"The Biden administration plans to
build up global coalitions to counter a pact between Vladimir V. Putin and Xi
Jinping, portending a new type of Cold War.
WASHINGTON — When Wang Yi, China’s
foreign minister, called on Saturday for talks to
resolve the crisis in Europe, he said Ukraine’s sovereignty should be
“respected and safeguarded” — but also sided with Russia in saying that NATO
enlargement was destabilizing the continent.
“If NATO keeps expanding eastward,
is it conducive to maintaining peace and stability in Europe?” he said by video at the Munich Security Conference
in Germany, which Vice President Kamala Harris was attending in person to rally
countries against Russia.
It was the latest instance of what
Western officials say is China taking a bold new swing at the United States and
its allies by wading into European security issues to explicitly back Russia,
which has amassed more than 150,000 troops around Ukraine for a possible
invasion — despite the fact Ukraine is not joining NATO anytime soon.
Current and former U.S. and European
officials say they are alarmed over what is effectively a nonaggression pact
between China and Russia that could amount to a realignment of the world order.
Portending a new type of Cold War, Biden administration officials say the
United States will work to create and bolster its own coalitions of democratic
nations — including new Europe and Asia-Pacific strategic groups — and help
countries develop advanced military capabilities.
John F. Kirby, the chief Pentagon
spokesman, said last week
that the U.S. government was watching the “burgeoning relationship” between
China and Russia. He said that a joint statement
issued by the two countries in early February when Presidents Vladimir V. Putin
of Russia and Xi Jinping of China met in Beijing showed that China was standing
behind Mr. Putin’s military buildup around Ukraine.
“Their tacit support, if you will,
for Russia is deeply alarming, and, frankly, even more destabilizing to the
security situation in Europe,” Mr. Kirby said.
In recent weeks, the two nations negotiated a 30-year contract
for Russia to supply gas to China through a new pipeline. They blocked a demand from Washington
that the United Nations impose additional sanctions on North Korea for new
missile tests, even though the two nations had agreed to similar sanctions
before. And Russia moved large numbers of troops from
Siberia to its west, a sign that Moscow, in preparing for a potential invasion
of Ukraine, trusts China along their shared border in the east.
Their long courtship reached a peak with
the 5,000-word joint statement
that said their partnership had “no limits,” which some Biden administration
officials see as a turning point in China-Russia relations and a brazen
challenge to American and European power. The statement was the first in which
China explicitly joined Russia in opposing any further expansion of NATO, and
the two countries denounced Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy and its new
security partnership, AUKUS, which includes Britain and
Australia. The nations also described Taiwan as “an inalienable part of
China.”
China and Russia declared that they
would work with other countries to “promote genuine democracy” and counter
American-led ideology and institutions — building a new world order in which
autocracies are unchallenged, U.S. and European officials say.
“They seek a new era, as they say,
to replace the existing international order,” Ursula von der Leyen, the
president of the European Commission, said in Munich on
Saturday. “They prefer the rule of the strongest to the rule of law,
intimidation instead of self-determination, coercion instead of cooperation.”
The strengthening China-Russia ties could herald a
reconfiguring of the triangle of power
that defined the Cold War and that President Richard M. Nixon exploited 50
years ago on Monday when he made a historic visit to Beijing
to normalize diplomatic relations. That helped the United States and China
counterbalance the Soviet Union. Ties between Beijing and Moscow had been
unraveling for years over issues of ideology and foreign policy.
The opposite is happening now.
“It’s certainly concerning, and it
is not a positive development from the standpoint of U.S. national security or
U.S. national interests,” said Susan Shirk, the chair of the 21st Century China
Center at the University of California, San Diego, and a former State
Department official. “They have a kind of common perspective on the U.S. right
now, and there is this affinity between the leaders.”
Ms. Shirk said President Biden
nonetheless should try engaging in diplomacy with Mr. Xi to coax him to act
with the United States on the Russia-created Ukraine crisis. “This seems like
Diplomacy 101 given at least the history of this triangular relationship,” she
added.
China and Russia are not united by
ideology, and they are in a marriage of convenience that Russia needs more.
While Mr. Xi appreciates Mr. Putin’s defiance of the United States, he does not
want the economic uncertainty that a European war would bring. China also
traditionally insists on respecting every nation’s sovereignty, as Mr. Wang
made clear on Saturday.
There are limits to what China would
do to help Mr. Putin if he invades Ukraine. After Washington imposes sanctions on Russia,
Chinese companies could buy more oil and gas from Russia and help fill some
technology gaps, but the major Chinese state-owned banks would probably refrain
from overt violations of the sanctions for fear of being shut out of the global
financial system.
Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin have met 38
times as national leaders. They share a drive to restore their nations to a
former glory that they see as having been stripped from their homelands by
Western European powers, the United States and, in China’s case, Japan. Both
are obsessed with the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991: Mr. Putin seeks to
forcefully wind back the clock to a pre-collapse era, while Mr. Xi
aims to prevent China from meeting the same fate as the Soviet empire. They
accuse Washington of fomenting mass protests and democracy movements around the
world to overthrow other governments.
An intensifying conflict with China and Russia would have a
different shape than the Cold War. China’s trade economy is deeply integrated
with those of other nations, including the United States, and Russia is an
important energy exporter to Europe. For practical reasons, the three
governments would be unable to completely block commercial exchanges with each
other or form distinct economic blocs with partner countries, like in the days
of the Iron Curtain.
Nevertheless, foreign leaders and
Democratic and Republican foreign policy practitioners have expressed concern
in recent days.
In a Wall Street Journal opinion column
titled “Entente Multiplies the Threat From Russia and China,” John R. Bolton,
the hawkish national security adviser under President Donald J. Trump, argued
that the partnership “will last” because the two countries’ interests “are
mutually complementary for the foreseeable future.” Stephen J. Hadley, the
national security adviser under President George W. Bush, called the joint statement
“a manifesto for their global leadership,” while Kevin Rudd, the former prime
minister of Australia, said China’s
explicitly pro-Russia position on European security was “new and significant
and quite a radical departure from the past.”
Scott Morrison, the current prime
minister of Australia, denounced China last week for remaining “chillingly
silent” on Russia’s military buildup around Ukraine and noted that the two
countries were “banding together.”
A senior U.S. official said the
Biden administration would counter the two powers in part by trying to create
“greater connectivity” among democratic partners and allies of the United
States, one that goes beyond regional coalitions. Such an approach has been a
central thrust for Mr. Biden, who during the 2020 campaign said Russia was the
greatest foreign policy challenge for the United States in the medium term, and
China the biggest in the long term.
Mr. Biden pushed NATO to issue a summit communiqué last June that
laid out the challenges that China poses to the alliance, a position that Jens
Stoltenberg, the secretary general of NATO, has reiterated. The president held
a virtual “Summit for Democracy” in December
in which he spoke by video with officials from more than 100 countries. And
this month, the White House released an Indo-Pacific strategy paper
that said the United States would promote democratic institutions among partner
nations and help them “deploy advanced war-fighting capabilities,” such as
helping Australia build nuclear-powered submarines.
Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin have denounced the initiatives. They
have long seen those two main strategic prongs of Washington — promotion of
democracy abroad and the deployment or sharing of troops and military equipment
— as enormous threats
to their nations.
“It is hoped that the U.S. side will
take off their tinted glasses, discard the Cold War mind-set, view China-Russia
relations and cooperation objectively, recognize the prevailing trend of the
times and do more things that are beneficial to world peace and development,”
Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said when asked
to comment for this article.
Alexander Gabuev, the chair of the Russia in the
Asia-Pacific Program at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said that the joint
statement from China and Russia was a notable public milestone, but that the
most important cooperation was occurring beneath the surface. In particular, he
said, weapons sales from Russia to the Chinese military should be of great
concern to American policymakers.
Mr. Gabuev also noted that because
the two nations settled territorial disputes along their 2,700-mile border in
2008 and have increased their military cooperation,
Moscow felt confident enough to move troops from its east to near Ukraine to
prepare for a potential invasion — drawing down Russian troops on the borders
with China and Mongolia to their lowest level since 1922.
However, the two nations also
compete and disagree on major issues. China has a growing footprint in Central
Asia, whose former Soviet republics are viewed by Moscow as within its sphere
of influence. China insists it is now a power in the Arctic, a region Mr. Putin
has wanted to dominate. And the country has important trade relations with
nations across the former Eastern European bloc.
China is Ukraine’s largest trade
partner, and Beijing has acknowledged the nation’s sovereignty for decades. It
has never recognized Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.
Notably, the joint statement made no explicit mention of Ukraine.
“When I was in the government, we
would take a very hard look at China’s calculations and find those things that
were not compatible with what Putin was trying to do and work on that basis,”
said Daniel Russel, a former assistant secretary of state for East Asian and
Pacific affairs. “The fact is that it’s so late in the game, and the three
sides have moved so far in this unequal triangle, that it’s really not going to
be easy to try to undo that.”"
