Anti-NATO Axis Could Pose Threat, Experts Say

U.S. foreign affairs specialists are monitoring the potential for increased cooperation between Russia, China and India, amid a growing conviction in all three countries, especially after NATO’s bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, that U.S. power must somehow be checked.

Although agreeing that the three nations are far from coalescing into a pan-Eurasian, anti-NATO axis, the analysts remain concerned about what they call a nightmare scenario: an alliance that would bring together about 2.5 billion people, formidable military might and a vast stockpile of nuclear weapons, all held together by the common goal of countering America’s global dominance.

“Right now, you have flirting,” said Charles Williams Maynes, president of the Eurasia Foundation, a Washington-based think tank. “I don’t know where this is going to go. If we play our cards right, it’s going to go nowhere.”

But if the relationships progress, Maynes said, “then you basically have the world’s heartland--2 billion people in China and India--allied with a formidable technological power in Russia. That would be a disaster for the United States.”

The signs of flirtation include a large and growing arms sale relationship between Russia and the two Asian countries. The trade provides Moscow with important arms-export markets, and Beijing and New Delhi with sophisticated armaments ranging from advanced combat aircraft to nuclear submarines.

The blossoming relationships are already changing the military equation in Asia. China’s acquisition of Russian SSN-22 anti-ship missiles, for example, could quickly become a worry for the U.S. 7th Fleet in any confrontation with Beijing.

The political desire for closer cooperation is reflected in high-level rhetoric about the need for greater cooperation, usually mixed with thinly veiled anti-Western comments or calls for a “multipolar world”--code for counterbalancing America’s global dominance.

During a visit to New Delhi in December, Russia’s then-prime minister, Yevgeny M. Primakov, floated the idea of a “strategic triangle” committing the three nations to a policy of regional peace and stability.

So far, the concept has not been fleshed out. But Western analysts see a series of converging interests among the nations that, if driven by events, could easily add substance to talk of strategic partnerships.

Aside from a shared discomfort about America’s might, the three have other common interests. They want a stable Central Asia. They fear the impact of militant Islam. They oppose theater missile-defense systems. They strenuously back the primacy of the U.N. Security Council for dealing with world crises. And they strongly support the principle of nonintervention in the affairs of sovereign states--a principle violated by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as it tried to halt “ethnic cleansing” in Yugoslavia, in the southern Serbian province of Kosovo.

All three opposed the bombing campaign that the U.S. led against Yugoslavia on Kosovo’s behalf, but the experience especially traumatized U.S. relations with Russia and China. Moscow watched an alliance that Westerners had traditionally characterized as purely defensive wade into a domestic conflict; China watched a U.S. B-2 bomber reduce its embassy in the Yugoslav capital to rubble.

“Kosovo marks something of a divide that I believe is likely to accelerate the collaboration that they pursue,” said Jonathan Pollack, a senior East Asia specialist who tracks China-Russia relations at the Rand Corp. in Santa Monica. “It all has more logic in the aftermath of Kosovo.”

China’s relations with India remain cool and labor under decades of mistrust. But the two agreed in June to launch a security dialogue, and they have restarted talks to resolve a decades-old border dispute. Beijing stayed clear of the recent crisis over the Kashmir region, in which Indian troops clashed with insurgents backed by Pakistan, a longtime ally of China.

Meanwhile, Moscow’s ties with New Delhi have revived after a lull that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Once-chilly Sino-Soviet relations began to thaw nearly a decade ago and have matured to the point that Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin has declared Russia and China to be “strategic partners.” Once-divisive border disputes have been resolved, and the transfer of Russian military technology to Beijing has steadily increased.

“Russia and China have a real military cooperation and converging interests on a range of international issues, and that’s what a partnership is about,” said Peter Rodman, a former Republican presidential advisor and currently an analyst at the Washington-based Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom in Washington. “They call it a strategic partnership, and in this case, it’s real.”

Early this month, two Hong Kong-based newspapers reported that Yeltsin and his Chinese counterpart, Jiang Zemin, had struck a tentative deal that would give China two Russian Typhoon-class nuclear-powered submarines capable of carrying nuclear missiles.

Senior U.S. officials say they are carefully watching the developing ties between the three nuclear powers. In the wake of Kosovo, they acknowledge that several countries, including Russia and China, are becoming increasingly uneasy about America’s global dominance.

“Policymakers never admit to being worried, but we do see trends, some of which are cause for concern,” said one senior Clinton administration official.

To be sure, even if the three continue to intensify their links, each has a stake in maintaining working relations with the United States, which offers access to a huge pool of technology, a lucrative export market and international lending institutions.

But regional specialists warn that if Washington plays its cards badly and introduces new tensions into these key relationships, America could end up with formidable adversaries.

“If you were to see a new administration [in Washington] less committed to these relations, with less of a stake in better relations with Russia and China, there might be more reason for the two to collaborate,” Pollack said. “Developments have highlighted [that] they have mutually reinforcing needs, and this is further stimulated by the concerns of American dominance.”

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Times staff writers Maura Reynolds in Moscow and Henry Chu in Beijing contributed to this report.