‘[The government of the Russian Federation is] a government that murders its citizens for highlighting corruption and other abuses.’

—  Holding Russia Accountable for Malign Activities Act of 2020, bill introduced to US Senate, 3 February 2021

‘We’re at an inflection point between those who argue that … autocracy is the best way forward … and those who understand that democracy is essential.’

— US President Joe Biden, remarks at Munich Security Conference, 19 February 2021

After weeks of considering how to respond to the poisoning and arrest of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the EU and US announced coordinated punitive sanctions. They target seven Russian government figures, including the head of the FSB security service, with asset freezes and visa restrictions. And US President Joe Biden has promised more action in retaliation for the placing of bounties on US military personnel and the SolarWinds hack, pending further intelligence assessment.

And after years of having to deliver watered-down Russia assessments to the Trump administration, US agencies will be relieved and pleased to present a full accounting.

Apart from classified sources, assessments will also be gleaned from the extensive findings of the reports by Robert Muller and the Senate Intelligence Committee into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and from vast open-source analysis on Russian malignancy.

This all details a global panorama of the Russian grey zone of cyberattacks and hacks; targeted disinformation campaigns aimed at deflecting action against Russia and boosting far-right forces in the US, UK and EU; the funding and training of extremists; the development and weaponisation of corruption and ‘dark money’ networks; multiple poisonings; microwave attacks against US officials; bounties on US troops in Afghanistan; and the oligarchical adventurism of the mercenary Wagner Group in Syria and Africa.

New assessments are likely to describe the network of perpetrators, not only state agencies like the GRU, FSB and SVR, but also entrepreneurs in President Vladimir Putin’s circle like Evgeny Prigozhin and Oleg Deripaska, and their enablers among Western political, media, financial and legal sectors.

The US Senate has already introduced a bipartisan bill calling for Navalny’s release and invoking the Magnitsky and chemical and biological weapons acts to sanction Putin’s cronies. It hints at possibly freezing the assets of Putin and his family. The bill also urges Germany to withdraw support for the Russian Nordstream 2 gas pipeline, which the US has already sanctioned.

These proposals go much further than anything the EU and US have so far considered. They are also much more in line with the views of Navalny, his supporters and many in the EU and UK who have argued that the West needs to target Putin’s ‘wallets’—those who handle corrupt flows of money and do his bidding offshore—to trigger infighting. Navalny has named oligarchs like billionaire Roman Abramovich, VTB bank boss Andrey Kostin and media mogul Alisher Usmanov as critical enablers of the regime.

Sanctioning oligarchs can be difficult, as the US found when it had to climb down from sanctions against Rusal and Oleg Deripaska, after an outcry from Western firms that needed to continue doing business with one of the world’s biggest aluminium companies.

It’s clear now, however, that after years of Putin’s moves against the US, and Donald Trump’s inaction and gaslighting about Russia hoaxes, many in the US political system, not to mention the public, are ready for a reckoning.

And in this new mood, some old lines of argument running through US policy on Russia seem to have been jettisoned.

One is the idea that Russia is merely a fading power and therefore not worth worrying about. Another is that its ambition only extends to its near abroad and, if left alone, it’s likely to morph into a constructive geopolitical player.

The Biden administration clearly sees Russia as a determined and effective adversary, particularly in the grey zone, working to undermine the world’s democracies, even while taking advantage of the good things that rule of law provides. But how will this translate to a new paradigm for Russia policy? How much of a reckoning is enough?

Biden’s comments at the Munich Security Conference suggest that the US is framing the relationship with Russia and China as one of values: democrats versus autocrats. Biden’s point person on Russia, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, who has spent her career looking at the global authoritarian influence of Russia and China, has no doubt influenced this.

But the president also stressed that geopolitical competition must be balanced with cooperation on the shared existential crises of climate change, nuclear proliferation and the Covid-19 pandemic. He wants to do it all, but that will be far from straightforward.

Russia specialists on both sides of the Atlantic have long derided what they see as the limp ritual of mild sanctions and bridge-building attempts governing Western responses to escalating Russian outrages, from the annexation of Crimea to interference in elections to the attempted assassination of Navalny.

Its defenders have argued that this approach, while unsatisfactory, is the only way to realistically manage tensions, keep channels open, and maintain geopolitical and nuclear stability.

