US-China-Russia Strategic Triangle

US-China-Russia Strategic Triangle

A deep dive for new great power competition

Magazine Desk

“Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.” — George Orwell (1984)

Now, even bleaker than the original 1984 novel, Oceania now has hostilities simultaneously with both Eurasia and Eastasia. Simply put, the US is still the dominant power in a world of increasing multipolarity. However, the increasing entente between Russia and China has caught the US foreign policy establishment flat-footed. Currently, Russia, China and the United States are the three countries at the heart of the global great power competition. Sino-Russian cooperation in numerous arenas challenges the United States but, at the same time, raises the question: just how far an alignment between Moscow and Beijing can go? The answer will be shaped by China’s own ascension and the dynamic interplay between Russia and the United States to counter China’s rise.

For the first time in decades, it is possible to imagine the United States fighting, and possibly losing, a large-scale great power competition. For generations of Americans accustomed to US military superiority and its ability to deter major wars, the idea of armed conflict between great powers may seem highly improbable. The idea that the United States might lose such a war would seem absolutely preposterous. Nevertheless, the possibility of war and US defeat are real and growing.

The US trade war with China and Washington’s prolonged standoff with Russia are increasingly driving Moscow and Beijing toward each other. Chinese President Xi Jinping recently was in Russia to attend the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum where he met with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. China and Russia have signed economic deals that span everything from 5G networks to hydropower plant construction to establishing a joint research and technology innovation fund. The deals come in the wake of Moscow’s recently indicated desire to collaborate with China in the Arctic’s Northern Sea Route as part of Beijing’s Maritime Silk Road initiative, while the massive Power of Siberia pipeline is completing the final phase of construction and is set to begin pumping ever-larger volumes of Russian natural gas to China by the end of this year.

These developments are simply the latest in a broader trend of Russia and China strengthening political, economic and security ties. Such developments raise the question as to how deep an alignment between Russia and China is and how far can it go, and to what extent their relationship is forming a competition with the United States. To begin to answer this question, it is important to first frame it in the appropriate strategic context, and then to look at how ties between Russia, China and the United States have evolved within this context.

The Postwar Evolution of the ‘Strategic Triangle’

The end of World War II marked the emergence of the United States and the Soviet Union as the two primary global powers, as well as the founding of the People’s Republic of China (1949). This development ushered in an inherent “strategic triangle” relationship among the three countries, meaning that relations between any two of these powers would necessarily shape and be shaped by the strategic interests of the third power. These strategic interests include neutralizing and dominating their respective peripheries while projecting outward and pushing their own respective vision of global order, producing inherent contradictions and driving the so-called great power competition between them.

In the initial years of the postwar era, China was the weakest of the three powers in economic and military terms. Nevertheless, under Chairman Mao, China aptly used its size and political and diplomatic heft to maintain independence and balance between the United States and the Soviet Union. Initially, Beijing aligned with the Soviet Union, partly because of their shared communist ideology but just as importantly because of their shared interest in rivalling the power and influence of the United States. However, this alignment almost immediately became strained over issues such as the Korean War, border disputes and the succession from Joseph Stalin to Nikita Khrushchev, with the latter pursuing policies like “peaceful coexistence” with the US that Mao deemed as detrimental to China’s interests.

These differences ultimately led to the Sino-Soviet split which, in turn, paved the way for a strategic rapprochement between US and China beginning in the early 1970s, as both countries shared an interest in limiting the power and influence of the Soviet Union. But this rapprochement proved to have its limits once Soviet power was effectively constrained and began weakening by the 1980s.

This strategic triangle entered a new phase after the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union (now Russia) was marginalized as a global player. The US became the only global superpower, while China embarked on a journey to achieve economic and geopolitical ascension. Though Russia experienced internal turmoil and its global power projection weakened substantially, it was never fully removed as a regional power, as demonstrated by the emergence of the Commonwealth of Independent States and its continued engagement in former Soviet politics and security affairs.

These developments recalibrated the power dynamics among the three countries, with the US expanding its power projection globally, while China and Russia began to improve bilateral relations as the former ascended and the latter began to recover after the chaotic 1990s. China’s rise as a global power has put it in greater competition with the US over a wide range of issues, from trade disputes to the South China Sea to the Belt and Road Initiative. Meanwhile, Russia’s regional resurgence in the mid- to late 2000s – thanks to high global energy prices and a domestic political consolidation by Vladimir Putin – put it in greater contention with the US and the West, culminating in the 2008 Russia-Georgia War and the 2014 Euromaidan uprising in Ukraine, and leading to the standoff between Moscow and the West currently in play.

