Rise of the economic pygmies a threat we must recognise

Vladimir Putin has bolstering Russia’s arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons. Picture: AP.

Two months after US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis announced that conflict between the great powers had replaced Islamic terrorism as the greatest threat to US national security, Russia’s Vladimir Putin has neatly underscored the point.

The attempted murder of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia is not so much a case of statecraft-by-other means, as a Corleone-style mafia hit. I’m no Russia expert, but it seems if Putin really wanted to keep his fingerprints off the whole grisly affair he probably wouldn’t have used a bespoke chemical weapon developed by the USSR and possessed only by Russia. Even in the land of Sherlock Holmes, it’s something of a giveaway. Presumably the point was to send a message: betray the mother country and we will come after you. Oh, and we’ll get your kids too.

UK Counter Terrorism police are now investigating 14 suspicious deaths involving Russian émigrés on British soil. It seems the Kremlin’s death squads have been busier than we thought.

Elsewhere, Putin is bolstering Russia’s arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons as a means of gaining battlefield advantage on the cheap. I say cheap because Russia’s revanchism plays from a pathetically low base. Russia is a mess. It has an economy the size of Italy’s. Its population is ageing. More than 20 million of its citizens — nearly 14 per cent — live below the poverty line. The shale gas revolution has placed a permanent cap on oil prices. Russia’s prospects are bleak and getting bleaker. There is no chance of it becoming a peer competitor to the United States.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t matter much. One of the great disruptions to statecraft over the last century has been the rise of the small power. In a world of tanks and trenches it used to be that a country could only be as threatening as its size, location and industrial base allowed. Today, economic pygmies like North Korea can wield influence vastly disproportionate to their size thanks to nuclear weapons, cyber technology and vast stores of deadly chemical agents like VX and Sarin.

In our own region, Beijing has been militarising the South China Sea, buying influence and strategic leverage across the region through its belt and road initiative and cheerfully purchasing as many Australian politicians as money can buy. Last week the Chinese congress formally abolished presidential term limits, clearing the way for premier Xi Jingping to be autocrat-for-life.

It is too great a stretch to compare a peaceful international actor like China with an outlier like Russia, but the portents are ominous. Say what you will about the chaos of the Trump administration, it seems Mattis was onto something.

We are living in an era of strategic transition. The world is reverting to a more dangerous age, one where the risk of conflict is probably lower, but the costs are higher. Russia, China, North Korea and Iran represent a challenge to the international order on a scale that has not been seen for thirty years. What’s more, all these countries know precisely where they are going, while for years Washington’s own priorities have been adrift.

Fortunately that seems to be changing. The Trump administration has brought renewed focus to US foreign policy. Trump’s National Security Strategy of last year dispensed with the liberal platitudes of the Obama-era — that climate change is a first-order security threat, that the Israel-Palestine dispute is the greatest barrier to Middle East peace and, most pernicious of all, that prolonged exposure to international liberal norms will see countries like China, Russia and Iran eventually adopt them.

The president’s ridiculous tweets aside, the signs are Washington is finally looking at the world with the steely realism needed for the times.