Triangular Diplomacy in the Age of Putin, Xi and Trump
One of the hallmarks of the
Cold War was the complex dynamic that played out among Washington, Moscow and Beijing, as each sought advantage by playing the others off of one another.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, that dynamic changed, but never really went away, as China’s economy — and military — emerged to rival that of the United States and Russia took a back seat economically.
Still, the triangular relationship among the three countries persists and plays an important role in international affairs, writes Walter C. Clemens, Jr. in JANUARY 2019, the then Director of National intelligence Dan Coats in the united states reported, quite accurately, that “China and Russia are more aligned than at any point since the mid-1950s.” Chinese media agreed that relations with Russia were at “their best in history.” When Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Beijing in April, 2019, he and Chinese President Xi Jinping called their countries “good friends” and vowed to work together in areas ranging from trade to aerospace. Xi said that “Russia is an important partner in co-building the Belt and Road initiative” and that the “two countries should strengthen international co-operation and adhere to multilateralism.” Putin offered his support for the Beijing-led initiative, saying Xi had “built an important platform for expanding international co-operation.” Putin added that “Russia is willing to strengthen exchanges and cooperation, and work with China in energy, connectivity and other major projects.”
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Following Putin’s visit to Beijing, Russian and Chinese ships, submarines, planes and marine units conducted a week of joint maneuvers called “Joint sea 2019.” the exercises followed participation in september 2018 of some 3,200 Chinese troops in Russia’s largest-ever war games, in siberia, where nearly 300,000 Russian troops conducted drills amid rising tensions with NATO. Visiting Moscow in June 2019, Xi noted, “Russia is the country that i have visited the most times, and President Putin is my best friend and colleague.” What should outsiders make of this ostensible solidarity?
Russia, China, and the united states in the
early 21st century remain the world’s three greatest military powers. Although Russia has stagnated economically for decades, China has steadily grown in material terms and now equals or surpasses the us in gross national product. But if Russia and China work together, their combined assets — military, geopolitical, technological, financial — could produce mighty tools to use against the us and its allies, in europe and worldwide.
how likely is this scenario? Let us review the relevant background.
history’s March
During the second World War, the us was allied with soviet Russia against Adolf hitler and with Nationalist China against Japan. By the late 1940s and during the Korean War, however, the us was at war, not just with Mao zedong’s China but also with Joseph stalin’s soviet union, which supplied arms to North Korea and pilots to fight us bombers.
stalin and Mao signed an alliance on Valentine’s Day 1950 that led Americans to imagine that “monolithic” Communism threatened the “Free World.” us leaders did not know or fully appreciate how tenuous was the sino-soviet alliance and how bitter were the resentments Mao felt toward stalin and later toward soviet Party leader
Nikita s. Khrushchev.
Washington did not know that Khrushchev in October 1957 had promised a sample atomic bomb to Mao in exchange for his declaration that “the ussr is the leader of the Communist movement” — only to slowly backtrack and finally suspend all aid programs to China in 1959-1960. (this process was described in my book The Arms Race and Sino-soviet Relations [1968] and confirmed in the memoir of Nie Rong zhen, head of China’s nuclear and missile programs, 1958-1970.) Despite Moscow’s duplicitous double-game, China persisted and tested its first atomic bomb in October 1964 — the same month that Khrushchev’s comrades ousted him for “hare-brained” policies. China’s nuclear development, however, had led Washington and Moscow in 1963 to consider some kind of intervention to stop it. As late as 1970, the Kremlin contemplated a surgical strike to destroy China’s nuclear facilities.
By the time that Richard Nixon became us president in 1969, it was clear that there was no longer a meaningful sino-soviet alliance. Nixon’s National security Advisor and later secretary of state, henry Kissinger, espoused triangular diplomacy — pitting Beijing and Moscow against each other in an effort to gain support for us objectives. the us goals included ending the indo-china War on terms acceptable to Washington and capping its nuclear arms race with the ussr. But neither Beijing nor Moscow had much influence in indochina and Washington finally withdrew in disgrace. Kissinger and Nixon did establish a sort of entente with Beijing in 1971-72, but Kissinger’s effort to leverage China did not contribute to the “salt i” arms accords with Leonid Brezhnev’s Kremlin in 1972. these agreements took shape because they satisfied the strategic needs of both Washington and Moscow. Kissinger’s triangular diplomacy