Page 66 - BNE_magazine_bne_September 2019

66 Opinion bne September 2019
The majority of leaders at the G20 run illiberal regimes. MOSCOW BLOG:
Putin at work at the illiberal G20 summit
Ben Aris in Berlin
The common wisdom is that Russian President Vladimir Putin is all about tactics and doesn't have a strategy. But things have changed. The collapse of the west through US President Donald Trump abrogating control of the US and its descent into a debilitating partisan slugfest, while Europe is riven by the Brexit fiasco and split by rising illiberalism, has cleared the ground for Putin to get on with the work of building up Russia’s standing in the rest of the world – the bigger, more populous and now richer half of the globe.
While European leaders spent their time haggling over EU
job postings at the G20 and the US delegation did little more than show off Ivanka Trump's dress collection, Putin got on with some serious work in Osaka. He effectively took control of OPEC’s oil production targeting process and so has gained the power to set oil prices. He pulled Japan into Russia’s orbit by cutting an Artic LNG production investment deal. He confirmed a deal to sell S-400 surface to air missile systems with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the face of resolute US opposition. And those are the deals we know about.
For most of the last two decades Putin has been skillfully playing a weak hand, exploiting the cracks in the western alliance that has sprung up against him since the annexation of the
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Crimea in 2014. The general assumption has been that there is no substance to Russia’s foreign policies and they will go nowhere; eventually the Russian economy will stagnate and implode.
But that is increasingly looking like wishful thinking.
The op-eds predicting Russia’s imminent end have been
a permanent feature for years but they have become less frequent now the Russian economy is looking more robust than ever. True, growth remains anaemic and Putin’s plan to “transform” the economy with 12 national projects
“The US is isolated by Russia and China,” Putin quipped”
is off to a very poor start, but the fiscal fortress he has
built is now formidable. Russia has by far the most robust macroeconomic numbers of any major power while it has sanction-proofed the economy. Growth has been sacrificed for safety, which is causing Putin political problems at home as increasing numbers of ordinary Russians take to the streets to