Ian Morris: Central Asia could be the key to driving a wedge between Russia and China
Morris is the Jean and Rebecca Willard Professor of Classics and Professor in History at Stanford University. His new book is“War is the realm of chance,” said Carl von Clausewitz, who knew more about the matter than most of us. “No other human activity is so continuously or universally bound up with it.
By then, with Mongol power broken, the threats came chiefly from the west. Polish armies took Moscow in 1610; Swedes besieged St Petersburg in 1705 and marched deep into Ukraine in 1709; Napoleon burned Moscow in 1812; Germany pushed Russia into revolution in 1917, sparking civil wars and foreign interventions that almost broke the country apart, and threatened Moscow again in 1941. No wonder Russians fear Europe.
One was to accept American primacy and join the Western-dominated global system. This was not unthinkable: Germany, Japan, and Britain all went this way after 1945, with generally good results. As late as 2000, Putin still talked of maybe joining NATO. However, Russia would have joined the new world order as a third-rate power, lagging behind not only the U.S. but also the E.U., Japan, China, and even India.
The two great revisionists, says Putin, are “good friends who hold largely the same views on addressing the world’s problems.” Both want to see the U.S. pushed back into the western hemisphere, leaving China dominant in Asia and Russia able to bully the European Union and Britain. Mackinder’s prophecy has still not come true, but nowhere is he read as avidly as in Moscow and Beijing. Russia and China are perfectly placed to dominate Mackinder’s geographical pivot—but on how to do this, the two great revisionists’ views and interests diverge. To Russia, the stans are potential vassals who will restore its Soviet Empire; to China, they are potential collaborators who will host its Belt and Road Initiative.
The other major player in the old Great Game, India, also has a role in the new version. Delhi and Beijing have been arguing over their border in the Himalayas since 1954. They fought over it in 1962, and in 2020 violence flared up again, leaving more than 40 dead on the disputed line. Delhi and Moscow, by contrast, have been close since 1955, and India’s armed forces have consistently bought Russian-made weapons.
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