Trump and the Putin-Xi Bromance

US President Donald Trump often boasts of his strong personal ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping. He believes these ties remain strong despite a looming trade war with China and the prospects of a renewed nuclear arms race with Russia. International relations, however, are not based on personalities but rather on the vital interests of nations. Thus, the recent meeting between Putin and Xi at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum should be sending shock waves through the White House. Not only have Putin and Xi publicly pronounced themselves as “best friends,” the two leaders signed a series of agreements designed to strengthen strategic cooperation between their nations. When it comes to backing up promises of friendship with action, both Putin and Xi have delivered where Trump has failed. Russia and China are cementing a relationship based on mutual respect and benefit, which, if fully consummated, will fundamentally alter the global geopolitical balance to the detriment of the US. Whether in haphazardly applying tariffs on Chinese goods or foreclosing on a foundational arms control agreement with Russia, Trump seems oblivious to the consequences of his actions. Whether or not Russia and China can ultimately achieve the full potential of their budding alliance, it is already clear that the US will never again enjoy the kind of leverage it has had over these two global rivals.

The courtship of China by the US and Russia over the past seven decades has produced a complex diplomatic history that colors the geopolitical map of Eurasia to this day. A quick review of that history provides valuable context to what is happening now.

With the Chinese Civil War in the aftermath of World War II, the US supported the nationalist Chinese forces, or Kuomintang. Russia, in the form of the Soviet Union, supported the Chinese communists. When the communists ousted the Kuomintang from the Chinese mainland in October 1949, it looked as if China had been lost to the West. For the next decade, Russia supported China in many ways: assisting China during the Korean conflict, providing industrial equipment and know-how to boost China’s economic capacity, and transferring weapons and material to strengthen China’s military.

The Russians, however, balked at providing China with the ability to manufacture a nuclear arsenal. In June 1959, Russia withdrew its nuclear technicians from China, forcing China to proceed on its own and marking the beginning of the schism between them. Five years later, in October 1964, when China tested its first nuclear device, the US approached Russia with a proposal for a joint military strike against China’s nuclear infrastructure. Russia, however, was hopeful of bettering relations with China, and rejected the US proposal outright.

Over the course of the next four years, however, Russian-Chinese relations worsened to the point that by 1969 the two nations were engaged in a series of bloody border clashes. It was Russia’s turn to approach the US about the possibility of joint military action against China. This time, the US balked — President Richard Nixon was laying the groundwork for the opening of relations between the US and China for the express purpose of driving a wedge between China and Russia.

Following Nixon’s trip to China in 1972, the US began a long and laborious process of engagement designed to open China to the West. The US never viewed China as an existential threat to its security. Russia, on the other hand, did — the prospect of millions of Chinese troops crossing into Siberia kept the Russian military on its toes, compelling the deployment of considerable military power along its lengthy border with China that otherwise could have been used to face off against Nato in Europe. But the military benefits of engaging with China were secondary to the prime US objective of unleashing China’s economic potential to the mutual benefit of both China and the West. It is the economic issue that most defines US-Chinese relations today.

The same cannot be said about Russia. The Russian economy, in and of itself, was never viewed as a threat to US national security; the Russian military was. The fear of Russian military aggression in Europe led to the formation of Nato in April 1949. When Russia successfully tested its own nuclear weapons later that same year, the US and Russia became locked into an arms race that left the two nations on the brink of nuclear war on more than one occasion. Dealing with the threat posed by Russia’s nuclear arsenal became the major theme in US-Russian relations, where success was measured in terms of arms control agreements that limited the growth, and later cut the size, of the nuclear arsenals of both nations. This emphasis on strategic arms control continues to dominate US-Russian relations to this day.

For decades, the US has been able to capitalize on the different realities that shaped its relationships with Russia and China, continuing to play one side against the other. China’s nuclear arsenal, largely composed of intermediate-range missiles, never threatened the continental US. It did, however, threaten Russia, forcing the Russians to continue to allocate precious military resources to deter the threat of Chinese aggression, regardless of the low likelihood of such an attack. And while Russia took advantage of China’s economic modernization by increasing trade with its neighbor, the fear of excessive Chinese influence being exerted over the Russian Far East prevented the kind of massive Chinese investment into Russia that might have otherwise taken place. Instead, China focused on its own economic growth, derived largely from increased trade with the US, Europe and the rest of the world. This formula of engaging Russia in arms control and China economically has defined US policy priorities between these two nations for the past 50 years, putting the US in a position to influence the pace and scope of Russian-Sino relations on terms conducive to US national security and economic priorities.

Responding to a Unipolar World

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 altered the global geopolitical landscape considerably. Russia was no longer viewed by the US as an existential threat, and as such, relations between the two nations were redefined in a manner that reflected the reality of Russia’s inferior position, both militarily and economically. For China, the Soviet Union’s demise put it at a strategic disadvantage with the US. The Soviet military had served as a global check against unilateral American exploitation of its military capability. With the collapse of Soviet military power, this equilibrium was no more, and China was left pondering its role in a unipolar world dominated by the US.

In 1996, in an effort to counterbalance the US, China, together with Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, entered what was known as the Shanghai Five Grouping. The primary focus for this organization was increased mutual security. Later, in the summer of 2001, the organization was reorganized and renamed. Now known as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the organization quickly expanded its mandate to incorporate projects involving transportation, energy and telecommunications. Moreover, regular meetings were held involving security, military, defense, foreign affairs, economic, cultural and banking issues.

As important as the SCO was to both Russia and China, other matters took precedence during the early 2000s. For Russia, negotiations over strategic nuclear weapons with the US overshadowed the SCO. While for China, expanding its trade relations with the US were paramount. With the vagaries of US domestic politics and their impact of foreign policy, eight years of US neglect during the administration of George W. Bush were followed by eight years of re-engagement under Barack Obama. Throughout, the importance for China and Russia of adapting to the foreign policy priorities of the US took precedence over the goals and objectives of the SCO.

The election of Donald Trump has brought a fundamental change with lasting consequences. The foundational understandings that underpinned US relations with Russia and China were abandoned as Trump sought to obtain unilateral US advantage over Russia and China regarding the very issues that had defined their respective relationships. For Russia, the imposition of economic sanctions in the aftermath of its 2014 annexation of Crimea was not a complete game-changer; but Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the treaty on intermediate nuclear forces was. Likewise, for China the US challenge to its military buildup in the South China Sea was a normal part of their evolving relationship; while the imposition of tariffs on Chinese goods has been, on the other hand, fundamentally destabilizing.

The apparent warmth of the bromance between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping in St. Petersburg signals the cold reality that the two leaders have all but given up on the US as a reliable partner on critical strategic matters such as arms control and the economy. The scope and scale of the agreements signed between the two leaders — including allowing the Chinese electronics giant Huawei to develop 5G technology in Russia at a time when the US has banned Huawei from the US market — reflects the desire of both Russia and China to create tight bonds that can withstand the test of time.

Particularly in the post-war era, the US always premised its foreign policy on the notion that it was the indispensable power, and that eventually all other nations would yield to this reality. By disengaging on the very issues that drove relations with Russia and China for decades, Donald Trump has succeeded in making the US dispensable. Doing so brings Russia and China together in a way that will challenge US primacy for decades to come.

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