Korybko To Shyam Saran: The Sino-Russo Entente’s Dynamics Are Different Than You Think

With all due respect to India’s former Foreign Secretary, his assessment of the Sino-Russo Entente’s dynamics is premised on assumptions and a heightened sensitivity towards the speculative strategic consequences of their recently strengthened ties.

Former Foreign Secretary and Honorary Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research Shyam Saran shared his thoughts about the Sino-Russo Entente in his latest op-ed at The Indian Express warning that “China is firmly in Russia’s corner – India needs to take notice”. He concludes that President Xi’s trip to Moscow late last month resulted in Russia becoming China’s junior partner, which could have serious security implications for India if Beijing forces Moscow to curtail its military exports to Delhi.

With all due respect to Saran, his assessment is premised on assumptions and a heightened sensitivity towards the speculative strategic consequences of their recently strengthened ties. He takes for granted that Russia will receive armed assistance from China, though no such aid has yet to be received and might never be dispatched. It’s also conjecture to conclude that China is shipping dual-use technology to Russia since the true origin of these reported imports is difficult to trace in today’s globalized world.

Saran unintentionally downplays the influence that threatened Western sanctions against China have had in restraining the People’s Republic on those two issues and thus far preventing it from crossing that de facto New Cold War bloc’s red lines. Although it’s true that Russia and China agreed to jointly accelerate the global systemic transition to multipolarity, they’re clearly going about it in different ways, with the first directly confronting the West while the latter remains reluctant to do so.

That’s not to say that China isn’t playing any role in this process, but rather that the dynamics of their Entente aren’t the same as Saran thinks. Beijing is building alternative financial and other platforms while Moscow is defending the integrity of its national security red lines in Ukraine after NATO clandestinely crossed them there. Their respective efforts are important, but the point is that they’re very different and thus incomparable, though there’s no doubt that they’re complementary.

Nevertheless, the shared pursuit of multipolar goals doesn’t pose a threat to other states with a stake in this future, only to the zero-sum interests of Western countries. India has nothing to fear from the recent strengthening of the Sino-Russo Entente since this actually unlocks a plethora of opportunities for it and Moscow. Those two’s decades-long strategic partnership is now unprecedentedly important in terms of maintaining a semblance of stability in the global systemic transition.

The strengthening of Russian-Indian ties in parallel with Russian-Chinese and Indian-US ones complements Moscow and Delhi’s respective balancing acts, thus preemptively averting their potentially disproportionate dependence on Beijing and Washington respectively. Far from resulting in Russia abandoning India in the military sense upon potential pressure from China, it’s actually expected to double down on their associated cooperation for this reason as well as to balance the Sino-Indo rivalry.

In the absence of solid Russian-Indian defense ties, China would be inclined to extend further credence to suspicions that India is the US’ “ally” against it, thus worsening their security dilemma. Instead, the People’s Republic sees for itself how strategically autonomous its South Asian neighbor is that it continues comprehensively expanding full-spectrum relations with Moscow in spite of Washington’s pressure upon it. This observation can comparatively assuage some of its growing security concerns.

One of the worst-case scenarios from Russia’s grand strategic perspective is the uncontrollable spiraling of the Sino-Indo security dilemma to the point of a large-scale conflict between its two BRICS partners, which could easily be exploited by the US to divide-and-rule them. India also wants to thwart that scenario from ever materializing since it could lead to it feeling pressured to surrender some of its hard-earned strategic autonomy to the US in exchange for vague security promises.

Just like Russia and China have shared interests in jointly accelerating the global systemic transition, so too do Russia and India have equally shared interests in jointly averting the aforesaid scenario of a large-scale Sino-Indo war, to which end they’re expected to double down on their defense cooperation. Any deterioration of their respective ties could radically alter China’s threat perception of India and prompt hardliners there to argue that they need to act first to thwart the US from exploiting it as a proxy.

The Sino-Russo Entente’s dynamics are therefore much more complicated than Saran portrayed them as. The Kremlin is triangulating between China and India, but those two are also triangulating in their own way too. China is balancing Russia and the West by accelerating the global systemic transition while being careful not to cross certain red lines that could prompt sanctions, while India is multi-aligning between Russia and the West in order to enhance its deterrence capabilities vis-à-vis China.

This complex crisscrossing of strategic interests is predicated on Russian-Indian relations remaining strong for the indefinite future since their comparative weakening could lead to everything quickly unraveling. Each would feel compelled to become China and the US’ junior partner correspondingly in that scenario, thus returning International Relations back to a bipolar-like system, with all that entails for everyone else’s strategic autonomy apart from those two superpowers’.

Russia and India won’t ever allow that to happen, hence the reason why it’s inaccurate to assess that either of them would let any third parties meddle in their relations. Moscow will do everything in its power to preemptively avert being placed in a position where Beijing might consider doing this just like Delhi will take care to do the same with respect to Washington, with each depending on the other for their complementary balancing acts to succeed.

Saran’s article doesn’t account for this complex geostrategic reality, which other astute and well-intentioned observers have yet to acknowledge as well, the reason being that it’s easier to subconsciously slip into over-simplistic assessments than to identify and explain deep nuances. Hopefully more experts will take note of the insight shared in this piece in order to produce upcoming works that more accurately reflect the dynamics between leading stakeholders in the global systemic transition.