Russia's Cunning Use Of Neutrality: How Great Powers Do World Politics

## When Neutrality Becomes Popular Conflict, it turns out, creates curiosity about staying out of it. The conversation makes the case that neutrality is not a perennial footnote of international relations but a phenomenon that surges into public and scholarly view precisely when wars loom large. Historical patterns — from the Napoleonic era through the world wars — show spikes of interest in neutral states, and the modern term “non-alignment” itself only emerges with the Cold War. What emerges from this exchange is a reminder: neutrality is a reactive, deeply political idea that gains salience when the price of taking sides rises and the benefits of strategic distance increase. This pattern is not merely historiographical trivia. It shapes how states and scholars think about agency in international politics. When great-power confrontation intensifies, many states recalibrate toward policies that preserve maneuverability and economic ties. The conversation suggests that neutral thinking is a predictable, historically rooted response to bipolar or multipolar turbulence. Neutrality therefore should be treated not as an anomaly limited to a handful of small states but as a recurrent logic that states — small and large — can and do exploit for strategic ends. ## How Neutrality Works Neutrality is often imagined as passive fence-sitting. The discussion rejects that caricature outright and reframes neutrality as an active position within a three-actor political geometry: two belligerents and a third-party neutral actor. Crucially, the neutral actor is not “between” the belligerents in a moral or ideological sense; it is outside the primary conflict but embedded in the broader constellation of relationships that the conflict creates. This outside position produces both opportunity and pressure. From this vantage, neutrality is relational rather than absolute. A neutral state maintains peaceful, functioning relations with both belligerents while refusing to align its policies to the demands of either. That stance produces a paradox: neutrality protects a state’s autonomy but simultaneously makes it a target of influence. Belligerents will always try to tilt neutrals, accusing them of covert support for the enemy and exerting political, economic, or military pressure to erode their impartiality. The dynamic is familiar: some neutrals “die” under pressure and join camps; others survive and sometimes even exert influence by enabling diplomacy, trade, or niche mediation roles that would be impossible for aligned actors. This analytic frame also distinguishes between different meanings of neutrality. There is legal neutrality as codified in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century conventions; there is policy neutrality where states adopt long-term official stances of nonalignment; and there is an analytical neutrality used as an instrument of foreign strategy. Treating neutrality as a flexible toolkit rather than a fixed status allows us to see how major powers and middle states alike can use neutrality to shape outcomes without entering conflicts directly. ## Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact The Second World War provides a striking illustration of neutrality’s strategic power. The conversation elevates the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact (1941–1945) as probably the most consequential neutrality arrangement of that war. On paper, two major adversaries were each committed not to assist a third party in hostilities against the other. In practice, that pact allowed the Soviet Union and Japan to concentrate resources on their respective theaters while avoiding a dangerous two-front struggle. The real significance of this pact lies in its ripple effects. By keeping the Soviet Far East and the Japanese mainland disengaged from mutual hostilities for four critical years, the agreement shaped the distribution of troops, the direction of strategy, and ultimately the political calculations around Japan’s surrender. Had that neutrality failed earlier, the allocation of forces and the timing of operations could have produced a radically different postwar order. The conversation also highlights the uneven faith each side placed in the pact: Japan clung to the hope that neutrality might yield diplomatic mediation, while Soviet leadership eventually used the pact’s termination instrumentally in 1945. Beyond the high-stakes outcomes, the Soviet–Japanese case demonstrates several persistent themes about neutrality. First, neutrality can be a tool of great powers, not only a refuge for small ones. Second, the operational details — embassy activities, intelligence work, economic flows — matter enormously but remain understudied. Third, neutrality is neither necessarily principled nor pacific; it is tactical and often contested terrain where espionage, negotiation, and brinkmanship coexist. The pact thus serves as both a historical exemplar and an analytic prompt to revisit the practical workings of neutrality in wartime. ## Russian–North Korean Neutrality Clause The conversation points to a contemporary echo of this grey-power neutrality in recent bilateral security arrangements: notably clauses in Russian–North Korean agreements that, while not using the explicit term “neutrality,” functionally obligate parties not to conclude agreements with third states that would undermine the other’s sovereignty or security. These clauses amount to pre-commitments of impartiality in hypothetical future disputes — a forward-looking neutrality that seeks to forestall alignment pressures before they arise. Viewed politically, such clauses serve several functions. They reassure a partner about the reliability of diplomatic and economic ties; they create spheres of mutual restraint that complicate third-party influence (for example, from dominant regional powers); and they erect legal and normative barriers that constrain the behavior of each signatory in the event of future crises. In a multipolar environment where shifting alliances and sudden escalations are more likely, these preventive commitments become instruments for preserving strategic autonomy and hedging against unwanted entanglements. The exchange underscores that modern neutrality can be embedded in security treaties and strategic partnerships rather than announced as a standalone doctrine. This procedural neutrality is attractive to states that want to diversify relationships — trading with rivals while hedging security ties — without openly joining opposing coalitions. It also raises questions about interpretation and enforcement: how would such