Trump presidency unlikely to disturb robust Beijing- Moscow ties
It has been more than a month since Donald Trump entered the White House. During the presidential campaign, he talked of improving US- Russian relations more than once and pledged to impose pressure on China over trade and currency, all of which made the international community hopeful for better USRussian ties while worried about ChinaUS relations and consequently, doubtful whether Sino- Russian ties within the trilateral framework could maintain good momentum.
Some hold the view that the US approaching Russia would directly lead to a turnaround in the Sino- Russian relations. Nonetheless, a shift in the bilateral relations between China and Russia will hardly happen.
On the one hand, the improvement in US- Russia ties could mostly be attributed to tactics and it remains difficult to see any alleviation in their strategic confrontation. Over more than 20 years since the end of the Cold War, the White House vowed to mend its fences with the Kremlin whenever a new president was sworn in. It has almost become a routine at the beginning of the tenure of an incoming US president.
The George W. Bush administration’s mollification policy toward Moscow after the September 11 attacks in 2001 and the Obama government’s policy of resetting US- Russia relations in the early days of his tenure of office provided pertinent examples. However, they failed to change the general development trend of Washington- Moscow ties. The bilateral relations between the US and Russia plunged to a freezing point since the end of the Cold War at the eruption of the Ukraine crisis.
From the perspective of past practices, it seems Trump’s promise to improve US- Russia relations will have little effect. A multitude of conundrums including arms control, nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction, scramble for territories within the Commonwealth of the Independent States, the configuration of the European security system and the divergences between Washington and Moscow over the Middle East, will keep besetting the Trump administration. All these intractable issues constitute a strategic plight for the White House and the Kremlin to see a détente. Moreover, the increasing interdependence between Beijing and Washington determines that their competition is a complicated non- zero- sum game. Trump’s China policy will wield some negative influence on the US- China relations but will not fundamentally damage them as a sharp reversal is not in the US’ interests.
China- US trade volume has gone up 200 times to nearly $ 520 billion, compared with the figure in the initial period after they established diplomatic ties. Their economic and trade relations are viewed as the ballast of the stability of their bilateral ties. Furthermore, the cultural and people- to- people exchanges between the two nations have been expanding. Their mutual recognition and understanding have reached a peak over the past four decades of communication. Therefore, solid economic ties and cultural bonds will keep endowing stability to the ties between the two major countries in the world.
While perennial problems such as US arms sales to Taiwan and the South China Sea territorial dispute will probably flare up, new thorny issues like Trump’s policy on tariff and exchange rate add uncertainties to the development of China- US ties. However, building a new type of major power relations in the interests of both is an irresistible trend of history.
The current China- US- Russia rela- tions have gone far beyond the pale of their triangle in the Cold War era when two countries joined hands to balance a third party. That epoch was dominated by a confrontational atmosphere. Without intimate economic and cultural connections, China and the Soviet Union formed an alliance against the US in the 1950s and the US and China made concerted effort to counter the Soviet Union in the 1970s. Such scenarios no longer exist today as the three countries are entangled together by strategic, economic and people- to- people ties. In this way, the prediction that closer US- Russia ties will estrange or even sever China- Russia strategic partnership will unlikely come true.
In the future, the ties among the three countries will continue evolving in accordance with an intrinsic rule that has developed for half a century and take on a new, perhaps unusually brilliant, posture.