Russia isn't that big in economic terms, but Russia had enough autonomy to defy the US intelligence establishment by granting asylum to Snowden. The reason Sno

Russia isn't that big in economic terms, but Russia had enough autonomy to defy the US intelligence establishment by granting asylum to Snowden. The reason Snowden had to quickly leave Hong Kong, in my opinion was that he learned that as soon as the US demanded that China hand him over, the Chinese government would have to comply or essentially run the risk their country falling apart. In particular, the Chinese-speaking lands have been united under a single government for only 500 of the last 2500 years (and 300 of those years were under the Mongol yoke). When the Chinese-speaking lands have been fragmented, non-Chinese governments have been able to cause a lot of trouble by playing one Chinese-speaking polity against the other, so it is understandable that most rational Chinese people strongly prefer to prevent that from happening. The main thing preventing popular unrest in China at levels that risk bringing down the Chinese government has been the rapid rise in living standards and rise in the economic prospects of poor Chinese. That rise would've been impossible without the massive Chinese trade with large countries that are wealthy per capita. The Chinese would not have risked Chinese trade with the US over Snowden. (It turns out that they are now having to contend with a probable reduction in their ability to provide jobs internally through trade with the US anyways, for different reasons: even if the volume of trade returns to previous levels, the terms of that trade will be more favorable for providing blue-collar jobs in the US and less favorable for maximizing employment in China.) No government on earth has as much ability to defy the US government or to inflict pain on the US as Russia does. (China might overtake it in that capacity in the future, but it is not close now IMO and in the opinion of professional strategists George Friedman and Peter Zeihan.) North Vietnam was tiny in economic terms (even accounting for assistance by the Soviet Union and Communist China), but that didn't prevent them from conquering South Vietnam despite massive US efforts to stop them.