The distribution of power and influence among the world’s major nations has been disturbed ever since February 24, 2022. Russia, China, the United States and Europe are in state of disequilibrium that makes it difficult to foresee the consequences of ordinary, previously established strategies of foreign policy as practiced by the major nations.
To state the case in its most simple form, statesmen cannot predict what will follow from even simple and ordinary policy actions that in the past were enacted in the ordinary course of international relations. Just as in finance, uncertainty results in mistakes and losses of a kind that are costly and obscure to even the most sophisticated practitioner-policymaker.
The causes have been several. First was the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. Second was the partial mutiny in Russia led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the man who controls the private army called the Wagner Group.
While some members of that military group are now in Belarus, since 2017 as many as 5,000 of then have been used as an active foreign-policy instrument for Russia, operating and earning “protection money” in a half-dozen nations in Africa, where they have been active mercenaries.
Third is the tilt toward, if not support for, at least an absence of criticism of, Russia on the part of China.
Fu Cong, China’s ambassador to the European Union, says China’s support for both Europe and Russia is “endless.” Lu Shaye, China’s ambassador to France, stated that countries that emerged from the former Soviet Union may not be fully independent because “there is no international agreement to materialize their status as a sovereign country.”
An adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Mykhailo Podolyak, said China is not a “major political player” so long as it supports Russia’s explanation of the invasion.
The events listed above have altered the effectiveness of a number of foreign-policy practices on the parts of various players. Several other students of policy have noted major changes. I will here list some effects noted by others, and then make my own contribution by drawing attention to what might be a small, but still potentially significant, event along with its possible consequences.
I suggest this apparently small factor might be exploited by one or another daring and imaginative national leader in a way that could bring about a universally celebrated breakthrough in the general state of worldwide foreign-policy affairs.
I will write about the Wagner Group’s temptation to interfere with the smooth functioning and future profitability of China’s investments in Africa, and how the US could unwisely use the ensuing situation to restore to itself some of its former influence on the “Dark Continent.”
Other strategic thinkers have noted that the collection of events under discussion have caused Russian President Vladimir Putin to lose some of his previous reputation as an astute military leader who, for example, was able to restore Russia’s Sebastopol seaport (it was made the Black Sea home port for the Russian fleet in 1804 after Alexander I fortified the town), recapture Georgia, and cause the Baltic nations to worry about their sovereignty.
Moreover, when the Wagner forces began their march toward the Kremlin, there was no outpouring of domestic support for Putin’s cause.
China’s ability to create a certain amount of trade and investment antagonism and jealousy between the US and Europe, and soften the impact the American anti-China strategies, was much diminished as the Europeans “rallied around” Ukraine and showed their disapproval of China’s solidarity with the Russian invaders.
That seems to have taken away some of President Xi Jinping’s reputation as an astute player, able to offset American sanctions by playing off the Western nations against one another.
These points have been made by others.
An unnoticed subtle problem is raised by noting that the Wagner Group has a foothold in Africa. Wagner is almost certainly cut off from its line of financial support previously supplied by Russian entities controlled by Putin. But Africa is full of economic opportunities available to players who are tough enough to demand payoffs for “good behavior.”
Unfortunately for China, money, gold, diamonds, valuable tradable commodities, raw materials and political influence extracted from African entities that are connected to China by way of investments, military agreements, trade contracts and other forms of the New Brand of tightly focused neocolonialism invented by China’s international players, will require payments to Wagner out of sources that until recently have been totally devoted to serving the interests of their Asian investors.
Enter the USA
American policy toward China has become bipartisan and aggressive to the point of near-hostility. US policymakers may very well see the Wagner forces as friendly insofar as they may become a tactical policy tool able to irritate, perhaps to frustrate China’s need for commodity inputs essential for future economic progress inside China’s industrial infrastructure.
Moreover, since 2009 China has superseded the US as Africa’s main investor, de facto mentor if not neocolonial influencer.
The radical but naive American “experts” for whom President Joe Biden is a kind of hand puppet, made out of old socks and faded ribbons, do not think in sophisticated, long-run terms.
They are likely to press ahead with existing anti-China policies, and eschew any idea that suggests that offering some easing of the cross-Pacific state of tension might induce China to pressure Russia, pushing it toward something like a ceasefire in Ukraine.
And so I come to my suggested way to use the African situation as a hidden way for America to help China with an irksome problem. In recognition of that help, the Chinese might see some kind of payoff for them in the case where they, at a minimum, cease their implicit support for the Russian invasion.
China could push for a Korea-style armistice in Ukraine, overseen or at least promoted by Beijing, as a way to restore some of its influence over Europe, and put an end to the self-inflicted exile from international events that currently limits China’s scope for action in trade relations.
Perhaps it is an idea too classically geopolitical, too Machiavellian, for President Xi and his cohort. But it has the potential to change today’s loss of international presence for China, while it also makes it possible for Xi to establish himself as very much the senior partner in respect of influence along his 4,250-kilometer-long border with his demoted neighbor.
A China-managed Ukranian armistice will produce its own set of uncertainties, and a changed international order. Perhaps it is only a 19th-century small-l liberal idea (that diplomacy is better than war), but after all, as measured by the mortality stats, the 19th century looks peaceable compared with numbers for the 20th, and its advocate, illiberal hardliner Friedrich Nietzsche.
Tom Velk is a libertarian-leaning American economist who writes and lives in Montreal, Canada. He has served as visiting professor at the Board of Governors of the US Federal Reserve system, at the US Congress and as the chairman of the North American Studies program at McGill University and a professor in that university’s Economics Department.