CHINA AND RUSSIA´S DANGEROUS LIASON / THE FINANCIAL TIMES OP EDITORIAL

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.