FINANCIAL TIMES
China and Russia’s dangerous
liaison The west ignores
the alliance forming between Moscow and Beijing at its peril Jamil Anderlini In the annals of western
intelligence blunders, the failure to notice the Sino-Soviet split in
the frigid depths of the cold war looms very large. Despite a small
group of heretical CIA officers pointing to mounting evidence from the
late 1950s onwards, successive governments in Washington and elsewhere
refused to believe that the two biggest members of the communist bloc
actually hated each other. It was not until China and Russia fought a
war along the Siberian-Manchurian border in 1969 that the sceptics
finally accepted the schism was real. Today
the west risks making the opposite mistake by dismissing the
anti-western, anti-US alliance that is now forming between Moscow and
Beijing. At a conference in Singapore in June, Jim Mattis, US
defence secretary, talked about a “natural non-convergence of interest”
between Russia and China and his belief that both countries had more in
common with America than with each other. This idea that Russia and
China can never really be friends is just as wrong and dangerous as the
cold war dogma that portrayed global communism as an unshakeable
monolith. Even as many in the west
dismiss or ignore the rapidly warming ties between the two countries,
presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have gone to extravagant
lengths to praise each other, in a budding bromance. According to Mr Putin, Mr
Xi is the only foreign leader he has celebrated his birthday with — over
a glass of vodka and a plate of sausage. For his part, Mr Xi recently
called the Russian president his “best, most intimate friend” while
presenting him with China’s inaugural friendship medal. It is easy to dismiss this
all as superficial posturing, but such gestures between autocrats matter
immensely to their respective systems. The two leaders have met at least
26 times since Mr Xi made his first overseas trip as paramount leader to
Moscow in 2013. It is true that Russia’s
ego has been bruised by the obvious role reversal — from the former
Soviet Union as “big brother” to Russia as “little brother” today. But
China has been careful to save Moscow’s pride — by speaking of the two
as equals, massaging Mr Putin’s ego and offering many of his confidantes
and advisers lucrative contracts. While heavily lopsided —
Russia’s economy is about one-tenth the size of China’s — the countries’
economic relationship is critical for both sides. China is the world’s
biggest importer of crude oil; Russia was China’s biggest supplier last
year and Beijing has lent tens of billions of dollars to Moscow to
secure future oil and gas supplies. Crucially, from Beijing’s
perspective, oil imports from Russia do not need to travel by ship
through strategic chokepoints, such as the Strait of Malacca or the Gulf
of Aden, that can easily be shut off by the US military. But even more significant
than their economic entanglement is the military relationship between
the neighbours. On his first trip abroad in his new role in April, Wei
Fenghe, China’s defence minister, visited Moscow with a very direct
message: “The Chinese side has come to show Americans the close ties
between the armed forces of China and Russia,” he told his counterpart.
“We’ve come to support you.” Again, this is not just
friendly rhetoric. Until recently, Chinese naval vessels had not strayed
from the country’s coastline for centuries, but today its warships
conduct regular joint exercises with Russia from the Sea of Japan to the
Mediterranean. For decades, Russia resisted selling its most advanced
military equipment to China but it has now abandoned that policy. In
May, Beijing deployed the latest model Russian fighter jets in a show of
force over democratic, self-ruled Taiwan. The most important
unifying factor between the two is ideological. Mr Xi and Mr Putin are
strongmen autocrats who share an aversion to representative government
and a deep fear that they will one day be thrown out of office by a
US-backed “ colour revolution”. Their tightening embrace is as much
about antipathy towards the US and the US-dominated global order as
their rapidly growing common interests. This presents an opportunity for
Washington to drive a wedge between them before their alliance becomes
unbreakable. The failure to accept the
reality of the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s allowed the
so-called “domino theory” — the idea that global communism had to be
confronted everywhere to stop its spread — to become orthodoxy in
Washington. If the US had attempted rapprochement with China a decade
earlier than it did under Richard Nixon, perhaps the horrors of the
Vietnam war and China’s Cultural Revolution could have been avoided. Thanks to its continued
rise and obvious ambition to supplant the US, China is a far bigger
long-term challenge for America than Russia. No less a figure than Henry
Kissinger — the architect of that reconciliation with China in 1972 —
has reportedly counselled Donald Trump to pursue a “reverse Nixon-China
strategy” by seeking to befriend Moscow and isolate Beijing. Given the current
investigation into possible collusion with Russia, it will be almost
impossible for the US president to pursue such a strategy successfully.
But American institutions, and whoever succeeds Mr Trump as president,
must recognise how serious a threat the nascent Sino-Russian alliance is
to US interests — and the current world order. |