A New Russia-China Alliance?

The Taiwan crisis grabs our attention, but however it turns out, another strategic problem is looming in East Asia.

Russia and China, it was recently disclosed, have reached an agreement to upgrade China’s air force with the production in China of Russia’s top-of-the-line SU-27 supersonic jet fighter. The U.S. State Department reacted with the soothing assessment that the transaction would not upset the military balance in Asia.

Something much deeper is going on here, however: a rapprochement between Russia and China that has disturbing geopolitical implications, and which will be confirmed by Boris Yeltsin’s visit to China in late April. The Sino-Soviet conflict that dominated so much of the postwar period essentially ended under Mikhail Gorbachev and the rapprochement has deepened under Yeltsin. The Russian and Chinese military industries have found it productive to restore some of the collaboration that existed in the 1950s, the jet fighter sale being only the latest example. Their intelligence services are collaborating too. The two countries share a strategic interest in preserving stability in Muslim central Asia. They are also cooperating in energy: in the transit of Russian oil and gas across northern China to Korea and Japan, and in the construction of China’s massive Three Gorges Dam hydroelectric project.

Some Russian analysts see China’s modernization as a better economic and political model for Russia than the West’s. Hard-liners in both societies see a common cause in resisting subversive political and cultural inroads from the Western democracies.

No, it’s not 1950 all over again. Then, the Sino-Soviet alliance had a global scope and ideological thrust that aimed at undermining Western positions throughout the developing world. When Khrushchev’s Soviet Union and Mao’s People’s Republic became rivals, each competed to be the most radical challenge to the West. That rivalry turned into a major conflict as the Soviets under Leonid Brezhnev played the bully and the Chinese turned to the West for protection. The present rapprochement may also run aground down the road, this time because of Russian fears of the growing power of China.

In the meantime, their collaboration is not good news. As each builds up its military power, neighbors of both have historical grounds for worry. (The Pacific is one place where military buildups, not drawdowns, mark the post-Cold War era.) Key friends of ours--Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, ASEAN--will pay the price.

Both China and Russia, moreover, are big proliferators, finding another common cause in their defiance of U.S. policies to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Both sell nuclear reactors to Iran and press for lifting U.N. sanctions on Iraq; China sells nuclear technology to Pakistan and missiles to Iran. In 1994, neither gave real support to U.S. efforts to squelch North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

U.S policy cannot be blamed for all the fundamental geopolitical factors at work here, but clearly the Clinton administration has lost its grip on this evolution. For the first time since the 1950s, China and Russia have better relations with each other than either has with the United States, meaning the loss of the pivotal position and leverage the United States had gained in the 1970s.

This is another disturbing trend that calls into question the administration’s handling of the most central strategic issues of the period. The U.S. could have hedged against a Russian reemergence by bolstering the newly independent states born out of the Soviet empire (including the democracies of Central Europe and the Baltics). Japan’s confidence in us is shaken by our bullying over trade disputes. China’s threats against Taiwan are met with a U.S. response of “strategic ambiguity,” which unnerves our allies and friends throughout Asia.

There’s heavy-duty geopolitics going on here, and the U.S. is losing its influence over potentially dangerous events.