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Opinion
July 12, 2019 www.intellinews.com I Page 23
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 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 anemic and Putin’s plan to “transform” the economy with 12 national projects 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 protest against smelly landfills, but with a triple surplus the Kremlin has the money to buy its way out of trouble and has launched a wide ranging, if as yet inefficient and ineffective, reform programme to deal with the biggest problems. The planned RUB27 trillion spending programme over the next six years
has yet to have any material impact on ordinary people’s lives, but economists all believe that these effects will start making themselves felt in the second half of this year to some extent.
Putin is increasingly finding himself on the
right side of the story as the world changes
with the rise of the emerging markets. He is not alone in mistrusting the US, which he clearly
has written off as an unreliable partner since
it unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) in 2002. That drove Russia into China’s arms, but Russia took most of
the heat until recently. Trump's trade war with China has brought Beijing into open conflict with Washington. And China’s President Xi Jinping and Putin now stand shoulder to shoulder in defying the US hegemony.