A Different Future*

*Editor’s note: On March 4, 2022, Russia enacted a law that criminalizes public opposition to, or independent news reporting about, the war in Ukraine. The law makes it a crime to call the war a “war” rather than a “special military operation” on social media or in a news article or broadcast. The law is understood to penalize any language that “discredits” Russia’s use of its military in Ukraine, calls for sanctions or protests Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It punishes anyone found to spread “false information” about the invasion with up to 15 years in prison.

Vice Rector of the Russian Foreign Ministry Diplomatic Academy Oleg Karpovich,on the results of the Russian foreign minister’s visit to Laos and on why the West doesn’t like the Asiatic countries’ approach..

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov joined a negotiation-saturated series of events that took place in Laos under the auspices of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, confirming the that Moscow has chosen the correct path to bolster its presence in the Asiatic region. Of course, we have been working very closely with both ASEAN itself and separate members of this structure for a long time since the 2000s. However, inertia from the Perestroika times has ultimately directed our main foreign policy focus westward. At the instigation of a significant number of the financial and creative elites, many of whom have recently hurried to leave the country, people believed that the European path for Russia, reinforced by periodical restarts of our relationship with the U.S., had no alternative, and that NATO countries were waiting with open arms to integrate us into the community of “enlightened nations.”

History has demonstrated how naive this reasoning is. While the West launched a Russia-phobic campaign it had long prepared aimed at delivering a strategic defeat against the Russian Federation, the Asiatic countries, with rare exceptions, showed wisdom and balance in their approach to long-term mutual interests.

We can’t ignore the fact that, for the West, this situation has been an unpleasant surprise. Washington, having grown convinced of the power of the sanction arsenal, honestly believed that it could break the Asiatic leaders, forcing them to support its aggressive course of action. However, the U.S. faced significant resistance almost everywhere in Southeast Asia — apart from Singapore, which succumbed to mass hysteria in 2022. That’s why the American leadership doubled its efforts in pushing initiatives aimed at imposing bloc thinking upon the Asia-Pacific region.

By increasingly creating a network of alliances, including the intelligence alliance known as the Five Eyes, the military AUKUS bloc, and the somewhat more formless Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, the Joe Biden administration has tried to inject the spirit of the Cold War into Asia, which, at this moment, has already provoked a sharp confrontation in the Old World. Lavrov discussed it in detail in Laos, while at the same time, there are efforts being made to move the NATO infrastructure into the region, clearly aimed at both deterring Russia and preparing for a possible America-China clash.

The minister-level meeting between Russia and ASEAN and our minister’s speech at the events that took place during these days were in sharp contrast to the grim agenda of international politics coming from the collective West. On the one hand, being aware that the governments of Southeast Asia strive to implement a multi-vector policy, Moscow isn’t trying, like Washington, to put pressure on them and force them into a choice without any compromise. We come from the fact that the peaceful countries of the region, long designated a nuclear-free zone, strive to avoid conflict and are focused on economic cooperation — and in this field our mutual trade turnover has room to grow, to put it mildly.

On the other hand, Lavrov couldn’t possibly avoid mentioning global geopolitical problems in their regional dimension. We must understand that the U.S. is actively using the territorial disputes between China and some of its neighbors to form and expand a powerful anti-Beijing coalition, for example. At the next stage, having turned the ASEAN countries toward the struggle against China, the American manipulators hope to imbue them with anti-Russian sentiment as well. Moscow is acting ahead of the curve, explaining to the regional players both our position in the Ukrainian conflict and the risks of the global security crisis spreading to Asia.

In this field, promoting united and indivisible security in Eurasia, which will come to replace the archaic Western-centric approaches of the past, remains the most important work for our diplomats. In Europe, we were the first to encounter the deviant proponents of Western unipolarity who can’t accept the loss of their leadership and wh sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives to support their hegemony. The Ukrainian conflict will be only a prologue to more destructive and tragic events.

Our task is not only to warn our Asiatic partners about American policy, which views the crisis in Ukraine as a rehearsal for a large-scale hybrid war with China, but also to stop such a scenario by creating certain insurance mechanisms. It was clear from the careful remarks of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who arrived late in Laos, that the U.S. is slowly accepting the fact that its expansionist plans in the region, also thanks to Russian efforts, face some serious obstacles. The ASEAN countries are able to hear their allies and look at the prospects of both regional and international policy pragmatically.