China and Russia Align Against U.S

Insight on the News, August 13, 2001 by Kenneth R. Timmerman

Their Cold War ghosts rising from the grave, Russia and China have just made a deal that squarely is aimed at harming the United States -- like an `assassin's mace.'

China's President Jiang Zemin went to Moscow in mid-July as if to receive a Russian bride. In the bride's trousseau were some of the best military and nuclear technology money can buy. Also included: an extended family of alliances, guaranteed by three generations of Communist godfathers. In exchange, Jiang handed Vladimir Putin, the former KGB officer who now is president of the Russian Federation, new contracts potentially worth tens of billions of dollars to Russian enterprises.

In Washington, Bush-administration officials reacted to the news of the Sino-Russian Friendship Treaty inked in Moscow on July 16 with quiet equanimity. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher dismissed the pact at his daily briefing, calling it "a treaty of friendship, not an alliance." At the White House, presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer noted that diplomacy was "not a zero-sum game." Echoing Boucher, he added: "Just because Russia and China have entered into an agreement does not necessarily mean it's something that would be adverse to the interests of the United States."

Official Washington was downplaying what outside observers and some top Bush-administration national-security officials say privately was a sweeping shift in the strategic balance of power that only can mean bad news for the United States. These critics say the Sino-Russian pact not only will expand Russian arms sales to China, which already had shifted the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait, but commits the two giants to a broad international agenda squarely opposed to core U.S. interests, making common cause in economic, diplomatic and military arenas.

"This treaty formalizes and makes visible a new coalition led by Beijing and Moscow to counter the United States and its allies around the world," says Constantine Menges, a former Reagan-administration National Security Council (NSC) strategic analyst now at the Hudson Institute. For Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., the treaty showed that "the Sino-Soviet split which marked so much of the Cold War period is definitely over."

The treaty calls for expanded cooperation in aviation, space, nuclear, military and information technology, as well as policy coordination at the United Nations, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO). It legitimizes both parties' right to smash dissident or separatist movements and spells out Russia's support for China's claims on Taiwan. Although Putin subsequently denied any such intent, the treaty also calls for defeating U.S. plans to deploy a national missile defense. Instead, China and Russia join to advocate a "fair and rational new international order" -- code words, say experts, for challenging U.S. interests.

But potentially most disturbing is Article 9, which contains language outlining a mutual-defense pact whenever one of the parties "believes there is a threat of aggression."

"With this treaty it would appear, for example, that any military move by China against Taiwan would now be backed up by the enormous nuclear arsenal of the former Soviet Union," Inhofe tells Insight. "Such an arrangement has profound strategic implications for the future."

Russia war-gamed how its forces could support a Chinese military takeover of Taiwan during exercises conducted Feb. 12-16. As first reported by Bill Gertz of the Washington Times, Russian commanders escalated the conflict by threatening nuclear-missile strikes on U.S. forces in South Korea and Japan. This is the first time Russia is known to have carried out a simulation involving joint war-planning with China or to have practiced fighting the United States in the Pacific.

China repays the favor on the Taiwan issue by agreeing in the treaty to support Russian dominance of Chechnya, which sits astride strategic transportation routes that command access to the vast oil resources of Central Asia and the Persian Gulf. While NATO is not mentioned by name in the 25 articles of the treaty, in an interview with the Italian daily Corriere della Sera that appeared just as he was signing the pact with Jiang, Putin suggested that "NATO could be disbanded as was the Warsaw Pact."

"This is a strategic relationship," a top national-security official told this reporter six months ago, before being tapped to join the Bush administration. "That is the phrase the Chinese and the Russians use themselves. It has concrete manifestations -- Russian arms sales -- and it is specifically aimed against the United States." That official could not be reached for comment.

In a speech at the National Defense University on May 1, President George W. Bush suggested that the United States and Russia should cooperate on joint defense projects. Indeed, the president's father and Russia's then-president, Boris Yeltsin, agreed in December 1992 to set aside lingering Cold War hostilities and pool resources to build a common missile-defense system -- plans shelved by the Clinton administration without further discussion.