The idea of keeping Russia’s economy stable, a justification for Nordstream 2, is part of this blend of conventional realist and liberal wisdoms that have dominated foreign-policy thinking since the Cold War. It’s said to be about keeping the balance of power, minimising military miscalculations and socialising Russia into international norms and the society of nations through diplomacy and economic inducements. And it’s a line of thinking that is still powerful.

But a diverse range of influential Russia watchers, including Edward Lucas, Molly McKew, Michael McFaul, Brian Whitmore, Sarah Kendzior, Anne Applebaum and new Biden administration official Laura Rosenberger, argue that Russia is playing a completely different game.

This group holds varied views on what Russia wants and what Putinism is all about—regime preservation and personal enrichment, destruction of the liberal order, geopolitical jockeying in readiness for a US–China war, access to the developing world’s resources.

But there’s agreement that Putin isn’t interested in grand non-interference bargains and has no investment in the liberal order whatsoever. He knows his long-term version of Russian power depends on liberalism being eroded everywhere.

Further, conventional diplomatic and strategic nostrums can’t cope with a geopolitical environment in which digital technologies have completely changed the nature of rising state competition.

By investing so much in digital political warfare and disinformation, Russia has demonstrated its ability to destabilise Western political systems, making the ideological threat of Putin’s illiberalism dangerously potent.

If this reading is correct, a new, much more unpredictable era of relations is emerging. And the question for the US and EU is, if the familiar rituals of managing geopolitical tensions with Russia are faltering, what might take their place?

The ideas now emerging are around containment, not just in a military sense but in terms of the more difficult task of containing a grey-zone threat running through the hyperconnected, endlessly manipulable sinews of a digitised world.

Deep transatlantic cooperation will be critical, and in recent days Washington and Brussels have made a start. But despite the new understandings of Russia emerging after Trump, the current sanctions package remains firmly within the old paradigm of reactive signalling, rather than creating serious discomfort for the regime.

Old diplomatic cultures die hard. Both the EU and US have good reasons for moving cautiously in a destabilised world. And repairing the trust deficit among NATO allies is a work in progress. The need to defend the fundamental security of democratic systems at the ideological level, ‘away from diplomats and pipelines, to principles and people,’ as EU foreign policy and strategy expert Constanze Steltzenmüller put it recently, will drive policy towards a reinvention of containment for an era of digitised hybrid warfare. As this new paradigm takes shape, Russia, too, might begin to miss the comforts of the old status quo.

The Australian government’s 2020 cyber security strategy is overwhelmingly focused on increasing the cybersecurity efforts of the defence organisation and law enforcement agencies. The mounting crisis in the United States from the hacking of software company SolarWinds indicates that this is not enough.

On 12 December, cybersecurity firm FireEye announced it had detected an alleged Russian cyberattack that had compromised the monitoring and management software on SolarWinds’ commonly used Orion network to get access to victim organisations—potentially 18,000 of them. The US National Institutes of Health and the departments of Treasury, Commerce, Homeland Security and State are reported to be among the victims.

This looks to be an extremely successful campaign, but haven’t we seen this all before?

Operation Cloud Hopper was a years-long Chinese Ministry of State Security campaign that compromised managed service providers, or MSPs, to gain access to their clients. MSPs provide remote IT services to their clients and generally have close to total control of client IT systems, so hacking into a single MSP can provide the master keys to many victim companies. Cloud Hopper affected more than a dozen MSPs and there were possibly hundreds of victim companies.

The response of Western governments was a coordinated denouncement of the activity by the Five Eyes partners (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US), along with Germany, Japan and other allies. The US Department of Justice issued indictments for two of the hackers, and more recently, the EU imposed sanctions.

The relative strength of the response to Cloud Hopper, the most robust combined diplomatic effort in reaction to a cyberattack to date, didn’t deter the SolarWinds perpetrators.

What other approaches should we be taking? The strategies espoused by the US Cyber Command could be a good place to look.

USCYBERCOM is responsible for defensive and offensive cyber operations. Its vision document states that it wants to maintain superiority in cyberspace and introduces the concepts of ‘persistent engagement’ and ‘defending forward’. The command aims to disrupt and deter adversaries by engaging and contesting them wherever they are on the internet. During the 2018 US midterm elections, for example, USCYBERCOM booted a Russian troll factory off the internet, and in the lead-up to the 2020 election it worked with overseas partners in ‘hunt-forward operations’ where it aimed to ‘take down the archer rather than dodge the arrows’.