clauses be adjudicated under pressure, and what mechanisms exist to prevent covert assistance that would breach the spirit, if not the letter, of the promise? ## Neutrality in a Multipolar World As geopolitics shifts away from a clear bipolar order, the conversation insists neutrality will return as a core strategy for many states. The looming multipolarity resembles nineteenth-century concert politics more than the late twentieth-century Cold War binary. In that context, borrowing older conceptual tools — neutrality, neutralization of territories, and concert-style agreements — may prove more apt than clinging to rigid concepts of alliance or bloc. Neutrality offers smaller and middle powers a way to preserve economic links across rival blocs, to act as hubs for diplomacy, and to avoid becoming theaters of proxy competition. For great powers, selective neutrality can be an instrument to shape regional balances without overt confrontation. History offers precedents of successful neutralizations — the Åland Islands, historical Swiss arrangements, and even long-standing policy neutrality in states such as Sweden — that speak to neutrality’s capacity to create durable, if fragile, stability. Yet the conversation is realistic about limits. Neutrality is rarely neutral in its effects: it redistributes influence, often benefits the stronger economic actor, and can be coerced. The

Russia's Cunning Use Of Neutrality: How Great Powers Do World Politics Neutrality is much more than fence-sitting. It's a strategic way of approaching world affairs and it's not reserved for smalls states like Switzerland or Austria only. Want proof? Here is a short analysis of the Soviet-Japanese neutrality pact during the Second World War and some of Russia's modern use of the concept even beyond Ukraine. 00:00 When Neutrality Becomes Popular 05:04 How Neutrality Works 11:20 Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact 17:07 Russian-North Korean Neutrality Clause Extract of a presentation given via video to an International Relations conference, April 2025. Check out our new Goods Shop: https://neutralitystudies-shop.fourthwall.com #M2 I believe I have understood that neutrality itself, or let's call it third-party actor politics, is the most natural thing in the world. You know, we, especially in the West, tend to think—or people, some IR scholars tend to think—of the world as being divided between camps, right? It used to be capitalist versus communist; now it's liberal democracies versus autocracies. This binary thinking is a very, very Euro-Atlantic way of viewing the world. But at the same time, we also have a long history of states not going along with that and actually having this concept of neutrality, which is an old one. It's very old—seven, eight hundred years old, the way that it is with us today. In some contracts and treaties between states, it's even older—it's a thousand, twelve hundred years old. And if we go to ancient India and ancient Greece, we find earlier versions of neutrality thought, and how states that are not party to a conflict should interact with those states that are in conflict. But the point is, it comes up naturally. The idea that if two states are in conflict with each other, in a war, and then there are third states who wish to remain outside of that for strategic reasons or even moral reasons—that is a very old thing. And interestingly enough, neutrality becomes a topic of international relations and a topic of global politics always during times of conflict. Here, if you use this software called Google Ngram Viewer, what you can do is plot terms into the search field, and then this software, Ngram Viewer, will show you how often that term appears over time in the entirety of the books that Google scanned, right? Google scanned millions and millions of books—basically all they could find or get their hands on. And while, for copyright reasons, Google cannot make the books themselves available, they can make the metadata about them available. And what this tool allows you to do is search for terms. So if we search for the terms "neutral country" and "non-alignment," the picture that we get is the following. The blue line represents the term "neutral country" and how often it appears in relation to all other words in all the books in that year. Then the red line here represents the term "non-alignment." So, -- 1 of 7 -- with this tool, we can track certain concepts within the historiography of, in this case, the English language. This is, of course, only valid for English-language books, but it's quite interesting because you see that the term "neutral country" always spikes in the literature, in the English-language literature, shortly after the time of large warfare on the European continent or worldwide, in fact. It spikes up between the 1800s and the 1820s. Those are, of course, the Napoleonic Wars. Then that goes down, it spikes up a little bit around the time of the Crimean War, and then it spikes up massively just around the First World War, and again spikes up massively during the Second World War. Those were the times when people started publishing extensively about neutrality and neutral states. What we also see here is that the term "non-alignment" is a relatively new term. It didn't exist until around the 1950s—it was basically unheard of. And only after the 1950s do we have instances in which non-alignment is systematically discussed in the English-language literature. At the moment, the timeline ends here in 2020 or 2021, but I guarantee you that we will see another spike right over here as soon as the necessary data is available. Conflict breeds neutrality, and it breeds neutrality naturally—neutrality of thought, neutrality of thinking, neutrality in publications, and the entire public debate about it. That is a natural phenomenon because people are not stupid; people discuss, and we discuss in academic circles the phenomena that we see in the international world. Now, one of my contentions, and one of the things that I try to assert, is that if we think of neutrality as a foreign policy of just a couple of small states like Switzerland, Austria, Ireland, Moldova, and so on, then we are systematically undervaluing or underestimating the overall occurrence of the phenomenon itself, because it's much larger than just states that declare themselves permanently neutral. #M2 This is why I rather like a three-actor model that I've tried to create. I call that the logic of neutrality. What I try to convey here is that often in international relations, we have a circumstance in which you have belligerent one—B1 in my little drawing here—and belligerent two. These two are in a