New Warmth Between Russia, China Is Cold Comfort for U.S. Policymakers

One of the myths that has guided American foreign policy for the last quarter of a century is about to be shattered: the idea that Russia and China are such natural adversaries that they can’t work closely with each other.

During the early years of the Cold War, America’s leaders believed in exactly the opposite myth: that the Soviet Union and China operated as some sort of communist monolith. When skirmishes erupted along the 4,500-mile Sino-Soviet border in 1969, that illusion was finally dispelled.

But since then, American policymakers have sometimes talked as though Russia and China were historically destined to be enemies. That idea isn’t much closer to reality than was the communist monolith.

In late April, assuming his health holds out, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin will saunter down to Beijing and get a royal welcome from Chinese President Jiang Zemin. They will sign a series of agreements that will bring China and Russia toward closer ties than they have had for more than 40 years.

Then, to dramatize to the world the impact of their new relationship, Yeltsin and Jiang will sit down in Shanghai with the leaders of three Central Asian governments that were formerly part of the Soviet Union--Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan--to sign a series of measures aimed at lessening the chance of conflict along China’s borders in Central Asia.

The new romance between Russia and China is a development with profound consequences for Asia and for American foreign policy around the world.

One example: Look at the forces China is now transferring to its southeastern coastline for military maneuvers that may threaten Taiwan and ask yourself: Where did those troops come from? How does China have so much leeway to move its forces around the country?

The answer is that 10 or 20 years ago, China didn’t. Huge numbers of its troops were pinned down in the interior areas of northern and western China, preparing to defend against the possibility of a Soviet invasion. Now those forces are no longer needed in such numbers, and they are freer to go elsewhere.

As for American foreign policy, the emerging ties between Russia and China bring together the Clinton administration’s two biggest foreign policy headaches.

One day last week, a member of President Clinton’s foreign policy team sat in his office ticking off the run of apparent successes the administration has scored in foreign policy over the last couple of years.

If you’ve listened to Clinton talk about foreign policy over the past few months, you may already have heard this list. And if you haven’t, you’re almost certainly going to hear it between now and Election Day. The Middle East. Bosnia. Haiti. Northern Ireland (whoops, hold off on Northern Ireland).

Then the advisor got to the problems, the areas of foreign policy where the administration knows it can’t trumpet success but can only, with luck, manage conflicts enough to avert disaster: Russia and China.

What he said was a fair representation of the administration’s mind-set on foreign policy these days. The high-level strategy sessions in Washington this year seem to alternate: China, Russia; Russia, China.

In one sense, at least, we ought to be thankful for this. At least the administration is concentrating on the right problems. Two or three years ago, Clinton and his foreign policy team would be so swept up by the crisis of the day (usually Bosnia-Herzegovina) that they didn’t spend much time on long-term policies.

It is interesting that administration officials now talk about Russia and China in roughly equivalent terms: as big, powerful, nuclear-armed states, both of them increasingly nationalistic in their foreign policies, both of them often at odds with the United States.

Until recently, no one in Washington would have equated the two. Doing so represents quite a change from the late 1970s, when China was treated as America’s strategic partner against the Soviet Union. And it is also different from the early 1990s, during the final years of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s rule and in Yeltsin’s first years, when Moscow and Washington were cooperating throughout the world.

Those days ended when Russia realized that the United States would not give enough aid and investment to solve domestic economic problems and began to question the wisdom of some of the concessions it was making to America.

Now Russia wants to be treated as a great power once again, and it is behaving accordingly. Consider just some of the foreign policy news involving Russia last week.

Yeltsin said he expects other countries to respect Russia’s “legitimate interests.” Russia led an effort to suspend the United Nations economic sanctions against the Bosnian Serbs. A Russian trade official disclosed that Russia might sell Iran $1 billion in military equipment over the next two years, despite the obvious unhappiness of the United States.

Russian and Chinese officials will point out that their cooperation falls short of a military alliance and that it is not directed at the United States. That’s true. But it’s worth pointing out that the United States and China never had a formal alliance in the 1970s either, and that then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger used to proclaim to the world that the ties he was forging with Beijing were not directed at the Soviet Union.

At the least, Russian and Chinese officials will be able to reinforce each other’s sense of resentment toward the United States.

China can commiserate with Russia’s intense unhappiness over American plans to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in a way that would bring the Western alliance much closer to Russia’s borders. Russia can voice sympathy for China’s view that the Clinton administration treated Beijing with disrespect when it granted a visa to let Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui visit this country.

While Yeltsin’s April visit will dramatize and solidify the new Russian-Chinese relationship, the ties have been developing, more quietly, for the last three years.

Moscow tried to mend fences with Beijing throughout the 1980s, but the efforts never quite bore fruit. When Gorbachev visited China in 1989, his trip was overshadowed by the mounting demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. But the current ties date to 1992, when Russia, newly democratic and strapped for cash, began selling military equipment to China at bargain prices.

Those sales included the first batch of 24 SU-27 warplanes. Now, on Yeltsin’s trip to Beijing, Russia will sign a deal to sell more of those jet fighters to China and to transfer technology so that China can start to make those planes on its own.

The new Russian-Chinese partnership will have some limits. Both nations still want investment and other sorts of help from the West. Neither one, for example, can help the other get into the World Trade Organization, a step that each country believes would help its economy.

The new ties between Moscow and Beijing should also serve as a cautionary reminder to the Clinton administration.

Last fall, flush with the heady triumph of peace settlements in the Middle East and Bosnia, Clinton became swept up in futurism. In interviews and public speeches, he seemed to be embracing a fashionable but superficial argument: that the importance of nation-states is now on the wane because of the speed with which money and people can move across borders.

“All the great nations of the world will be holding their heads, figuring out what to do in a world where everybody can move around with relative freedom and there’s all this integration, and you can move money around and all that,” the president predicted.

Maybe so, but the great powers aren’t exactly dead yet. Indeed, you can argue that with the end of the Cold War, we are entering a new age of great powers, more like the 19th century than the rest of the 20th century.

Ideology doesn’t seem to matter much anymore, and governments seem to be making decisions based on their own national interests. Russia and China are approaching each other as practical friends rather than as ideological brothers.

It’s not a return to the testy, unequal alliance of the early 1950s. But for the United States, the emerging relationship between Russia and China could still prove troubling.

The International Outlook column appears here every other Monday.