Russia, the Green New Deal, and the 2020 Presidential election

Juan Cole writes about why Vladimir Putin views a Green New Deal - more broadly a meaningful, practical strategy to move away from fossil fuels - as a serious threat to Russian economic and political power in Why the Russian Petro-state is actually terrified of a Bernie Sanders Presidency: The Green New Deal Informed Comment 02/23/2020:

Noting that Putin mocks warnings about the danger of global climate change with comments like, “the way technology is today, without raw hydrocarbons, without nuclear power, without hydroelectric power, mankind can simply not survive, cannot preserve its civilisation”.

Putin isn’t actually afraid of people becoming cave men. He is afraid of his economy radically shrinking if people get off oil and gas. Petroleum and natural gas comprised 65 percent of Russian exports in 2018, and account for 40 percent of its gross domestic product. Although its Soviet past and its military-industrial complex make Russia a significant global player, it is actually just a petro-state like Saudi Arabia. It is only 11th among world economies, and lies amid South Korea, Spain, Canada and Brazil. Not, in other words, in the same league as the US, China and Japan.

The rise of green energy and electric vehicles has the potential to make Russia plummet on down to a level of GDP below that of Mexico and more like the Netherlands, which only has a tenth of its population. I.e., if you took away the 40 percent of GDP that is oil and natural gas, Russia’s gross domestic product would fall to less than $1 trillion annually.

The US GDP is $21.4 trillion annually. One of the reasons Russia is so nervous about its world standing and is willing to spend enormous sums to be in countries like Syria is that economically it has fallen from being a peer superpower with the United States to having a smaller economy than Canada or Brazil, and is in danger of becoming Holland. (Holland is rich per capita because its GDP is only divided by 17 million people, not Russia’s 144.5 million. [my emphasis]

With that in mind, it's easier to contextualize a report like this on from one of the top reporters on Russia in America, Julia Ioffe, Why Exactly Does Putin Love Bernie? GQ 02/23/2020. The title is misleading, because what her article explains is that what Russia is most likely trying to do with election meddling is to promote divisions. Or, as one of her sources calls it, "chaos".

One of her sources is Marc Polymeropoulos, who she identifies as "a recently retired CIA agent who, after the 2016 election, was tasked with pushing back on Russian covert operations around the world." Gleb Pavlovsky is another, "a political scientist who used to advise Putin." Also included is Igor Yurgens, "president of the Institute of Contemporary Development, and a former advisor to erstwhile Russian president Dmitry Medvedev." And Andranik Migranyan, "who used to run a Russian government-funded think tank attached to the Russian mission to the U.N."

Reading an article like this is a bit like watching a cop show. Are these sources telling the truth as they understand it? Or are they promoting some particular story line they would like the reporter to spread? Or do they assume that Ioffe will assume they are trying to deceive her and giving her a more-or-less accurate story so she or her readers would find it dubious? Or maybe they don't entirely know what they are talking about? Or some other convoluted variation of deception and manipulation?

This is where Cole's reminder about Russia's actual situation is important: a regional power who is jockeying for a better power position in a situation where China is becoming the world's leading power and the US, Europe, and everybody else is trying to decide what kind of international arrangements will maximize their possibilities.

Pavlovsky says that Putin's government likes Sanders because they see him as “a soft pro-Putinist.” Yurgens thinks the Russian government wants Trump to win and thinks Sanders will be a particularly weak opponent. Migranyan, though, says, "“I don’t think anyone really respects or values Sanders here [Russia].” And he gives this headscratcher of an elaboration:

“It’s like a knife in the throat,” he went on. “The things Sanders says even Russian communists would be too scared to say. He is a real communist. I always said to Americans, ‘Your brilliant future is our horrible past.’ We collapsed into nothing because of Communism, and now this is the dream that Sanders is offering - and a big part of your country is following him into the abyss.”

Polymeropoulos stresses the desire to sow "chaos". And Ioffe quotes a Russian political scientist, Ekaterina Schulmann, saying, "I suspect that, for our people [at the top], Sanders looks like the mad professor from ‘Back to the Future'. “Which is why he’s very convenient for starting a pan-American brawl. Let them all fight each other while we lay another gas pipeline somewhere!”

I don't think there is any reason to assume that Putin's oligarchic authoritarian Russia is any more adapt at influencing American internal politics than the old Soviet Union was. You don't have to look at many of the regime-change operations the US has undertaken to wonder how adapt Putin's government would be as anything so complicated as such an operation in the US. The US government has the duty to enforce American laws against foreign interference in our elections. But whether the Russians are effective in what they are attempting is a different matter.

From what I've seen of the documentation that has come out on the 2016 Russian interference, I assume that causing confusion was the most likely Russian goal. From the analyses I've seen, I would guess that the Russians assumed that Clinton would win and they hoped to weaken her politically by trying to make the vote in 2016 as close as they could. And maybe I'm overestimating the competence of the Russian spooks. But would Putin and his intelligence officials really have wanted to select such a bizarre "loose cannon" character as Donald Trump as his American counterpart?

Leaving aside how effective the Russian interference attempts actually were - something very difficult to measure accurately - it's clear that Russia would see a power advantage for itself by weakening the NATO alliance and the EU. So isolationist policies in the US and nationalist, anti-EU policies by governments in Europe would increase Russia's relative power in Europe.

The strangest of the responses Ioffe elicited was that from Pavlovsky, who said that Sanders "is a real communist." Good Lord, not even the pundits on FOX News actually believe that! (Chris Matthews could be that far gone, though.)

But, as Paul Waldman writes in Why Putin Wants Trump to Win American Prospect 02/24/2020:

After 2016, Russia knows that they can meddle in American politics without any real consequence, and for a relatively modest investment. And just think of what Vladimir Putin will get from four more years of a Trump presidency. The institutions of American democracy will be degraded and discredited, as Trump systematically dismantles everything that makes our system an example to people wishing their own countries could be less corrupt and more committed to the rule of law. Putin - along with dictators everywhere - will be only too happy to watch it crumble.

Which brings us back to Russia and green measures to address the climate change crisis. Bernie Sanders is serious about a Green New Deal. Donald Trump opposes even long-standing and effective anti-pollution measures. So Pavlovsky's dumb characterization of Sanders is more likely to reflect the real hostility of Putin to Sanders' policies.

As always with US policy toward Russia, I consider it extremely important that both countries realize their common as well as their diverging interests, the most urgent of which is nuclear arms control, including nonproliferation. Despite Putin's backward-looking position on climate change, the fossil fuel era is ending and its very much in Russia's interest to make that transition a successful one. Obviously, espionage and information operations by both countries will always have an antagonistic element. We see now in the Middle East instances of Russian and American interests converging and diverging. Both countries stand to benefit greatly from having a government in Washington that (1) takes foreign policy seriously; (2) has a constructive and coherent approach to the Middle East; and, (3) isn't infected with hacks, idiots, and criminals.