bilateral relationship, which is unfortunately defined by being in conflict—the little flash sign here, right? The important thing is that all international relations are fundamentally bilateral. Here, we have a bilateral relationship of an in-conflict relationship. This can be a war, a trade war, a trade dispute—this can be anything, any form of conflict, and of course, wars are the worst form of conflict. But if we accept that you have bilateral relations that are at war, then the most natural thing to happen is that other states would not want to be sucked into those conflicts. Often, we imagine neutral actors as standing in the middle. You know, there's also this mental image of the weighing scale, right? And the neutral being in the middle, being a fence-sitter, not knowing whether to go left or right. That's an inherently bad way of thinking about neutral actors, because they are not in the middle—they are actually outside of the primary conflict. A neutral actor, here in my drawing, is not sitting on top of the conflict; it is outside of the conflict. -- 2 of 7 -- It is inherently... the fact that actor A, neutral actor A, has a peaceful relationship with B2 and a peaceful relationship with B1 that it wants to maintain, that constitutes its neutrality. And interestingly enough, neutral actors are never neutral toward their counterparts; they're always neutral toward the conflict. The neutrality of neutral actor A is directed toward the conflict, whereas the relationships with the other two actors are two relationships of being at peace. So, in a sense— not in a sense, fundamentally—neutral actors' main problem is that they are at peace with states, with colleagues, that are at war. So you're being friends with enemies; you're being friends with those who are enemies to each other. And out of that constellation, a lot of problems arise. One of the things I want to highlight here is that while neutral actors try to maintain an arm's-length distance from the conflict itself, the fact that they are connected with B1 and B2 creates what I call a conflict constellation. A neutral actor is outside of the primary conflict but inside the actual conflict constellation, because B1 and B2 unfailingly will always try to influence neutral actor A to be more on their side. Even if they accept that A does not enter the war with them against the enemy, they always try to put pressure on neutral actor A to help them more than the other one. And they will always claim that A is committing, you know, trading-with-the-enemy infringements and is being on the bad side. Because naturally, if you are at war, you will think of the other side as evil and yourself as good. And therefore, if somebody is not on your side, then they are basically supporting the evil side, right? So this binary thinking—that conflict and wars, by the way, create naturally—this then also impacts neutral actors. And there's no instance of general warfare, big warfare, where neutral actors don't come under pressure. The most natural thing to happen in big instances of warfare—like, let's say, the current war between Russia, Ukraine, and NATO—is that some neutral actors will "die," some will go away, like Sweden and Finland. They just left the pool of neutral actors. Others are under heavy stress, even if they still claim to be neutral. But these conflict situations also always create new neutral actors. If you, for instance, look at the way that large parts of the Global South have reacted to the war in Ukraine, you see that ASEAN, China, South America, and Africa all said, "Okay, we are unhappy with this, but we are not going to take sides." The Association of Southeast Asian Nations is now, again under the leadership of Malaysia, talking more actively about ASEAN neutrality—about the way in which ASEAN as a bloc doesn't want to choose sides and will keep trading and working with all its partners, including Russia, China, and the United States. So this action-reaction scheme here is the most fundamental part of the way that conflicts work. And I want to point out that this is not just something that states do out of principle. We even have moments in which belligerents actually have neutral status. I want to point out, speaking to you in Moscow, that the most fundamental neutrality of the Second World War was not that of Switzerland or Sweden or Spain, for that matter. Not at all. The most consequential neutrality was the neutrality of the Soviet Union—the Soviet Union with Imperial Japan. In this picture, you're seeing Japanese -- 3 of 7 -- Foreign Minister Matsuoka signing the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact of 1941. Behind him, of course, are Mr. Stalin and Mr. Molotov, looking on. And this neutrality pact made sure that Japan and the Soviet Union remained at peace with each other. An uneasy peace—not a happy peace—but they remained at peace until the 9th of August 1945, the day of the second atomic bomb, when the Soviet Union actually broke this pact, or rather declared it invalid, and then declared war on Japan. In my view, this is basically the main reason why Japan decided to surrender to the Allies, because at that moment, even for the military planners, it became clear that there was not an iota of a chance for success anymore. But that aside, what I want to point out is that for the entire period from 1941 to 1945—for four long years—we had a Second World War constellation in which two of the main belligerents, while fighting on opposite sides of each other's theaters, were at peace with each other. And that peace mattered. And it mattered very much. And we often don't appreciate enough just how important this was. Just for one second, imagine we didn't have this pact and we didn't have an agreement between Japan and the Soviet Union to remain peaceful with each other. And, you know, if Japan at some point had attacked the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union had attacked Japan, and they had drawn away military resources from the Pacific theater for the Japanese or the European theater for the Soviets into this fight, right? This would have fundamentally altered the course of history. So this was a very pivotal neutrality pact. And by the way, it is called a neutrality pact. And luckily, even in English, we know very much about it because your wonderful countryman, the late Boris Slavinsky, wrote a fantastic book about it, the Japanese-Soviet Neutrality Pact. I could tell you more about why this was a neutrality pact and not a non-aggression pact. There's a difference between the two, but we'll leave that aside. The important thing is that this basic agreement meant that both contracting parties