Does the success of the SolarWinds supply-chain hack despite the efforts of USCYBERCOM invalidate the defend-forward and persistent-engagement model?

No.

The strategies imply, at least to some degree, the use of offensive cyber operations for pre-emptive defence (offensive cyber operations are those that disrupt, degrade or destroy). And offensive cyber operations are effective—during the Covid-19 pandemic they have been used by both Australia and the UK to disrupt disinformation and criminal operations, and in October USCYBERCOM disrupted the Trickbot botnet.

The acknowledgement of these types of operations by governments indicates they are increasingly comfortable with justifying them, both internally and publicly, as worthwhile and effective. In addition, ransomware (the criminal version of offensive cyber operations) is so effective that it’s threatening to undermine the cyber insurance market.

But although disruptive cyber operations are effective and the public portrayal of organisations like USCYBERCOM and the US National Security Agency makes them appear omniscient, the reality is that these organisations have limited resources and competing requirements and have to strictly prioritise their efforts. No doubt the highest priority of US intelligence agencies in the past nine months was ensuring the integrity of the 2020 election.

In other words, the approach is effective, but even well-resourced intelligence agencies can’t know everything.

The SolarWinds campaign has been described as particularly stealthy, and the malware the attackers used lay dormant for weeks prior to activating itself. This kind of strict operational security comes with both benefits and costs.

On the one hand, tight operational security, or OPSEC, allows operations to continue undetected, and therefore produce an ongoing stream of intelligence. And the Russian state absolutely has an enduring interest in what is occurring in the US government. If it could, Moscow would like to retain access to the US State Department forever.

On the other hand, strict OPSEC greatly slows the speed of intelligence collection, as the intelligence benefits of each action have to be weighed against the risk of discovery. Good OPSEC tends to increase the duration of an intelligence operation (because you don’t get detected), but it can paradoxically limit the scale and scope of the data collected (at least in the short term, assuming somewhat competent defenders).

Importantly, the approach used in the SolarWinds campaign—strict OPSEC—is consistent with effective use of the strategies of persistent engagement and defending forward. To be clear, it is also consistent with the hackers simply trying to avoid being detected. But, on its own, the SolarWinds campaign is not a repudiation of persistent engagement.

But if deterrence via diplomacy, indictments and sanctions has failed, and defending forward is at best an incomplete solution, what other avenues should we pursue?

First, we should recognise that forcing an adversary to make its operations more stealthy is a form of success. Operations without any consideration for OPSEC can rapidly gather huge amounts of data—because cyber operations can be either faster or quieter, not both at the same time.

Second, we need to put far greater emphasis on raising security across the entire economy. The Australian government has rightly focused on protecting a relatively broad definition of critical infrastructure, but it needs to do much more to encourage the rest of Australia’s businesses to increase their cybersecurity.

When critical infrastructure is a hard target, criminals and states will find other, easier ways to attack us that achieve similar effects. The government and law enforcement cannot possibly conceive of, discover and combat every single threat. We need to empower and encourage businesses and the community to protect themselves.

One positive development would be providing regulators with real teeth. The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority has indicated it will be taking a far more robust approach after it found that too many boards either don’t understand their true cyber risk or fail to tackle that risk as urgently as they should.

But APRA deals with just a small, albeit important, sector in the Australian economy. Other bodies, such as the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, and even the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, should be funded to prosecute cases in which poor cybersecurity practices are identified.

Cybersecurity programs focused on the defence and law enforcement sectors, by themselves, will not protect us from attacks like the one on SolarWinds. We need to do much more to encourage action across the entire economy.

Is Turkey the new Russia? That question is increasingly being asked in European capitals as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan adopts a more aggressive foreign policy. In addition to using migration to threaten and finagle the European Union, Erdogan has also been deploying military power to expand Turkey’s sphere of influence across the wider region.

Since the end of the Cold War, Europeans have viewed regional security through a unipolar Western lens. While NATO guaranteed military security, the EU—with its 80,000-page rulebook for everything from LGBTQ rights to lawnmower sound levels—provided legal order. Back in the 1990s, it was widely assumed that the two big non-Western regional players, Russia and Turkey, would gradually be accommodated to this arrangement.

But over the past 15 years, the dream of European unipolarity has given way to a multipolar reality. Both Russia and Turkey have had a long, tortured love–hate relationship with Europe, and both have grown more assertive under national leaders who share a disdain for EU norms and values.

