Russian-Chinese pact to explore the moon highlights Moscow’s estrangement from the United States

Call it lunar politics.

This week, Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, signed an agreement with the Chinese National Space Administration, to create an international scientific lunar station “with open access to all interested nations and international partners”. It was the most dramatic sign yet that Moscow is considering its space future with China, not the United States, further underscoring its growing strategic alignment with Beijing.

It follows a quarter of a century of US-Russian space cooperation, launched by those who dreamed of post-Cold War reconciliation between Moscow and Washington. The highlight was the construction and operation of the International Space Station.

This week’s deal also marked an apparent rebuke of NASA’s invitation to Russia to join Project Artemis, named after Apollo’s twin sister, which aims to put the first woman and the next man on. moon by 2024. Together with international partners, Artemis would also explore the lunar surface more thoroughly than ever, using cutting-edge technology.

“They do not see their program as international, but similar to that of NATO,” laughed last year Dmitry Rogozin, the director general of Roscosmos, who had sneered a lot before in Brussels as a former Russian ambassador. with NATO. “We are not interested in participating in such a project.”

Rather than dwell on what this all means for the future of space, it may be more important for the Biden administration to reflect on how this latest news should be factored into its approach. emergence of Putin’s Russia.

President Biden has no illusions about Putin, showing that he will commit when he concludes it’s in the best interests of the United States and punishes if necessary. His first foreign policy victory was a deal with Putin to extend the new strategic arms limitation negotiations President Trump had abandoned.

That said, Biden also imposed new sanctions on Russia, in concert with the European Union, following the poisoning and then imprisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. It remains to be seen how the Biden administration will act on new or existing US sanctions against the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, the most active issue currently at stake that divides European and even German politics.

Whichever path Biden chooses, it would be wise not to compound the mistakes of previous administrations due to misperceptions about Russia’s decline or too singular an emphasis on Beijing.

“Putin does not exercise the same power as his Soviet predecessors in the 1970s or that Chinese President Xi Jinping exercises today,” writes Michael McFaul, President Obama’s US ambassador to Moscow, for Foreign Affairs. “But neither is Russia the weak and dilapidated state it was in the 1990s. It has reemerged, despite negative demographic trends and the retreat of market reforms, as one of the most powerful in the world – with much more and an ideological power that most Americans appreciate. ”

McFaul notes that Russia has modernized its nuclear weapons, unlike the United States, and has significantly improved its conventional military. Russia has the 11^e-the largest economy in the world, with a GDP per capita higher than that of China.

“Putin has also made major investments in space weapons, intelligence and cyber capabilities, which the United States has learned the hard way,” McFaul wrote, referring to the major cyber attack that came to light earlier this year after have entered several regions of the United States. government and thousands of other organizations.

At the same time, Putin is showing less restraint in the way he aggressively fights national opponents, challenges Western powers, and appears willing to take risks to achieve a dual motive: to restore Russia’s position and influence. and reduce that of the United States.

Henry Foy, the Financial Times’ Moscow bureau chief, presents this weekend a compelling story about today’s Russia under the headline “The Third Brutal Act of Vladimir Putin”.

Foy writes: “After 20 years during which the Putin regime was supported first by economic prosperity and then by pugnacious patriotism, his government has now shifted to repression as a central tool for maintaining power.”

The world saw him graphically in the poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and then his arrest upon his return to Russia after recovering in a German hospital. Foy also reports a “storm of laws” passed late last year that crack down on existing and potential opponents. The latest move came today (Saturday) as Russian authorities arrested 200 local politicians, including some of the top opposition figures, during a protest in Moscow.

Some see Putin’s increasingly ruthless dissipation and widespread arrests, amid the scale and scale of pro-Navalny protests, as a sign of Putin’s growing vulnerability.

Still others see his actions from the seizure of Crimea in 2014 to the latest apparent cyberattacks as proof of his enhanced capabilities. They warn of more brazen actions to come.

Both points of view are correct: Putin is more vulnerable and more capable at the same time. Its oppression at home and its assertion abroad are two sides of the same man.

So what to do?

The Atlantic Council, the organization where I am president and CEO, this week had an unusual public dust of voices from staff in conflict over the right course to follow in dealing with Putin’s Russia.

The arguments revolved around the important role that human rights concerns should play in shaping US policy towards Moscow.

Wherever this question is looked at, what is hard to dispute is that Russia’s growing strategic link with China, underscored by this week’s moon deal, is only one among a growing mountain of evidence that the Western approach to Moscow over the past 20 years has failed to produce the desired results.

What is urgent is a review by the Biden administration of Russia’s strategy that begins by acknowledging that misconceptions about Russia’s decline have obscured the need for a more strategic approach.

This should combine more attractive elements of engagement with more sophisticated forms of containment alongside partners. It will take patience and partners.

What is needed is a strategic context for the patchwork of actions and policies concerning Russia: new or existing economic sanctions regimes against Russia, potential response to the latest cyber attacks, more effective ways to counter disinformation, and a more creative response to Sino-Russian strategic growth. Cooperation.

Overreacting is never good policy, but Russia’s underestimation is, for now, the far greater danger.

The long-term goal should be what those at NASA hoped for 25 years ago: US-Russian reconciliation and cooperation. Then put it in the context of an entire Europe, free and at peace, where Russia finds its rightful place, the dream articulated by President George HW Bush a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Whatever Putin may wish for, it’s hard to believe the Russians wouldn’t even prefer this outcome to a Sino-Russian landing on the moon.

Frederick Kempe is a bestselling author, award-winning journalist and CEO of the Atlantic Council, one of America’s most influential global affairs think tanks. He worked at the Wall Street Journal for over 25 years as a foreign correspondent, deputy editor and senior editor of the newspaper’s European edition. His last book – “Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the World’s Most Dangerous Place” – was a New York Times bestseller and has been published in over a dozen languages. Follow him on Twitter @FredKempe and subscribe here to Inflection Points, his look every Saturday on top stories and trends from the past week.

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