twist and tug, and I almost passed out.  Then I rode down a couple floors in the hospital elevator and had a bone marrow biopsy.  A few days later I flew from Nebraska to Washington, D.C. to start chemotherapy at Georgetown University Hospital.  When we landed, my wife and I checked in at our passable extended-stay hotel in Crystal City (Arlington, VA), and went for a walk on the nearby Long Bridge.

I've no idea why it's called the Long Bridge.  It's not especially long.  It runs out past the Reagan Airport runways, along a marshy part of the Potomac where Eagles sometimes circle, fish, and land in the trees.  The Pentagon sits to the left, across I-395.  A glassy, brand-new Boeing facility is set near the start of the bridge, and at the far end is a rise from which one can see the Washington Monument, the Capital building, and much of DC's leafy, northwesterly spread.  As I was beginning chemotherapy, I went for walks out to that elevated end of the bridge, and stared off into the cold late-fall dusk coming down on the city.  And wondered if I would live.

This past Sunday I flew to the Washington, DC area again, and checked in to a hotel very near where we stayed two years ago, during my treatment.  This time I'd come for the final stage of the Foreign Service entrance exams, the Oral Assessment; if I passed, I'd be (almost) a member of the U.S. diplomatic corps.  I passed.

The next morning, having time to kill before my flight out, I walked to the end of the Long Bridge to look again at the unchanging city.  The day was warm and dry.  Waist-high native grasses along the side of the bridge rustled in the breeze, and I reached out to touch their bristled tops with my palms.  I'd lived after all.

The overwhelming sensation on this day, however, was of the same unhurried, inscrutable presence of the eternal that I'd had two years prior, in a much more dire condition.  Though then I'd been supremely vulnerable and now I was (in my small way) triumphant, I was in each case most aware of the ineradicable uncertainty that underpins all human experience - having now achieved a high goal, I no more knew where I was going, what I was doing, what would happen next, or even if I would live much longer, than I had understood those things back in 2012 when I faced cancer.  The through-line of history is precariousness.  Around this axis revolves a cycle of aspiration and despair, conviction and dismay, hope and then ultimate surrender to the unknown.

I am of this human lineage, and I am intimately familiar with these regular orbits of human emotion.  And I cannot resist the too-perfect metaphor of the Long Bridge as the defining vector of my personal uncertainties.  How many times will I stand at its peaceful terminus and ask, invoking God, and my loved ones, and everybody else too, Quo Vadimus?  Where are we going?

If I'm fortunate, many, many more.