The breakdown of the EU–Russia relationship is well documented; the Turkish story less so. The Iraq War in 2003 complicated Turkey’s relationship with NATO, and its relationship with the EU took a turn for the worse in 2007, when France blocked a key part of its EU accession negotiations. Turkey has since been forging its own path in Syria, the Balkans and Libya, as well as pursuing new ties with Russia and China.

Of course, the Turkey–Russia relationship is no less complicated, not least because Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin backed different sides in Syria’s civil war. The low point came when Turkey shot down a Russian military plane in 2015. In response, Putin imposed sanctions, which sowed chaos in the Turkish economy and prompted an uncharacteristic apology from Erdogan.

Despite being a NATO ally, Turkey has since decided to purchase a Russian-made S-400 missile-defence system over the objections of the United States. And while tensions over the Syria conflict remain, Erdogan clearly admires how Russia has re-established itself—at relatively little cost—as an important player in the Middle East and North Africa.

After Putin became mired in an unwinnable war in eastern Ukraine, his largely successful campaign in Syria seemed to restore some of his domestic authority. The West had spent five years insisting that there was no military solution to the conflict and that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had to go. But while UN-sponsored talks in Geneva went nowhere, Russia-sponsored talks in Astana seemed to make some headway. By including Turkey and Iran while excluding Western powers, the Kremlin created the impression that Russia had risen from the ashes, a born-again superpower.

Facing growing opposition at home, Erdogan has adopted the Putin playbook. With the West unwilling to intervene militarily (again) in Libya, Erdogan saw an opportunity to strut Turkey’s stuff. Following Russia’s approach in Syria, he secured a formal invitation from the Libyan government to intervene. In one fell swoop late last year, he not only boosted Turkey’s image as a regional power, but also clinched a maritime border deal with Libya, thereby disrupting a plan by Greece, Cyprus, Egypt and Israel to develop underwater oil and gas fields in the vicinity.

Since then, the EU- and UN-led ‘Berlin’ peace process has sought to end the war in Libya, but Turkey’s military intervention has fundamentally changed the balance of power on the ground. Once again, Russia and Turkey will determine the future of a country that is essential to European interests, only this time it’s Turkey that is in charge.

Erdogan also seems to have been inspired by the Kremlin’s divide-and-conquer strategy in Europe, where it often squeezes those EU member states that are most reliant on Russian hydrocarbons or markets. Just as Putin has long weaponised the supply of energy, Erdogan has tried to weaponise the flow of migrants and refugees fleeing conflicts in the Middle East. When the EU announced a new naval mission to block the flow of weapons into Libya, Turkey dangled the migrant threat in front of Malta, which then signalled that it would veto the mission’s funding.

For years, Europeans told themselves that Russia was a kind of prodigal son and that the European unipolar order remained sound. Yet that made Europe an easy target for the Kremlin’s divide-and-conquer strategy. Only relatively recently did the bloc devise new policies and a robust sanctions regime to deter Russian aggression. And even now—despite the best efforts of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron—the EU still has not created effective channels of communication with Russia for addressing shared problems.

Turkey is not yet a new Russia, but it could become one if the situation is mishandled. For now, most Europeans still regard Turkey as a complicated partner rather than as a ‘systemic rival’. But Europeans should heed the hard-won lessons of dealing with Russia over the past 15 years. The EU–Turkey relationship needs a new, mutually agreed set of principles, as well as clear red lines to deter further destabilisation in the region.

To that end, Europeans should make clear that the EU accession process can be either rolled back or pushed forward, and that a more transactional relationship will involve the use of both carrots and sticks. The challenge will be to ensure that there’s still room for political engagement on issues of shared security in a region influenced not just by Europe and Turkey, but also by Russia, the US and a rising China.

While there’s still some debate about whether the world is entering a new era of ‘Pax Sinica’ in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, it does appear that we’re witnessing the emergence of a more aggressive and assertive China that is intent on exploiting the geopolitical and economic upheaval resulting from Covid-19 to protect its perceived interests and advance its agenda.

An emboldened China will particularly pose a number of critical security challenges for Russia over the next decade, and decision-makers in the Kremlin may find themselves asking whether the long-term costs associated with its partnership with China outweigh identified benefits.

As noted elsewhere, while Moscow clearly stands to benefit from its relationship with Beijing, it ‘must take care to preserve its full sovereignty and independence’. The problem for the Kremlin in a post-pandemic world is that it’s not certain that it has the means to do so.

