South Sudan’s Chief Mediator, Pagan Amum, Criticizes China’s “too cautious” Diplomacy in Conflict Between the Two Sudans

Russia is often, and sometimes justifiably, presented as something of a prickly and irascible presence on the international stage, a kind of global equivalent of an old man shouting “get off my lawn!” to the group of kids playing baseball in front of his house. Sometimes this is the result of non-cooperation on matters that actually do have something of a rough international consensus: as I’ve written before Russian intransigence on Syria strikes me as particularly ill-advised since Assad is almost certainly going to be defeated when everything is said and done. It certainly appears that in the case of Syria Russia is motivated purely by the most cynical considerations imaginable including weapons sales, the use of a military base, and a general desire to play the spoiler to any Western diplomatic and military initiatives.

However I want to, cautiously, advance a different, competing notion: that while Russia’s foreign policy is self interested to the extent that any state’s foriegn policy is, by definition, self interested, its obstinate refusal to countenance sanctions and armed intervention is not purely the result of a cruel and cowardly realpolitik (one that uses whatever justification it can lay its hands on) but is actually the product of a very different conception of how the world works and how states are likely to respond to different incentives. This outlook is not without its own blind spots and weaknesses (just in case anyone thinks I’m acting as a blanket defender of Moscow let me re-re-iterate that I find some of their diplomatic stances to be unconscionable) but it does contain certain lessons that we would be loathe to ignore. The West, in general, seems to be far too enamored of using sticks and to resort to punitive measures without first exhausting other options.

Consider, for a moment, Russia’s policy towards Sudan, which is every bit as opposed to intervention and sanctions as you might expect based on Russia’s track diplomatic record. As far as I can tell, if Russia had a purely self-interested and inconsistent approach to diplomacy, an approach that adopted a justification post-facto and in which policy in one situation did not necessarily bear any relation to policy in another situation,  then it would actively encourage Western sanctions and do everything it could to drive up tensions. Why? Although neither Sudan nor its new Southern neighbor are particularly large oil producers, their combined production is only about 500,000 barrels a day, Russia has a clear economic interest in keeping oil prices at the highest level possible. If both Sudans were under stringent international sanctions regimes, this would remove their supply from market and, more generally, create uncertainty and risk about the ability to develop their reserves (after the end of the Sudanese civil war, oil exploration picked up noticeably). Removing Sudanese oil from the world market wouldn’t cause a huge rise in prices, but since Russia’s budget is so heavily dependent on oil and gas revenues, every little bit helps: even a $1 rise in the price of oil per barrel is a significant boon to a country that produces over 10 million barrels a day.

It would this appear that Russian opposition to sanctions in Sudan is not purely a self-interested act or ploy, but actually reflects a comprehensive understanding of diplomacy and statecraft, one very different from our own, that is predicated above all else on the understanding that the first order of business for any regime is survival. That is why places like Cuba, or Myanmar, or Saddam-era Iraq do not simply roll over and play dead once they’re put under a sanctions regime, because their first order of business is simply to continue in power. There’s also the fact that political opposition within poor countries with state-dominated economies tends to weaken, not strengthen, as a result of sanctions – largely because the regime and its supporters have control of and priority access to vital resources. Thus Lavrov’s description of sanctions as “unproductive,” which to the typical American must sound either bizarrely naive or downright evil, isn’t necessarily as crazy as we might think.

Russia’s essentially blanket prohibition on sanctions might not be the most morally laudatory position in the entire world, and certainly has a certain amount of self-interest in it since Russia would like to avoid ever being targeted by such sanctions, but it’s not ipso facto irrational when you look at how sanctions have impacted the real world behavior of other less-than-savory regimes. Consider the United State’s decades long embargo of the Castro regime in Cuba: how effective has that been at modifying the regime’s behavior or at making it more predisposed towards American interests? It’s certainly helped keep the island even poorer than it would otherwise have been, but in its main goal of weakening Castro’s dictatorship it has been a spectacular, resounding failure.

Will Russia play a constructive role in averting open war between Sudan and South Sudan? I have my doubts, but it certainly remains possible. What I do think is important though is that although Russia appears to us to be constantly stonewalling valuable and important interventions, this is a viewpoint that is not necessarily shared by other countries.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/markadomanis/2012/05/01/russian-policy-towards-sudan-and-syria-genuine-diplomacy-or-unmatched-cynicism/