In the early 1970s, in conversations with Nixon, Kissinger and Alexander Haig, Chairman Mao averred that the United States depended so extensively on nuclear weapons for its security because it did not have faith in its conventional military forces. Mao’s gambit—astoundingly callous by contemporary standards—was that China could actually come out the winner in an all-out nuclear war. The US and the USSR would annihilate one another, but China, although largely devastated, would still have enough survivors to fight its way back to the status of a (if not the) dominant world power. This scared the leaders of some Eastern European Warsaw Pact nations to the extent that they successfully pressured Moscow to distance itself from the People’s Republic and pursue a policy of détente vis-à-vis the NATO alliance.

Mao’s blasé attitude towards mutually assured destruction may have been no more than a brazen bluff, but he was right about the actual military weakness of the US when stripped of its nuclear umbrella. Forced to fight on the ground against communist/nationalist insurgents in the wake of the collapsing colonial system, the United States consistently failed to realize its objectives: the Korean War ground to an unsatisfactory stalemate, Cuba was a fiasco, Vietnam a tragedy. Despite increasing reliance on dirty tricks—such as the deposition of Salvador Allende in Chile—and disinformation—such as Reagan’s ‘star wars’ program—the US continued to back off from direct military confrontation, even when the Soviet Union openly invaded Afghanistan in 1979 or when Hezbollah murdered 241 US marines in Lebanon in 1983.

Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union’s own colonial empire, apparent US military successes are exceptions that prove the rule. The 1991 Gulf War was raucously proclaimed a victory in so far as it drove Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait and appeared to dispel the curse of Vietnam. But Shi’a Marsh Arabs and Kurds can be forgiven for begging to differ, and when George W. Bush returned—for whatever perverse reason—to ‘finish the job’ his father had abandoned, the result—despite the initial Blitzkrieg—was far from the one neo-con intellectuals envisaged.

As far as invasions of Afghanistan go—and there have been many—the 2001 response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks can hardly claim to be one of the most successful. In fact the Soviet invasion of 1980 was arguably one of the most benign and might have resulted in the beginnings of a more stable polity for that benighted country, had the US not armed the Mujahideen.

In short, the history of US military adventures overseas since 1945 has been characterized by a mixture of overdependence on nuclear umbrellas, overwhelming air power and remote-controlled drones, dirty tricks and behind-the-scenes proxy wars.

By contrast, until the break-up of the Soviet Union and even afterwards, the Russians have done rather well. No wonder Mao felt he had more to fear from them than from the United States.

Territorially, Russia came out much stronger from the First World War and the Bolshevik upheaval and then the Second World War, in which they sacrificed more soldiers and citizens than any other combatant nation. Before that it had fought off and eventually incorporated Mongols and Tatars in the midst of a complex five-player game of chess with the other great powers of the time. By 1854, Russia was threatening to move in on the moribund Ottoman Empire, thereby turning the Black Sea into a Russian lake. Fearful of this prospect, the French and the British—allied for the first time since the Napoleonic Wars—joined forces with the Ottoman Sultan to push back this threat to their own expansion. They invaded the Crimea in an attempt to wrest away the port of Sevastapol—Russia’s only warm-water naval base and springboard for annexation of Ottoman territories… The war dragged on much longer than expected… Casualties on both sides were horrific, but the Russians, as they later would in the Second World War, bore the brunt of the carnage and eventually, perhaps inevitably, came down on the losing side…

For the Allies, however, the Crimean War would prove to be a Pyrrhic victory… Widespread mismanagement of logistics and perceived lack of concern for the welfare of the common fighting man brought down the British government of the time. The Ottoman Empire staggered on, only to be over-run and carved up in the aftermath of World War I… by Britain and France. Russia’s ambitions in the Near East were curtailed, but it retained its suzerainty over the Crimea and its vital Black Sea naval base.

One hundred and sixty years later, Russia is definitely on the back foot. It has lost most of its colonies and its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe and much of the Third World. On its eastern flank, the economic and demographic tsunami that is China has overwhelmed its most far-flung provinces. Even within its shrunken federation, breakaway Islamic Republics struggle stubbornly for independence and send suicidal terrorists to gas opera houses and bomb schools. If ever a country needed a strong military and firmer control of its porous borders, Russia does…

Russian takeovers of neighboring territories have tended to be relatively bloodless, if not entirely legal or benign. US interventions to garner strategic advantage overseas have tended, by contrast, to be bloody and divisive, without having much in terms of legality or benign motives to recommend them either…

More importantly, in the school of hard knocks that is the international community, recent Russian interventions, different from American ones, have been almost totally successful to the point that they go uncontested. Chechnya has been brought to heel; the Georgian province of Abkhazia was swiftly annexed without a whisper of protest from the otherwise waspish US President George W. Bush. Transnistria slipped almost unnoticed into the neo-Soviet orbit.

And now Crimea—the source of so much conflict, violence and suffering in times gone by—has been folded back into the Russian family of nations, without so much as a shot being fired. Western leaders thump tubs and impose diplomatic punishments; but Russia merely snubs its nose. Soldiers on the ground are more likely to be sharing tea or vodka with their newly reconciled compatriots than quaking in fear of IEDs. Crimea is a fait accompli.

Geopolitics has its own logic and usually trumps ideology. Mao and Nixon, perhaps the wiliest of late 20^th century political leaders, forged a policy of “putting a horizontal line” under the Soviet Union. The de facto Sino-Western alliance has since continued to shift this line further North, to the understandable consternation of the Kremlin and at considerable cost, in terms of blood and treasure, to the Capitol. Beijing meanwhile has so far incurred no cost whatsoever. This is classic Chinese diplomacy: pitting rivals against one another in order to pursue one’s own national interests despite relative weakness and with little or no military effort: soft power Chinese-style. It remains to be seen, however, whether, in the long term, this strategy of isolating Russia and pursuing a far from heart-felt alliance of convenience between China and the US, first embarked on over forty years ago, will prove to have been a truly wise geopolitical move.