Even before the Covid-19 crisis, Moscow’s agreement to the 2019 comprehensive strategic partnership with Beijing meant that it was already on track to join a Sino-centric power bloc, albeit as a junior partner. But the pandemic has exacerbated the asymmetrical nature of this partnership by making Moscow potentially dependent on Chinese investment for infrastructure development and on Chinese markets for natural resources.

As with most countries experiencing Covid-19 outbreaks, Russia’s economy has been devastated by shutdowns caused by the pandemic. That economic pain has been further exacerbated by the associated collapse in the price of oil.

But the pandemic’s ramifications for the Kremlin and Russian President Vladimir Putin may be even more consequential—the economic and social impacts have exposed the limits of the Russian state and potentially widened cracks in the foundations of Putin’s power. Putin has also gone missing in action during the height of the crisis, undermining his personal approval rating.

It is in this context that the Kremlin and Russian elites are pinning ‘their hopes on the proposition that China will roll out massive measures to support [Russia’s] tumbling economy and prevent growing unemployment from causing social unrest and will continue government-driven spending on construction and infrastructure, including accelerating [the] rollout of 5G networks, giant data centres, and more’.

In doing so, not only will the Kremlin be straying further into the realm of potential debt dependency on Beijing, but it will also inevitably be negotiating with Beijing on the rules for investment from a position of weakness. As a consequence, Moscow may ultimately end up paying a high price—including its intellectual property, advanced military capabilities and ultimate control over its natural resources—in order to obtain much-needed Chinese investment.

The problem for Moscow is that Chinese investment will come on China’s terms and Beijing will likely have a Plan B in its investment strategy that mitigates the risks associated with investing in Russia’s corrupt and volatile economy.

Beijing’s investment decisions will also likely be based on three objectives—gaining commercial dominance in Russian markets; gaining access to Russian technology, critical technical research and intellectual property; and gaining access to Russia’s vast natural resources—and it will use any means to achieve them.

Prior to the pandemic, Moscow was already potentially exposed to Chinese industrial espionage as a result of a ‘high-tech partnership’ with Beijing that covered cooperation and investment in telecommunications, artificial intelligence, robotics, biotechnology, new media and the digital economy.

Moscow had also provided Beijing with a critical foothold in Russia’s telecommunications infrastructure, including through the establishment of a China Telecom office in Vladivostok dedicated to providing telecommunications infrastructure for private, commercial and government customers across the Russian Far East. Beijing will look to capitalise on this inroad post-pandemic and is also reinvigorating its planned expansion of 5G infrastructure along the Digital Silk Road, which will straddle Russia, Central Asia and much of Europe.

Beijing is also well positioned to exploit the Kremlin’s desire to use the pandemic as justification to roll out pervasive Chinese Communist Party–style surveillance infrastructure across Russia. Ironically, this infrastructure will depend upon Chinese hardware, artificial intelligence and facial recognition technologies, providing further opportunities for Beijing to gain covert access to Russian critical national infrastructure.

In exposing itself to these risks, Moscow appears to have learned nothing from the experiences of the West in dealing with industrial-scale theft of intellectual property and sensitive information by China. The Kremlin also appears to have ignored warnings from Russian officials on the risks in reliance on Chinese technologies and the perils of granting Chinese telecommunications companies privileged access at the heart of Russia’s developing 5G telecommunications infrastructure.

In the short term, an increase in Chinese investment, telecommunications technology and markets for Russian natural resources will clearly provide significant economic benefits during the post-pandemic downturn. But Russia’s decision-makers should acknowledge that the current entente with China may not prove sustainable and they should be considering what will happen if their country’s strategic interests diverge from China’s.

The Russian–Chinese partnership is still best categorised as an ‘axis of convenience’ founded on mutual antipathy towards the US and a desire to counter US hegemony. But the key problem for Moscow is that the partnership is an increasingly asymmetrical one that is providing Beijing with expanded leverage over the Kremlin.

And by welcoming Chinese companies into Russian communications infrastructure, Moscow is also potentially providing Beijing with access to Russia’s critical national infrastructure in a way that will be difficult to wind back.

Somewhat ironically, as its relationship with Beijing has become more asymmetrical, Moscow has become more suspicious about Chinese motives and concerned about Beijing’s leverage over it. But this suspicion is nowhere evident in the decisions Moscow is taking on Chinese investment in Russian critical national infrastructure and collaboration on technology and the digital economy.

