Russia’s Use of the Instruments of Statecraft in the Indo-Pacific
FPRI launches a new report by Alexander Korolev that analyzes Russia’s use of statecraft to advance its interests in the Indo-Pacific region and China's perceptions.
The Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) recently launched a new report, Russia’s Use of the Instruments of Statecraft in the Indo-Pacific: Systemic Balancing and Regional Hedging, by Alexander Korolev. You can watch the virtual report launch with the author in the link above.
This report is the fourth installment of a five-part series examining Chinese and Russian influence and interests in the Indo-Pacific region, where author Alexander Korolev analyzes Russia’s use of diplomatic, military, and economic instruments of statecraft to advance its interests in the Indo-Pacific region and examines how China perceives it.
Key Points
Russia has utilized instruments of statecraft to maintain a two-level engagement pattern in the region—systemic balancing and regional hedging. At the level of systemic balancing, Russia unequivocally embraces China as an economic, military, and political ally to balance the United States or the West more broadly. However, at the level of regional hedging, Russia diversifies its economic, political, and security bets by engaging with China’s actual or potential adversaries and avoids explicitly taking one side at the obvious expense of another in regional disputes: Moscow hedges its bets between different states, including China, to maximize cooperation opportunities.
This two-level engagement pattern does not undermine Russia’s systemic alignment with China, but it reduces Moscow’s dependence on Beijing and makes the regional aspects of China-Russia relations more complex.
The intensification of US-China rivalry and the deterioration of China’s relations with India, Vietnam, and other Southeast Asian states are conducive to Russia maintaining this two-level pattern. The worsening US-China relations incentivize Beijing to consolidate its alignment with Russia.