Brian M Downing
Foreign policy is a long game. It’s been going on for millennia. Major powers come and go, alliances are forged and break down. The US, Russia, and China have been friends and enemies in just the last century. Things change and the circumstances of today between those three states might not be the same in a decade or so.
China will soon have the world’s largest economy. It’s established, by hook or by crook, a hi-tech sector and a military-industrial base and it’s managing the transition from an export economy to a consumer-based one.
Rising powers and geopolitical shifts
Rising powers shake things up, demand their place in the sun, and avenge grievances, sometimes ones from centuries past. That was the case with Prussia/Germany in the late 19th century when it became an industrial power, defeated France, and built a navy. Britain had long been allied with Prussia/Germany, and warred with France and Russia. They did so on the continent and across Central Asia in the Great Game. Germany’s rise brought a jarring geopolitical shift. Britain, France, and Russia became allies.
China in recent months has been vigorously asserting itself. It’s been building up military power in East Asia and Southeast Asia, and Central Asia is becoming part of its co-prosperity sphere. Attention is on China’s rivalry with the US. Their planes and ships cross paths, their citizens are indicted or expelled, and sanctions are heaped on one another.
The US is solidifying ties with allies from South Korea to Vietnam to India. Vietnam, it scarcely needs mention, was once an enemy. And India was officially non-aligned but irked by American support to Pakistan.
China is expanding elsewhere s well. It’s buying up natural resources of Central Asia and constructing the Belt and Road Initiative. In coming years attention may shift from tensions between Beijing and Washington and turn to those between Beijing and Moscow.
Russia may look with dismay at China’s economic clout along its southern periphery – what Russians call their Near Abroad. Today, there’s cooperation and amicability, but things change. By mid-century it may be Russia that’s searching for allies to counter an aggressive, still-rising, and perhaps dominant China.
China-Russia relations
Over the centuries the Muscovite princes expanded their power by conquering territory. The march began with wars to take the Crimea, continued with the khanates and tribal federations to the east, and continued until it came upon lands claimed by Chinese emperors.
The results were a series wars and treaties from the 17th century to the 19th that ceded land to the tsars. Often Russia would seize Chinese land, annex parts, and give the rest back to China for a hefty price. The Russian Far East of today was once an integral part of Chinese Manchuria – the homeland of the Qing emperors.
The expansion to the east is glorified in Russia – nation-building, heroic leaders, settling the wild east. China, however, views the expansion as the result of “Unequal Treaties” forced upon weak Qing dynasts by Russian tsars.
The two powers nonetheless aligned during the Cold War. Though both were communist, the past was not dead, at least in Beijing, and the partnership was rocky. When Stalin encouraged North Korea to invade the south in 1950, Beijing was angry. It did not want a war on its border, let alone one that would bring US and western forces into the region. As those forces reached the Yalu, China felt the need to intervene and suffered 175,000 dead in two and a half years, including Mao’s son.
The American effort in Vietnam ten years later brought cooperation to the Soviet Union and China. Both supplied arms and money to the North in order to make Southeast Asia a quagmire for the US. Nonetheless, Soviet and Chinese troops skirmished for six months in 1969 along the uneasy border between Manchuria and the Russian Far East – a region that had seen intermittent fighting since the 17th century.
Recognizing opportunity, Nixon and Kissinger opened relations with China in 1972. The Soviet Union was appalled at Washington’s “playing the China card”. The Russian Far East was more vulnerable. What would the Washington-Beijing alignment bring? China reduced supplies to North Vietnam, pressing Hanoi to sign the Paris Peace Accords in 1973. Seven years later, China supported the guerrillas against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
But things changed again. Russia and China moved closer again after the Soviet Union collapsed and as China sought to restore its preeminence in the world.
© 2020 Brian M Downing
Brian M Downing is a national security analyst who’s written for outlets across the political spectrum. He studied at Georgetown University and the University of Chicago, and did post-graduate work at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. Thanks as ever to Susan Ganosellis.