PATRICK LAWRENCE: The US-Russia Summit
June 14, 2021
Two recent moves on Moscow's side suggest that the encounter in Geneva will
mark the start of a long and welcome process.
Geneva, with Lake Geneva in background. (Alexey M, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia
Commons)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
Curious it was to read that the Russian judiciary ruled last Wednesday that
Alexei Navalny's political network is an extremist movement. Its members
should be grateful that the courts recognized it as a movement, given
Navalny's nationwide support has never exceeded 3 percent or so, but on
paper they are now liable to arrest and prosecution and, if convicted of one
or another charge, could be fined or imprisoned.
There have been no arrests, so far as has been reported. But think of all
those chances Western intel agencies and their clerks in the press may now
have to lionize a new cohort of oppositionists as Navalny's heroic
followers. Let us not forget, a kooky poseur journalist named Oleg Kashin
had the nerve to call Navalny "Russia's true leader" in a recent New York
Times opinion piece.
There is no limit to the silliness in all matters Russian, it seems. At
least not at the Times.
I say "curious" because, in the ordinary conduct of statecraft as we have
had it for the past seven decades, the Moscow's court's ruling, exactly a
week prior to President Joe Biden's first summit with President Vladimir
Putin, would have to be counted obtuse. Wouldn't minding one's manners -
especially given that the Navalny network's significance resides solely in
the minds and news pages of Western propagandists - be the wise course?
I don't think so. I have no clue as to the independence or otherwise of the
Russian judiciary, but it is unthinkable the Russian leader did not know in
advance of what the courts were about to determine. I think Russia was
indeed minding its manners - a different and altogether more honorable set
of manners than American pols and diplomats have exhibited lo these many
decades.
In a sensible read, the court ruling was a calculated gesture in response to
Biden's commitment, announced during a Memorial Day speech, to confront
Putin in Geneva on June 16 with the question of human rights in the Russian
Federation. "We will not stand by and let him abuse those rights," saith the
man from Scranton.
We will not stand by, Moscow replied in so many words, as you grandstand at
Russia's expense. Recall in this connection, Sergei Lavrov, Russia's foreign
minister, has lately made it a habit to note that Moscow is monitoring human
rights in the U.S. since the Jan. 6 protests at the Capitol. "We have no
taboo topics," Lavrov said in evident response to Biden's speech. "We will
discuss whatever we think is necessary."
Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, left, and President Vladimir Putin
meeting with China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi, 2017. (President of Russia)
It would be very wrong to take this matter as a passing spat as the Russian
and American presidents find their feet with one another. In my view, the
court judgment last week and Lavrov's remarks on human rights as a two-way
street make the Geneva encounter far more important than it may have
otherwise turned out to be.
Five Principles
To understand this, we must go back and back and back some more until we
reach the early 1950s, when newly independent India and newly socialist
China were working out how two very large neighbors ought best to conduct
their relations. It was while negotiating a bilateral agreement on this
question in 1953 that Zhou Enlai, Mao's cultured, subtle, farsighted
premier, first articulated his Five Principles, the ethical code by which
the People's Republic would conduct its relations with all nations.
These were incorporated into the Sino-Indian Agreement of 1954 and have been
justifiably well-known since. Note that four of the five have to do with
respectful conduct and parity:
- Mutual respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty;
- Mutual nonaggression;
- Noninterference in the internal affairs of other nations;
- Equality and mutual benefit among nations;
- Peaceful coexistence.
A year after New Delhi and Beijing signed their accord, Zhou's principles
were reiterated at the historically monumental conference of nonaligned
nations Sukarno hosted at an Indonesian hill station called Bandung. When
the Non-Aligned Movement was formally constituted six years after that, the
Five Principles effectively became the non-West's statement - of aspiration,
of intent - to the West: This is what we have to offer the postcolonial
world, the NAM said in so many words. This is our contribution to a new and
peaceable world order. This is how we will manage our relations with others.
The Grand Mosque of Bandung, Indonesia, with its twin minarets, adjacent to
the city square in Asia-Afrika Street, 2008. (Prayudi Setiadharma, Wikimedia
Commons)
The United States never had any time for the NAM. As readers of a certain
age will recall, it dismissed the movement, with-us-or-against-us style, as
a badly dressed bunch of crypto-Communists or Soviet dupes. The decades
since are an easy lesson in why Washington took this utterly awful position:
It has not once, not in any given year, observed even one of Zhou's
principles. It has always, in any given year, abused all five.
Vladimir Putin
One may admire or detest Vladimir Putin, but he is undeniably possessed of
an excellent grasp of history, as many of his speeches attest. I doubt he
thinks very specifically about the NAM or Zhou's principles, but, without
naming them, these are what he will have on the table when he meets Joe
Biden.
This is the meaning of the oddly timed court judgment against Navalny's
apparatus and the message Lavrov conveyed in response to Biden's Memorial
Day speech: Internal affairs are to be resolved internally.
Geneva will mark the start of a long and welcome process. Its importance
will lie in its formalization of a stance Russia - and China, too - have
adopted since those two catastrophically stupid mistakes Biden and Secretary
of State Blinken made last March, when Biden called Putin a murderer and
tin-eared Blinken hollowly lectured the Chinese about human rights and
democracy.
President Joe Biden in Oval Office, April 27. (White House, Adam Schultz)
Beijing and Moscow have ever since stiffened their backs toward the U.S.,
giving as good as they get on all the questions with which Washington
customarily browbeats others.
If we have begun a process, where will it lead? In my read to an excellent
place, where nations mind the better set of manners noted above - Zhou
Enlai's manners, let us say.
Before this century is out, and very possibly before the midway mark, Zhou's
Five Principles stand to become the norm in international relations. Zhou's
true topic was parity between West and non-West. This will be achieved, and
strange it is that the opening months of the Biden administration have
opened us to this salutary prospect. The U.S. will otherwise lead us all
into an egregiously messy period of history, and I do not think rising
powers - Russia, China, India, others - will find this acceptable.
One other matter must be clarified as Geneva approaches.
I do not know the merits of the case against Navalny or, since last week,
the ruling against his followers. But I have always found it curious that
The New York Times and the other major dailies recite as rote that Navalny
and his people consider the two charges of embezzlement (and the two
convictions) that put him in jail in the first place to be "trumped up" or
"politically motivated." Why doesn't the Times' Moscow bureau do the gumshoe
work and inform readers whether or not this is so?
True, Times' Moscow correspondents are among the worst in my lifetime, but
this kind of kabuki requires one to consider carefully whether the charges
are indeed legitimate. My read: The legal case against Navalny probably
holds water, and the American press uses the power of omission to avoid
acknowledging this.
Pitiful, if this is the case.
The larger point here: We must learn to put all such questions aside in
contexts such as we have now in U.S.-Russia relations. Anyone who has ever
been in a Marxist reading group knows the importance of distinguishing
between primary and secondary contradictions. Let us not forget the
essential lesson, no matter anyone's political stripe.
What is the primary contradiction here? It is Washington's refusal to
observe the principles of noninterference and sovereignty, and it is vital
far, far beyond bilateral relations that Russia defends these. The Navalny
case and the associated matter of human rights are, plainly and simply, a
secondary contradiction - and one it is imperative to leave to Russians to
resolve.
Geneva in June, a rather nice place to be. Let us see if Biden and Putin
mind their manners - and whose manners these turn out to be.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the
International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer.
His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American
Century. Follow him on Twitter @thefloutist. His web site is Patrick
Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.