Should We Be Worried About Russia and China Ganging Up on the West?Probably not. Here's why.
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 29, 2007, at 7:31 AM ET
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StumbleUponAs Russians leave the sparsely populated eastern territories in search of opportunities in the country's increasingly prosperous cities, waves of (mostly illegal) Chinese migrants are moving in. The trend is likely to intensify, feeding an anti-Chinese xenophobia that has existed in Russia for centuries. The risk of interethnic violence is bound to grow, complicating relations between the two governments.
Third, state-owned Chinese firms have expressed interest in buying increasing volumes of Russian equities. Russia will happily accept the cash, but the Kremlin is loath to accept investment that gives any foreign power a stake in the so-called strategic sectors of the Russian economy.
Today, trade with Russia, estimated at around $40 billion, accounts for just 2 percent of China's trade total. According to Chinese customs data, U.S.-Chinese trade reached $262 billion in 2006. Trade with the European Union came in at around $272 billion. Given the importance of trade for the Chinese leadership's vision of China's future, these numbers reveal that Beijing's interest in any anti-Western alliance will remain limited.
Finally, the Russian and Chinese governments now see the world (and their roles in it) in fundamentally different ways. China is well on its way to becoming a status-quo power. The Chinese Communist Party's first priority is to safeguard its legitimacy at home by generating prosperity for the Chinese people.
To build that prosperity, Beijing has embarked on a "Go Out" foreign investment strategy meant to secure the reliable long-term supplies of energy and other resources on which future growth will depend. To ensure the strategy's success, China must maintain reasonably positive relations with the United States and the European Union, home to wealthy consumers who buy increasing volumes of China's manufacturing goods and companies that both invest in China and transfer new technologies to Chinese firms. International conflict—with America or any other powerful state—puts some of this commerce at risk.
For Moscow, on the other hand, the international status quo has become intolerable. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, demand has grown within Russian society for a more assertive role on the international stage, one that satisfies domestic demand for a forceful reassertion of Russia's historical importance.
Following a decade of relative poverty and rising fears that Western powers were encircling Russia and profiting from its weakness, President Vladimir Putin's government has embarked on a self-consciously aggressive new foreign policy. The steep rise in energy prices over the past four years finances the project.
But even Russia's anti-Americanism is limited. Moscow's relations with Western governments have reached their lowest point since the end of the Cold War. But Putin is not Ahmadinejad, and the Kremlin has no interest in becoming a pariah. The Kremlin forcefully insists that it has remained within the letter of international law in righting recent wrongs.
Russia and China will continue to find tactical advantage in working together on specific foreign-policy issues. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is, in part, a tool designed for that purpose. Some of that coordination is bound to come at the West's expense. But the two countries' foreign policies will continue to diverge, limiting the likelihood of any anti-Western alliance.
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Remarks from the Fray:
An awful lot of Russia's oil reserves are Siberian. Though nobody is saying it out loud, China covets Siberia; strategically, it would catapult them into a completely new geopolitical and economic reality if they could ever get their hands on it. Russia realizes this. It will never fully trust China.
China plays a very long game. Not for them the focus on quarterly profit reports or elections every two years.
Russia has a habit of imploding every few decades. When it does, we're reminded that Russia is a troubled empire, not a nation. The breakup of the USSR was a start towards empire dissolution, but it won't be finished until Russia itself flies apart, too. Russia is made up of extremely diverse cultural and ethnic groups and is rife with internal pressures; that's one reason it's tending to lapse back to authoritarianism, it's the main thing that keeps the lid on and lets people go about their daily lives.
Russia also tends to need a belligerent foreign policy; external threats help to keep the empire together. The dissolution of the USSR was at least partly due to the gradual realization, despite internal propaganda, that nobody was really threatening its land mass militarily. Pretending otherwise was bankrupting it; they had to drop the pretense. Now that it's doing a little better economically, Putin finds it politically expedient to turn up the belligerent rhetoric a few notches, rebuild some of its lost military capability, and manufacture a few incidents. He won't want to go so far as to provoke a serious Western response, probably. But some tension serves his purposes.
