In his classic work on geopolitics, former American Foreign Secretary Henry Kissinger praised Cardinal Richelieu for shrewd acumen, which kept the whole of central Europe at bay as part and parcel feature of French foreign policy. When Richelieu dwelled as a crafty statesman in the 18th-century psyche for his insatiable appetite for centralized policy and balance of power, the international community in the 21st century can see the same naked ambitions from a man sitting as an academic in Moscow. Sergey Karaganov (also written as Sergei Karaganov) is a senior professor of International Relations at Russia’s largest national research university, the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, whose contribution to the scholarship has earned him a reputation as a scholar of excellence. In a juncture of crossroads where the world is witnessing the genesis of a new axis consisting of Iran, North Korea, Russia, and China to challenge the dominance of the Atlantic alliance, understanding Karaganov is sensible for a better understanding of Russia’s foreign policy and Moscow’s strategic thinking.
In the cryptic world of strategic thinking beyond the walls of the Kremlin, ideals hardly inspire Vladimir Putin as he often manifests what political scientists call “Realpolitik” that underpins no moral qualms over his actions such as the aggression espoused by the Russian Federation in 2022 by starting the war in Ukraine. Sergey Karaganov stands among the handful of people who left an inedible effect on the Russian leader’s mind due to his brains in stiffening Moscow’s strategic culture. The imperative of Karaganov’s foresight came into the picture with the recent launch of Russia’s updated nuclear doctrine, which appears to be a cynically articulated one compared to what post-Cold War Russia upheld. The 2024 updated doctrine signifies the probability of using a nuclear attack by Russia against a pre-eminent threat to Russian sovereignty, in which Russia would not think twice about using them against conventional forces if they pose a critical threat to the sovereignty of Russia and Belarus.
A year before Putin unveiled his audaciously updated nuclear doctrine, Karaganov authored a controversial article arguing the possibility of using nuclear strikes on Western Europe, which framed a new nuclear armageddon. While reminiscing on the Soviet era, Karaganov remains adamant in his stance to believe that only a robust strategy of intimidation that would target Germany, Baltic states, and Romania would stave off a major debacle in the long run. The profound appeal created by Karaganov in his article by referring to nuclear weapons as divine tools truly resonates with the strategic thinking of Moscow beneath the poetic charm of his carefully knitted words. Karaganov cemented the same plethora of ideas in legitimizing the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a historical inevitability some weeks prior to the actual aggression.
Karaganov is neither a pacifist nor a globalist in his rigorous approach to diplomacy. He openly admits that Moscow is in a fog war, which remains in a state of flux with constant changes in the opinions, and objectives parallel to the global developments, and contends that Russia cannot afford to lose as the whole Ukrainian episode is a proxy war between Russia and the West. He is quite sarcastic about any potential NATO attack on Russian soil, which he finds to be utterly destructive for all the parties as striking a nuclear state like Russia can simply escalate a catastrophic conflict beyond the wildest imagination.
The famous Article 5 of NATO that has been reverberated by Western policy analysts promising the protection of Europe appears to be a prattle to Karaganov as he openly ignores the notion of “collective security” in NATO. Article 5, which provides that if a NATO ally is the victim of an armed attack, every other member of the alliance will consider this attack as an attack against all the members is not likely to deter Moscow anymore under the present trajectories.
It should be noted that Sergey Karaganov stands as one of the staunch proponents for a rule-based international order disrupting the dominance led by the West for the past 500 years and he believes that the unipolar moment enjoyed by the US in the aftermath of the Cold War has come to its decadence. His overwhelming narrative on the Russo-Sino alliance seems to have allured the foreign policymakers in Moscow to counter the abysmal situation that erupted after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In May 2024, Vladimir Putin visited Beijing and the joint statement made by both leaders found a common ground to thwart the US’s activities in the Asia-Pacific by increasing the military cooperation between the two countries. Furthermore, Russia will host the BRICS summit by the end of this month in Kazan in a triumphant manner regardless of the West’s efforts to isolate Moscow, an avowed victory of Russia as BRICS + evinces the growing global rifts.
By all means, Karaganov suffers from no need to salve his morality for making views in favor of nuclear strikes and sometimes he even goes beyond by denying the whole identity of Ukraine as an independent nation. His fascination with history frequently supports his arguments in rationalizing his claims. For instance, his claim challenging the identity of Ukraine as a nation is grounded on the history of the Kyiv principality which played a pivotal role in the infancy stage of Russia as a separate civilization before the Mongol invasion.
In an era where new ideologies serve as the foundation for the emerging world order, we cannot ignore Karaganov’s thoughts reflecting Moscow’s actions. When he was asked whether Russia would succumb to the orbit of China one day due to Beijing’s economic influence, Karaganov described Russia in one word—“sovereignty”. Taking the kaleidoscopic views of Russian history in which Russians earnestly preserved their sovereignty from Napoleon to Hitler, Karaganov argues that Russia would never become a subsidiary country to China. Reading Karaganov in these times of trouble might help the West in fathoming what the most misunderstood country on the planet thinks. After all, as the famous political action movie V for Vendetta encapsulates, “Ideas are bulletproof.”
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Punsara Amarasinghe is a post-doctoral researcher affiliated with Scuola Superiore Sant Anna, Pisa. He is a PhD holder in Public International Law from the Institute of Law, Politics and Development at Scuola Superiore Sant Anna (Sant Anna School for Advanced Studies) in Pisa, Italy. He holds LL.M. from the South Asian University, New Delhi, and completed his undergraduate studies in law at the Faculty of Law, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka.
He completed another master's degree in international relations from the HSE, Moscow. He has held two visiting research fellowships at the Global Legal Studies Centre at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Sciences PO, Paris. He was affiliated with the Minerva Center for Strategic Studies at Hebrew University, Jerusalem for a brief period in 2019.