EU foreign affairs chief Joseph Borrell has an extraordinary blog post up about his recent visit to Russia.
Keep in mind that Borrell speaks in the deliberately measured tone of a diplomat. So when he describes a ‘very complicated visit to Moscow,’ you can be sure that some complicated shite went down.
Borrell’s take-away: ‘It seems that Russia is progressively disconnecting itself from Europe.’ He does not like saying that. One has the impression of a man shocked into a geopolitical realisation that he had much hoped to avoid.
The cause appears to have been the attitude of Borrell’s Russian interlocutors. He writes that after he made an appeal for Navalny’s release, the discussion with his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, ‘reached high levels of tension’.
Diplomats usually use that phrase to describe shouting matches, or the quiet the comes just before bullets start flying.
The picture that emerges is one of Russian officials who are prickly to the point of hostility, and eager to respond to any hint of criticism with the blast of a rhetorical shotgun. Almost Trumpian, you might say.
Western security analysts, and in particular US analysts, often fall into the trap of comparing our emotion-based foreign policies with the allegedly calculating, opportunistic, and hyper-rational policies of Russian leaders. But it seems to me that the Russians can be just as emotional as the rest of us, if not more so.
Until last month, US President Donald Trump – whose hurt feelings and seething grievances cast a broad shadow over the US foreign policy establishment – made the Russians appear rational in comparison. But now that he’s gone and a more practical approach is in control, we can appreciate how gut-based much Kremlin foreign policymaking can be.
That realisation brings us back to Borrell. Reading only a little between the lines, his account seems to confirm just how much even the highest Russian officials base their decisions on petty grievances and perceived slights, perhaps because, deep down, they know that the Navalny controversy is one that they brought on themselves.
As Americans have learned well during the last four years, a gut-based foreign policy tends to create its own problems. For example, Russia’s politicised roll-out of what appears to be an effective vaccine has created a wave of Western suspicion towards Sputnik V that will be slow in dying. That suspicion, in turn, provokes the Russians even more.
The whole cycle could have been avoided if the Russians had adopted a more low-key approach, rather than triumphantly and falsely declaring back in August that they had created the world’s first vaccine and then aggressively pushed it while attacking Western vaccines.
The EU’s choice seems obvious. Back away slowly from the Russians and rebuild a clear-eyed transatlantic relationship with the newly cooperative Americans knowing that, in four years, things could change again.
But at least American resentment tends to be focussed inwards on domestic political opponents. Russian resentment seems to be focussed outwards towards Western Europe, an altogether more frightening prospect.