The "new Cold War" and China-Russia relations

Charles Kupchan is recommending a bit more realism on this whole new-cold-war-with-China thing (Biden’s Foreign Policy Needs a Course Correction Project Syndicate 05/14/2021)

In this emerging world, democratic governance will still retain its intrinsic advantage: humans prefer freedom. But for the first time since its emergence as a global power in the 1940s, the US now faces in China a full-spectrum competitor. And because the US needs China’s help to rein in North Korea, arrest global warming, and tackle other transnational issues, it had better start mapping out a strategy that is not just about “us versus them.”

Premising US policy on a clash between democracy and autocracy would not just fail to contain China. Worse, it would actually encourage China’s recalcitrance by consolidating its unholy [sic] alliance with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. China and Russia have been rivals historically, and China’s rise should naturally alarm the Kremlin. But the two autocracies have instead formed a marriage of convenience to resist what they see as the West’s encroaching ambition. [my emphasis]

The Chicago Council on Global Affairs provides some recent background on the still-improving relations between China and Russia (Russians See Greater Reward than Risk in Closer Relations with China 03/21/2021):

Russia and China deepened economic ties in 2014 after the United States and European countries slapped sanctions on Moscow following the annexation of Crimea. Xi Jinping attended Russia’s 2015 Victory Day celebration, where he and Vladimir Putin signed agreements to increase economic and strategic ties. This included a formal link between the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) with China’s Belt and Road Initiative (specifically the Silk Road Economic Belt).

Since then, cooperation has expanded into a variety of domains. Russia has leaned on China economically during the COVID-19 pandemic. China has also found a welcome partner in Moscow as it faces tensions with the United States over trade, human rights, and security issues. During a three-day visit to Moscow in 2019, Xi Jinping stated in a press conference that “Russia is the country that I have visited the most times, and President Putin is my best friend and colleague."

US-China diplomacy off to a bit of a lurching start under Biden?

Fred Kaplan seems to have been more disturbed than impressed by Secretary of State Tony Blinken's confrontation with Chinese diplomats in Alaska last week. (A Cold Welcome in Alaska Slate 03/19/2021.

Noting that Blinken had "all but said in advance" that the meeting would go badly" - i.e., it was a pre-planned moment of verbal confrontation - Kaplan still writes, "It is surprising, though, that the meeting went so badly, and even more surprising that Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who led the U.S. delegation, seemed surprised that it did."

He also notes that:

... after the reporters and cameras left the room. A “senior official” said Thursday night, that, after the stormy public ripostes, the two sides “got down to business” and held “substantive, serious, and direct” discussions that went “well beyond the two hours we had allotted.” This language—“substantive, serious, and direct”—is reminiscent of the term “frank and businesslike” invoked by public-affairs officials in the Cold War era to describe particularly tense meetings between U.S. and Soviet diplomats.

Kaplan also explains some of the leading considerations in balancing relations with other countries in the US-China relationship:

In this respect, the Biden team’s Asian voyage has been a mixed bag so far. Leaders of Japan, South Korea, and India have seemed pleased to be treated to the new administration’s first foreign trip, but it has highlighted conflicting interests as well as common ones. The joint statement released after Blinken’s meeting in Seoul, for instance, said nothing about “denuclearization of North Korea”—Biden’s security objective in the region—or about China. South Korean President Moon Jae-in avidly wants a peace deal with the North and, to that end, wants to avoid—much less join an alliance built on—confrontation with Beijing.

When Blinken goes to Europe next week for the annual meeting of NATO ministers, he will find that several allies there—notably Germany and France—want no part of what they see as a “cold war” with China, either. They rely on China for trade, don’t view the distant Pacific as a theater for national-security concerns, and so don’t view China as any sort of threat. [my emphasis]

As I say here periodically, I have a love-hate relationship with the "realist" view of international relations. It focuses on nations as actors in a state system which pursue a variety of interests that are often persistent no matter how domestic political ideologies may change in the national government. Some of the most perceptive critics of the Iraq War were noted advocates of the "realist" perspective like Stephen Walt who pointed out the unrealistic assumptions of the neoconservative warhawks and their fantasies of local populations jubilantly welcoming American troops conducting "wars of liberation". On the other hand, "realists" like Henry Kissinger have been known to conduct foreign policy with a level of cynicism that are difficult to justify in terms of real American interests, e.g., the 1973 coup in Chile. And even a common definition of what a country's most important interests are doesn't in itself produce agreement on how to conduct foreign policy.

