openpolitics.com

Russian president’s global strategy keeps Moscow’s tentacles in enough places that the Kremlin is ensured a seat at every table that matters

You’ve got to give Vladimir Putin his due: The man knows how to play a weak hand well.

With relatively little investment, the Russian leader is expanding his toehold in the Western Hemisphere and potentially getting access to giant oil and uranium supplies by backing a dictator in Venezuela.

With relatively little investment, he has expanded his base of operations in the Middle East by propping up a dictator in Syria and by trying to send some sophisticated Russian military equipment into Turkey. (For the latter effort, he’d actually turn a profit.)

And with relatively little investment, and little notice from a distracted international community, he has kept up a low-level war against those fighting a Russian takeover in eastern Ukraine, holding on to a bargaining chip he might find useful someday.

He does all this while overseeing an economy roughly the size of South Korea’s, which produces little or nothing the world wants to buy, outside of oil and military gear.

It’s an audacious strategy—and it is working. Never was that more clear than last week, when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Boltoncited Russian support as the only reason Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro remained in his country in the face of an organized uprising by his opponents and elements of his own military.

.. In short, Mr. Putin appears to recognize the moment he is in, and what to do about it. After almost two decades of a focus on combating terrorism and Islamic extremism, the world is evolving into a new era of big-power competition. The U.S. and China are the two big competitors now, of course, but Mr. Putin is making sure Russia is the third.

His problem is that Russia doesn’t have the economic might of the U.S. and China. So he brings to the table what he can, which is basically the ability to make trouble and thereby insert himself into the global mix.

Thus, Russia became an early world leader in the 21st-century tool of unconventional combat—cyber warfare. The Kremlin combined that skill with its traditional willingness to engage in the dark arts of covert action to interfere with the 2016 election in the U.S., as well as other elections in the West.

As the U.S. tries to maintain economic pressure on North Korea, Russia provides just enough economic relief to Pyongyang to ensure that Moscow has to be a player in how the standoff over North Korea’s nuclear program plays out.

Meanwhile, Mr. Putin is wedging himself into the space between East and West by offering to sell Russia’s S-400 air-defense system to Turkey, which happens to be a member of the American-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization. After members of Congress declared that Turkey couldn’t both buy the American-made F-35 jet fighter and have a Russian air-defense system geared toward shooting down that same jet, Russia stepped up and said it also would sell its own jet fighters to Turkey instead.

What is Russia’s goal in all this? Probably, in the first instance, it’s simply to keep Russia in the global game. By ensuring that Moscow’s tentacles are in enough places, Mr. Putin can win a seat at every table that matters. Thus does he maneuver to restore the global importance of Russia, which he thinks was unjustly stolen by the combination of the Soviet Union’s collapse and the West’s maneuvers to marginalize a once-great power.

Only in the second instance, most likely, is the Putin goal to gain some particular advantage or asset. Russia fishes in troubled waters. One day it may catch something that turns out to be valuable.

Venezuela may be the best current example of this strategy. Asked why Russia seems to want a beachhead in Venezuela, a senior U.S. official replies simply: “Why not?”

Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves and uranium reserves second only to Canada’s, the official notes. The world markets for oil and uranium matter greatly to Russia, whose economy is based almost entirely on such commodities, so having a hand on such big parts of the world supply can’t hurt.

And preserving a base of operations in Venezuela helps strategically in the continuing effort to keep the U.S. off balance and reactive. Russia already has plenty of influence in Cuba, but Venezuela may be a safer location for a Western Hemisphere foothold. “Cuba is too close to the U.S.,” the senior official says. “Venezuela is a better base of operations.” As noted: Why not try?