July 3, 2017
Exclusive: Official
Washington’s arrogance in trying to push around Russia and China has pushed the
two countries together, creating a dangerous new dynamic in international
relations, explains ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
By Ray McGovern
Top Russian and Chinese
leaders are busy comparing notes, coordinating their approach to President
Donald Trump at the G20 summit in Hamburg this weekend. Both sides are
heralding the degree to which ties between the two countries have improved in
recent years, as Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visits Moscow on his way to the
G20. And, they are not just blowing smoke; there is ample substance behind
the rhetoric.
Whether or not Official
Washington fully appreciates the gradual – but profound – change in America’s
triangular relationship with Russia and China over recent decades, what is
clear is that the U.S. has made itself into the big loser.
Gone are the days when Richard
Nixon and Henry Kissinger skillfully took advantage of the Sino-Soviet rivalry
and played the two countries off against each other, extracting concessions
from each. Slowly but surely, the strategic equation has markedly changed
– and the Sino-Russian rapprochement signals a tectonic shift to Washington’s
distinct detriment, a change largely due to U.S. actions that have pushed the
two countries closer together.
But there is little sign that
today’s U.S. policymakers have enough experience and intelligence to recognize
this new reality and understand the important implications for U.S. freedom of
action. Still less are they likely to appreciate how this new nexus may
play out on the ground, on the sea or in the air.
Instead, the Trump
administration – following along the same lines as the Bush-43 and Obama
administrations – is behaving with arrogance and a sense of entitlement, firing
missiles into Syria and shooting down Syrian planes, blustering over Ukraine,
and dispatching naval forces to the waters near China.
But consider this: it may soon
be possible to foresee a Chinese challenge to “U.S. interests” in the South
China Sea or even the Taiwan Strait in tandem with a U.S.-Russian clash in the
skies over Syria or a showdown in Ukraine.
A lack of experience or
intelligence, though, may be too generous an interpretation. More likely,
Washington’s behavior stems from a mix of the customary, naïve exceptionalism
and the enduring power of the U.S. arms lobby, the Pentagon, and the other
deep-state actors – all determined to thwart any lessening of tensions with
either Russia or China. After all, stirring up fear of Russia and China is a
tried-and-true method for ensuring that the next aircraft carrier or other
pricey weapons system gets built.
It’s almost like the old days
when the U.S. military budgeted to fight wars on multiple fronts
simultaneously. Recent weeks saw the following:
–The guided-missile destroyer
USS Stethem on Sunday sailed within 12 nautical miles of the Chinese-claimed
Triton Island in the Paracels in the South China Sea. The Chinese Foreign
Ministry immediately branded this “a serious political and military
provocation.”
–The U.S. last week announced
a $1.4 billion arms sale to Taiwan, placed sanctions on a Chinese bank for its
dealings with North Korea, and labeled China the world’s worst human
trafficker.
–On June 20, President Donald
Trump sent off a condescending tweet intimating that, at his request, China had
tried but failed to help restrain North Korea’s nuclear program: “It has not
worked out. At least I know China tried.” (Over the centuries, the
Chinese have had bad experience with Western condescension.)
Common Concern: Missile
Defense
On the eve of his arrival in
Moscow, Xi gave an interview to Russia’s TASS news agency, in which he focused
on missile defense – an issue particularly close to Vladimir Putin’s
heart. Xi focused on U.S. deployment of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense
(THAAD) missiles to South Korea as “disrupting the strategic balance in
the region” and threatening the security interests of all countries in the
region, including Russia and China.
Xi also reiterated that
Beijing is urging Washington and Seoul to back off military pressure on North
Korea, and he may even hope that South Korea’s new President will react more
sensibly than his predecessor who authorized THAAD deployment, which has made
the North even more nervous about a possible preemptive strike. [In a seminar
on the Web in February, Professor J. J.
Suh and I discussed THAAD in the
historical perspective of missile defense systems.]
Less than a month ago, Putin
and Xi met in Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana, on the sidelines of a Shanghai
Cooperation Organization summit. At that time, Putin predicted that the
bilateral meeting now under way in Moscow would be “a major event in bilateral
relations.”
The Russian leader added, “By
tradition, we use every opportunity to meet and to discuss bilateral relations
and the international agenda.”
If Sino-Russian “tradition” is
meant to describe relations further back than three decades ago, Putin
exaggerates. It was not always so. A half-century retrospective on
the vicissitudes of Russia-Chinese relations illustrates the difficult path
they have taken. More important, it suggests their current closeness is not
likely to evaporate any time soon.
Like subterranean geological
plates shifting slowly below the surface, changes with immense political
repercussions can occur so gradually as to be imperceptible until the
earthquake. As CIA’s principal Soviet analyst on Sino-Soviet relations in the
1960s and early 1970s, I had a catbird seat watching sign after sign of intense
hostility between Russia and China, and how, eventually, Nixon and Kissinger
were able to exploit it to Washington’s advantage.
The grievances between the two
Asian neighbors included irredentism: China claimed 1.5 million square
kilometers of Siberia taken from China under what it called “unequal treaties”
dating back to 1689. This had led to armed clashes during the 1960s and 1970s
along the long riverine border where islands were claimed by both sides.
