US, Russian and Chinese moves mark the return of raison d’état

In the new era of global politics in which national interest eclipses all else, countries will inevitably provoke one another, giving rise to coalitions and a new global balance of power
Such an environment is hardly conducive to international cooperation and historically has led to full-scale conflict

Danil Bochkov

Published: 3:30am, 5 Jul 2022

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In today’s reality, it seems that power politics has replaced all other forms of interaction between global powers. As Hans Morgenthau frames it, “international politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power”, which means that whatever restrictions are placed on global powers, they will act by raison d’état.

This was practised in the 17th century by French statesmen Cardinal Richelieu and later popularised in Henry Kissinger’s magnum opus Diplomacy.

Bluntly, it stipulates that national interests override all other considerations of a legal or moral kind. In other words, as Kissinger writes, “raison d’état asserted that the well-being of the state justified whatever means were employed to further it”. Power politics and raison d’état are interconnected, since the promotion of national interests requires both accumulation and global spread of power.

However, it also naturally elicits a response from other states which, likewise seeking to defend their own interests, form coalitions, ultimately leading to the formation of a particular balance of power.

There is no limitation – legal or practical – to raison d’état, except for the physical capability of the country to enforce its own interests on other states. That is the main driver of global conflicts and wars.

When a balance is struck, a period of relative stability is ensured, as in the aftermath of each major global conflict, resulting in a new international system: the Peace of Westphalia (1648), the Congress of Vienna (1814–15), the Treaty of Versailles (1919) and the Paris Peace Conference (1919–1920), the Potsdam Conference (1945) and the current state of post-Cold War international relations which emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

As this timeline shows, the periods of relative stability can be long or short, but not everlasting.

So it goes today, when a new great power rivalry is unfolding globally. It is hard to pinpoint the origin of the deconstruction of the post-Cold War system. From a US perspective it might be either 2008 or 2014, associated with the Russia-Georgia and Russia-Ukraine conflicts respectively.

Moscow’s position was summed up by Russian President Vladimir Putin when he explained the rationale behind the “military operation” against Ukraine as a preventive measure against Nato expansion. It also echoes his speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference when he lambasted Nato enlargement and the United States’ monopolistic dominance.

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If Russia-US antagonism budded earlier, the Washington-Beijing rivalry is the product of recent years, rising to its current epic scale under the Trump and Biden administrations.

They reprimanded China for alleged misbehaviours ranging from trade and economic practices to its proactive foreign policy, rising military and technological might, maritime claims, and human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Hong Kong.

Under US President Joe Biden’s foreign policy, Russia-China strategic cooperation was packaged as a unified security threat. Hence, the ideological basis for confrontation has been laid, presented in the form of a fight between democracy and authoritarianism.

Now the US, China and Russia are guided in their foreign policy manoeuvres by national interest or raison d’état – a pattern of state behaviour which in all the aforementioned historic instances led to full-scale conflict.

Even if the threat of a “nuclear autumn” may limit the scale to some local military encounters, sooner or later new parameters for an international system will be laid out. And they will obviously be derived from the final distribution of power being worked out now.

The US has ramped up its diplomatic overtures on both the Indo-Pacific and Euro-Atlantic fronts to coalesce alliances against Russia and China. Collectively, Moscow and Beijing have just been confronted during G7 and Nato summits.

If last year Nato for the first time viewed China as a “security challenge”, this year Beijing secured its own paragraph in an update of Nato’s 2010 “Strategic Concept”, which also described the Russia-China “deepening strategic partnership” as running counter to its values and interests.

It is noteworthy that this year’s Nato summit was also for the first time attended by non-Atlantic states such as Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea, which caused a lot of resentment in a Beijing increasingly wary of the US building an Asian version of Nato in the Indo-Pacific.

US President Joe Biden (centre) flanked by US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken sits with South Korea’s President Yoon Suk-Yeol (left) and Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida during a meeting on the sidelines of the Nato summit, in Madrid on June 29. Photo: AFP

For this reason, Russia and China promote alternative platforms of non-Western states, which naturally contributes to the formation of an alternative to the US-led global order.

After securing membership to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation last year, Iran, together with Argentina, has just applied to join what is transforming into BRICS+, or to use a term recently coined by speaker of the Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, the “new G8”.

Despite Western pressure, Russia’s international isolation has not materialised, with Indonesian President Joko Widodo going against US recommendations and officially inviting Putin to attend the G20 summit in Bali this November.

Whose world? What order? Time has passed for West to call the shots

Symbolically, a new period in international relations has already been signified by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who said on June 30 that the “Iron Curtain” was lowering again, echoing former British prime minister Winston Churchill’s 1946 speech marking the onset of the Cold War.

The period of intensive globalisation which manifested in the post-Cold War era is over. The new structure of global relations that is forming is likely to be less liberal and more nation-oriented, with ad hoc coalitions of like-minded states and struggles for sovereignty in all areas from culture and technology to trade and economics, with the latter being intensified by the disruption of supply chains following the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Although such isolationism might be less efficient than plurality and cooperation, it is dictated by the current predominance of raison d’état thinking in all the major global capitals.

Danil Bochkov is an expert at the Russian International Affairs Council