Chinese and Russian influence operations during the Covid-19 pandemic from the perspective of neoclassical realism

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Chinese and Russian state-sponsored media and authorities have been spreading their national narratives across foreign audiences. Their efforts of casting a favorable image of their countries as trustworthy global leaders and of undermining the responses of democratic countries have been widely analyzed by fact-checkers and political and communication scientists. This paper aims at contributing to the analysis of this phenomenon by shedding light on the structural causes of China’s and Russia’s behavior on the one hand, and on the other hand on the strategic incentives emanating from their geopolitical rivals during the pandemic. For that purpose, I propose an analysis of Russian and Chinese narratives using an analytical framework based on the neoclassical realism and, to a lesser extent, structural realism theory of International Relations. Through the lenses of the latter, I argue, we can comprehend why the offensive narratives spread by these two revisionist powers focus mainly on Western countries and why they converge and reinforce mutually. From the perspective of the former, we can understand, firstly, why this pandemic represents a systemic opportunity to advance their geopolitical goals. And secondly, what strategic motivations Russia and China may have for influencing the public opinion in democratic societies. The reason for combining both theoretical approaches in this paper is their complementarity. The offensive structural realism considers only the external variables from the international system to explain the foreign behavior of the states. So, as its main author, John Mearsheimer, recognizes, it falls short to explain the role of individual or domestic actors (Mearsheimer, 2003:10). By contrast, neoclassical realism adopts the assumptions of structural realism and tries to complete it with more complex explanations of foreign policy responses in given specific contexts. For that reason, it also considers the internal variables from within the states as the intervening variables between the system —dependent variable— and the policy responses —independent variable—. These internal variables include the leader’s perception, the strategic culture, the state-society relations and the domestic institutions (Ripsman et al., 2016). According to the neoclassical realism, a high level of polarization in democratic states can provoke an inadequate policy response to external threats. In this paper it is argued that this is the logic behind the behavior of Russia and China when their media outlets and representatives abroad try to deepen the preexisting divisions within democratic societies during the Covid-19 pandemic. By discrediting rivals’ domestic institutions and eroding their domestic cohesion, China and Russia might set a competitive advantage in their aspiration to gain relative power at the expense of the US and its allies, particularly the EU. As neoclassical realism explains, the more divided their societies, the more difficulties are to be expected for their governments to properly attend the demands of the international system in the medium and long term. References Mearsheimer, John (2003): The Tragedy of great power politics. NY: Norton. Ripsman, Norrin M., et al. (2016): Neoclassical Theory of International Politics. NY: Oxford University Press.