Empires made up of ethnic regions dreaming nationalistic dreams don't last forever. They are not sufficiently politically stable for it. A few centuries is about the most you can hope for. Russia may well be nearing the end of its useful life as an empire. It probably won't fall apart soon, but the Chinese are a patient people.
Acquiring sparsely populated, resources-rich Siberia is truly the boldest, most profitable thing that could happen to China. Perhaps they won't do it. But you can be sure they're thinking about it.
If China does hunger for Siberia, what strategy would it use?
--UrgeIt
(To reply, click here.)
China does not trust the US plans in the Middle East and for sea route control in the Indian Ocean, the Straits of Malacca, and E. Asia - the regions through which Chinese oil imports travel. Land pipelines fro oil and gas - like the ones being built by Russia towards China, help ensure secure energy supplies. The element of energy prices to which Bremmer points is overestimated: Russia does not determine global oil prices (and hence gas prices), its is mostly done by OPEC and by the rising power hunger of China, India, and US. The price element is a non factor and will be determined by market speculation and OPEC reaction. But obviously Bremmer needs this myth to strengthen his case against the obvious.
While China and Russia are both status quo powers - and USSR had freely withdrawn from Central Europe, E. Asia, Africa, and then Soviet republics, it is in fact the US that has been opening bases everywhere, inc. Central Asia, invading countries - Somalia, Serbia, Iraq, destabilizing the strategic parity between US and Russia - ABM, withdrawal from arms control treaties - and financing and promoting domestic instability in other states - Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan. US has also demanded that the former Kyrgyz president Akaev allow AWACS on his territory - right near the Chinese border, which irked China. Before being booted out from Uzbekistan, US was also planning to expand the base. Finally besides US base expansionism - Romania, Poland, Czech Republic, and Bulgaria, US is also promoting NATO expansionism. That is not at all a status quo power. So China and Russia have joined to limit and squeeze US out of Central Asia.
What Bremmer ignores is that Chinese and Russian foreign policy vectors are in different directions - Russia towards Europe and the Caucasus, China towards East and Southeast Asia. In both cases, Russia faces US fuelled NATO expansionism and bases (in the west), and China faces US presence in East and Southeast Asia as well as growing US patrols of the sea lanes and military presence in the Middle East - from where China gets most of it oil. If anybody - including Bremmer - cared to read Chinese analysts, they show strong suspicion and worry over US energy drive and plans to, when needed, cut off China from the Middle East oil. Hence the SCO has provided security to built Kazakh and Russian pipelines to China. China and E. Asia actually provide Russia with an opportunity to diversify its energy exports away from Europe/NATO and to rebuild the local infrastructure - the planned electricity exports to China from the Russian Far East, gas and oil exports, and the transportation projects utilizing the TransSib.
SCO has also helped institutionalize the growing political and trade relationship between Russia and China. The old and "boogeyman" of Chinese immigration into the Russian Far East is simply that - even the reports from the local paranoid nationalist administration in the Russian Far East show no more than 15,000-20,000 seasonal Chinese migrants in the main 3-4 Russian cities in the Far East. And as anybody vaguely familiar with the Russian Far East (not Bremmer apparently) knows, if they are not in the cities, then they are surely not hiding in the taiga forests! The biggest Chinese community is in Moscow.
Finally, a sign of the cohesion of any political-security organization are its military preparations and games: Russia and China have conducted extensive anti-terrorist games in 2005, 2006, and 2007...have any of them done this with USA to the same extent? Politically, neither state wants to see US turn Iran into another mess like it did in Iraq, most recently. The Chinese will lose another energy supplier to US invasion, Russia will lose a southern buffer against US expansion into CIS. Russia-Chinese concerns of course do not stop there - ABM, Weapons in Space, undermining the authority of the UN.
--Rekab
(To reply, click here.)
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