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10 hours agoRussia is even more fucked up than just a capitalist country. Like the infrastructure itself there are some institutions which retain a lot of influence from the USSR, Kremlin + central bank nonwithstanding, which is why I recommend Samir Amin’s book abt the transition to and out of the Soviet mode of production. The MoD has had a major role in the economic planning of the country and it’s not academically bought-out by the west. Its influence grows the longer the conflict in the Ukraine and soon the arctic progresses
Although Russia is still a bit of a neoliberal hellhole, it has a lot of institutions, trade relations, and physical infrastructure which are holdovers from the USSR, and its MoD’s separate academic tradition & role in economic decisions + renationalized control of nuclear industry, oil etc sets it apart from more compliant states. At this point Russia has far more economic links to Asia than the western world. Of course if they’d been given the opportunity United Russia gooners would have gone for a subimperialist relationship with US + Europe and not bothered with all of this developmentalism stuff, but it’s really just too large and independent for that to be permitted, making Russia the primary example of an entity the west cannot lay siege to. Lot of Russian poli sci and foreign relations teach people to make decisions based on a kind of mnemonic policy sentimentalism backed by unanalytical historical (including Solzhenitsyn-tier sources so) analogies, they’ve got annoying war on terror Israel policy. They have copied a lot of China’s foreign relations because it produces political stability + reduces foreign diplomatic pressure (independent allies can’t be easily coerced), healthy trade relationships, stable skilled workforces to build industrial capacity that can travel abroad for training, low cost of labor through infrastructure rather than exploitation, creating military self-sufficiency + providing training & technology transfers rather than overburdening yourself through suppling military aid to an isolated country. They don’t have contrary foreign policy building isolated blocs that they attempt to build up into semi-self-sufficient partners, there is a mutual interest in constructing international institutions + law (which mostly de facto dont exist, coalition of the willing rules based yadda yadda) and opposing unilateral sanctions. Instead of picking different countries in the periphery to sponsor they have a mutual interest in Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Sahel states, etc are able to develop. KPRF is a lame socdem party but they pressured Kremlin for intervention to stop the aggression against DPR and LPR, and have been successful in ways that the western union/antiwar protest left has not. Like Latam socdems there is more potential for something there because it’s not organizing labor aristocrats & humanities washouts, it’s in the global semiperiphery
I’m not ragging on people, many developmental, human, and theoretical advancements were all made possible by the USSR, it’s just important to see why it was in a position to be disassembled & how some of its institutions persisted, and how it was unable to uproot imperialism, why there was a doctrinal split with China (which made mistakes too). So with all that out of the way, China and Russia now have no reason to go through a diplomatic or military confrontation, and since they’re so economically + militarily interdependent, they have a zillion ways to quash anything before it comes to blows. Even simply postponing the signing of a new bilateral cooperation agreement or not incentivizing tourism would be a stage of escalation in the event of a dispute. Most likely we’ll see more pressure against Russia from across the arctic circle & from eastern Euros + Scandinavians, not Russia working against China and Southeast Asian countries. Russians - even the more 4th positionist/neolib-nationalist-style Russians - are genuine about economic crosslinking, problem is their western-academia-brain-poisoned leadership has been slow to recognize how essential it is + how little western countries will compromise on their mission to undevelop & privatize the natural resources of every global south country & keep their trade links linear + how much allies like Iran & central Asia states need support in order to make international law real for the first time
China and Russia have completely different foreign policy than Cold War China and the USSR, there’s been no sign of friction over China maintaining attitude of neutrality re: Ukraine, they are increasingly collaborating on infrastructure + involved in each other’s supply chains. There’s plenty of other stuff to worry about. I just don’t see any series of events leading to tensions