The Limits of a Russia-China Alignment

At this point, the United States remains the strongest global power, but one whose position — whether political, economic or military — is increasingly challenged by China and Russia. US tensions with China and its standoff with Russia have pushed Moscow and Beijing closer together to recalibrate the strategic triangle. Russia and China have in recent years expanded economic ties and political coordination, and their level of military cooperation is at the highest level since the end of the Cold War.

However, this rising cooperation between Russia and China has both challenges and limitations. While economic ties between the two countries have indeed grown significantly in relative terms, they are still quite limited in absolute terms. And despite the recent US-China trade dispute, overall bilateral trade ($737 billion in 2018) is still much higher than overall Russia-China trade ($108 billion).

However, it is important to consider that the public view of China within Russia is positive, especially compared to that of the United States: A survey conducted at the end of 2018 found that 75 percent of those polled viewed China in a positive light, while 54 percent viewed the US negatively. However, when it comes to the specific issue of China’s rise as a power, a different picture emerges. Nearly 60 percent of Russians living in Eastern Siberia polled in another survey considered China’s ascent as a threat to Russia’s interests, and more than half opposed a visa-free regime with China.

This dichotomy is important when considering the general level of cooperative relations between Russia and China and a deeper sense of concern and mistrust that lurks beneath the surface. China doesn’t challenge Russia’s political model in the manner that the West does in terms of promoting democracy and human rights, but China does challenge Russia’s survival in a way the West does not. Such impressions are anecdotal, of course; nevertheless, these kinds of conspiratorial perceptions among educated Russians in the private and education sectors show that there are deep concerns about China’s rise at the social level and signal the potential pushback that strengthening ties between Russia and China could face at the political level.

Looking Ahead

So, what does all this spell for Russia-China relations down the line? Relations between Moscow and Beijing have been on an upward trajectory in recent years, and Russia and China have until now been careful to downplay their differences while emphasizing the shared opportunities of their cooperation. However, from the standpoint of the strategic triangle, it can be deduced that as China continues to grow as an economic and military power, tensions will likely increase between Russia and China and undermine the trajectory of cooperation that the two countries are currently on. Thus, while increased Chinese economic involvement in areas such as the Arctic, Eastern Siberia and Central Asia can produce economic benefits for Russia for now, at a certain point this involvement can pose a more direct strategic threat to Moscow, whether in the form of increasing Chinese control over key infrastructure and shipping lanes, having greater access to Russia’s remote regions or overwhelming Russia from an economic and demographic standpoint.

China has been careful to downplay any notion that its rise presents a threat to Russia, and it was often emphasized to me in China that Beijing wants peaceful coexistence with its neighbours. However, as Henry Kissinger writes: “Strategists rely on the intentions of the presumed adversary only to a limited extent. For intentions are subject to change. And the essence of sovereignty is the right to make decisions not subject to another authority. A certain amount of threat based on capabilities is therefore inseparable from the relations of sovereign states.” This means that China, like other powers, must be judged by its capabilities rather than its current intentions when it comes to projecting power.

Such capabilities have clearly served as a concern for the United States, but they may be even more worrisome for Russia — which has a tenth of the population of China (147 million people vs. 1.4 billion) and an economy that is a tenth of its size ($1.6 trillion vs. $12.2 trillion) while sharing a long and direct border with China. This is where Russian fears over Chinese expansionism come from. While the two countries have been able to manage and mitigate tensions over such matters, for now at least, the underlying issues are likely to grow more contentious. China seems likely to increase its economic, political and (potentially) security involvement in areas that matter to Russia — with signs of this already taking place in the border areas near Tajikistan and Afghanistan.

Because of this, there may be room down the line for Russia and the United States to find common ground on selective issues, which in turn could pave the way for the United States and Russia to pursue a rapprochement of their own to curb China’s power. But like the US-China outreach in the 1970s, such an effort would be limited even as their deeper competition endures. Thus, the growing alignment between Russia and China is part of a fluid global power competition dynamic, with further shifts in the strategic triangle inevitably to come in the years ahead.