In the late 1960s, Russia
reinforced its ground forces near China from 13 to 21 divisions. By 1971, the
number had grown to 44 divisions, and Chinese leaders began to see Russia as a
more immediate threat to them than the U.S., which had fought Chinese troops
during the Korean War in the 1950s and refused to recognize the country’s
communist leadership diplomatically, maintaining the fiction that Chiang
Kai-shek’s Nationalists on Taiwan remained the legitimate government of China.
Enter Henry Kissinger, who
visited Beijing in 1971 to arrange the precedent-breaking visit by President
Richard Nixon the next year. What followed was some highly imaginative
diplomacy orchestrated by Kissinger and Nixon to exploit the mutual fear China
and the USSR held for each other and the imperative each saw to compete for
improved ties with Washington.
Triangular Diplomacy
Washington’s adroit
exploitation of its relatively strong position in the triangular relationship
helped facilitate major, verifiable arms control agreements between the U.S.
and USSR and the Four Power Agreement on Berlin. The USSR even went so far as
to blame China for impeding a peaceful solution in Vietnam.
It was one of those felicitous
junctures at which CIA analysts could jettison the skunk-at-the-picnic attitude
we were often forced to adopt. Rather, we could in good conscience chronicle
the effects of the U.S. approach and conclude that it was having the desired
effect. Because it was.
Hostility between Beijing and
Moscow was abundantly clear. In early 1972, between President Nixon’s first
summits in Beijing and Moscow, our analytic reports underscored the reality
that Sino-Soviet rivalry was, to both sides, a highly debilitating phenomenon.
Not only had the two countries
forfeited the benefits of cooperation, but each felt compelled to devote huge
effort to negate the policies of the other. A significant dimension had been
added to this rivalry as the U.S. moved to cultivate better relations
simultaneously with both. The two saw themselves in a crucial race to cultivate
good relations with the U.S.
The Soviet and Chinese leaders
could not fail to notice how all this had increased the U.S. bargaining
position. But we CIA analysts saw them as cemented into an intractable
adversarial relationship by a deeply felt set of emotional beliefs, in which
national, ideological, and racial factors reinforced one another. Although the
two countries recognized the price they were paying, neither seemed able to see
a way out. The only prospect for improvement, we suggested, was the hope
that more sensible leaders would emerge in each country. But this seemed an
illusory expectation at the time.
We were wrong about that. Mao
Zedong’s and Nikita Khrushchev’s successors proved to have cooler
heads. The U.S., under President Jimmy Carter, finally recognized the
communist government of China in 1979 and the dynamics of the triangular
relationships among the U.S., China and the Soviet Union gradually shifted with
tensions between Beijing and Moscow lessening.
Yes, it took years to chip
away at the heavily encrusted mistrust between the two countries, but by the
mid-1980s, we analysts were warning policymakers that “normalization” of
relations between Moscow and Beijing had already occurred slowly but surely,
despite continued Chinese protestations that such would be impossible unless
the Russians capitulated to all China’s conditions. For their part, the Soviet
leaders had become more comfortable operating in the triangular environment and
were no longer suffering the debilitating effects of a headlong race with China
to develop better relations with Washington.
A New Reality
Still, little did we dream
back then that as early as October 2004 Russian President Putin would visit
Beijing to finalize an agreement on border issues and brag that relations had
reached “unparalleled heights.” He also signed an agreement to jointly develop
Russian energy reserves.
A revitalized Russia and a
modernizing China began to represent a potential counterweight to U.S. hegemony
as the world’s unilateral superpower, a reaction that Washington accelerated
with its strategic maneuvers to surround both Russia and China with military
bases and adversarial alliances by pressing NATO up to Russia’s borders and
President Obama’s “pivot to Asia.”
The U.S.-backed coup in
Ukraine on Feb. 22, 2014, marked a historical breaking point as Russia finally
pushed back by approving Crimea’s request for reunification and by giving
assistance to ethnic Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine who resisted the coup
regime in Kiev.
On the global stage, Putin
fleshed out the earlier energy deal with China, including a massive 30-year
natural gas contract valued at $400 billion. The move helped Putin demonstrate
that the West’s post-Ukraine economic sanctions posed little threat to Russia’s
financial survival.
As the Russia-China
relationship grew closer, the two countries also adopted remarkably congruent
positions on international hot spots, including Ukraine and Syria. Military
cooperation also increased steadily. Yet, a hubris-tinged consensus in the
U.S. government and academe continues to hold that, despite the marked improvement
in ties between China and Russia, each retains greater interest in developing
good relations with the U.S. than with each other.
The sports slogan has it that
nothing is over “until the fat lady sings,” but on this topic, her tones are
quite clear. The day of the U.S. playing China and Russia off against each
other is no more.
One perhaps can hope that
someone in the U.S. government will inform President Trump that his Russian and
Chinese counterparts are singing from essentially the same songbook, the
unintended result of arrogant miscalculations by his immediate predecessors.
Implications for U.S. national security are enormous.