In time, Russia’s suspicions of China’s intentions may ultimately prove to be well founded and the Russian bear may find itself dancing to Beijing’s tune.

The year 2014 was just as significant as 1914. Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula elicited a weak response from the West and highlighted a larger strategic problem: the erosion of the liberal-democratic world order. The West failed to rise to the challenge of Russian resurgence and, since 2014, has all but shrugged at the notion that it must act to sustain the rules-based global order we created after World War II.

Paul Dibb’s recent ASPI report is an important addition to a rather limp debate on great-power warfare and the role of the Sino-Russian relationship in Australia’s strategic outlook. Dibb outlines the ways in which Russia and China are profiting from the West’s strategic disarray. He points to China in the South China Sea and Russia in Crimea as examples of coercion by Beijing and Moscow in their ‘natural sphere[s] of influence’.

These ventures are symptomatic of a bigger challenge than just Western (specifically, US) weakness. To our disadvantage, strategists in the West continue to focus on Russian and Chinese advances and obsess over tracking their parallels with the Cold War era.

But a more productive relationship between Russia and the West is possible, as history shows. Such a relationship will only ever be based on matters of mutual interest, so we shouldn’t hold our breath for a democratic Russia. Russia, for its part, hasn’t turned away from its traditional focus on Europe, and President Vladimir Putin’s ‘idea of Russian exceptionalism, of Russia’s unique Eurasian identity’ is not inherently anti-Western.

The Eurasian narrative in Russia predates soured Russia–West ties. Europe is vital to Russia’s energy industry as by far its largest export market for natural gas.

Dibb argues we should expect some (more) risk-taking behaviour from Putin’s Russia, noting ‘Russia might consider using military force in such places as Moldova and Kazakhstan’. While some grievances exist, both states are active participants of Russian-led collective security and economic blocs.

Kazakhstan is one of the six members of the ‘Eurasian NATO’—the Collective Security Treaty Organization. Any Russian aggression against Kazakhstan would be in contravention of Article 4 of the CSTO treaty that Moscow itself crafted. Putin has also applied valuable lessons learned from the EU experiment in forming the Eurasian Economic Union. Kazakhstan is a member of the EEU, and Moldova is seeking to integrate into the union and was the EEU’s first observer state. Moscow needs these institutions to work, so self-inflicted damage is unlikely.

This brings us to the question of whether a Russia–China military bloc will ‘inevitably affect the international security order, including by challenging the system of US-centred alliances in the Asia–Pacific and Europe’. Perhaps. But the international system is already shifting away from US-centred alliances without the help of an accord between Beijing and Moscow. In the West we have been complacent in protecting liberal democracy from wear and tear.

The argument that Russia and China are united in their disdain for the West is contestable. These authoritarian powers have actually benefited from the Western-led processes of globalisation and market liberalisation. Moscow and Beijing seek respect, notice and recognition from the West that they’re legitimate poles of power in a multipolar system.

Dibb’s argument that Russia and China are developing an ‘ever-closer friendship of convenience’ is apt. But there’s potential for a falling out. The relationship between Russia and China will be convenient until it is not. Dibb argues that Moscow and Beijing might take risks to ‘regain lost territories’. What, then, of the possibility that China will seek to regain lost territory in the Russian far east?

A final problematic assumption is that the West is still united as a bloc and that the very concept is still of use. The notion of ‘the West versus the rest’ is fitting for historical black-and-white assessments of the international environment. However, the contemporary landscape is not so neatly divided. The use of ‘grey zone’ tactics means a new framework for pondering our security outlook is needed.

And while it’s true that US dominance and power-projection capacities are in relative decline, both Moscow and Beijing harbour long-term fragilities at home. Demographically, they’re both in serious trouble. China will likely get old before it gets rich, and therefore its time at the ‘top’ strategically might be relatively short lived. Russia has similar population challenges, magnified by an increasing brain drain of migration out of the country.

The established international system is eroding and the risk of conflict may have increased. However, we must be careful not to miss the forest for the trees. Russia–China ties are closer than ever before and, yes, we should expect the two states to take advantage of the West’s strategic and ideological disarray.

But our response will be short sighted if it focuses on Russia and China alone, for Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping personify the profound transformation towards a multipolar order. There’s still time to reserve a seat at the leadership table for Western liberal democracy in this future international system.