But one central realist concept has been understandably prominent in discussions of China. Realists understand that when a major power like the US is declining in its relative influence that other powers will assert their own perceived interests more affirmatively. And in the case of China, which is becoming the largest economy in the world, the US and other countries, notably including Russia and the European Union, have to adjust their approaches and recognize the opportunities and dangers that can arise from that process.

So the dynamics of the US, Russia, and the EU in adjusting to the rising power and status of China will be a consistent theme is international politics for quite a while. Kaplan himself also argues that the US should avoid a "New Cold War" framework in our approach to China. (The U.S. Can Compete With China Without Fighting a “New Cold War” Slate 03/18/2021)

And because of those larger sets of relationships, individual issues like the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) neoliberal deregulation "trade" treaty, or China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI; New Silk Road project) will be influenced in significant ways by the larger patterns of adjustments.

One notable development that doesn't seem to be registering very strongly with mainstream political analysts is that Russia and China have relatively good relations at the moment. Charles writes about this dynamic in Ziegler "A Sino-Russo Entente?" (The National Interest Mar/Apr 2021), online title A Russian-Chinese Partnership Against America? 03/06/2021, where he writes:

Each regime is acting as a pragmatic, nationalist great power, and each sees its interests as far more compatible with the other power than with the United States.

Russian and Chinese adherence to global rules is selective and cynical, though international law and institutions can be manipulated to frustrate American foreign policy goals. The two often vote together in the United Nations, for example, using their veto to counter U.S. and European Security Council resolutions on Syria. In 2018, Russian and Chinese diplomats discussed coordinating on the Middle East and agreed to maintain a dialogue on a range of issues in the region. The Middle East presents opportunities and security concerns for Russia and China as the United States disengages. Both opposed Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and have taken advantage of the situation by negotiating closer military and economic cooperation with Tehran. More broadly in the Middle East, China became the region’s largest investor in 2016, and in the following year established its first overseas base in Djibouti. Russia is engaged diplomatically across the region; is selling weapons to Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Libya, the UAE, and Turkey; and recently concluded a twenty-five-year agreement for a naval base in Sudan to complement its base at Tartus, in Syria.

In other regions, the two countries may not be cooperating openly, but their implied support for each other’s aggression narrows Washington’s policy options. [my emphasis]

Wolfgang Münchau's Eurointelligence reports in Are Nord Stream 2 sanctions too late? 03/22/2021 that the chances that Germany will insist on the completion of the project seem high, but it's not a done deal yet:

Two Russian pipe-laying vessels are working on expedited schedule to complete the missing parts of the pipeline in the Baltic Sea. The question in Germany is no longer if the pipeline is completed but when. Handelsblatt says the current estimate is September.

The paper says the bigger issue is not so much whether US sanctions would stop the pipeline, but to which extent they would damage the transatlantic relationship. One of the potential threats we haven't considered so far is for the US to target Gerhard Schröder personally. As the chair of Nord Stream 2's supervisory board, the former German chancellor could become subject to US sanctions directly - through a freeze of assets and a travel restrictions to the US.

We have to take this report with a pinch of salt. The German media - generally fanboys of the grand coalition [Merkel's governing coalition] - have been supportive of the project, and did not see the international counter-reaction coming. We believe, in contrast to Handelsblatt, that the Biden administration and Congress have the ability to stop this project if they want to. The question is whether they are ready to do what it takes. [my emphasis]

Ideological conflict and US-China Relations

Michael McFaul has a worthwhile article cautioning against the US taking a new-cold-war policy in its relations with China that emphasizes ideological conflict in Xi Jinping Is Not Stalin: How a Lazy Historical Analogy Derailed Washington’s China Strategy Foreign Affairs 08/10/2020(registration required).

The Stalin reference in the title has to do with the comparison of the world situation during the decade after the Second World War and today. Here he seems to be making a straight-up defense of Truman's Cold War policy based on the "secret policy paper known as NSC-68," although he calls the language in the now-(in)famous NSC-68 "sound eerily like" speeches on China by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien that McFaul is criticizing sharply.

McFaul does criticize other aspects of Cold War view taken by US administrations:

But the United States also at times overreacted and oversimplified, seeing every leftist and national liberation movement as an enemy to be defeated. That mindset contributed to some of the worst American excesses during the Cold War, including McCarthyism, the fictitious “missile gap,” the Vietnam War, and support for brutal right-wing dictatorships, including even apartheid in South Africa.

He also notes in terms that cannot be said to be an unquestioning praise for US Cold War policies:

And the Cold War was not cold; the scholars David Holloway and Stephen Stedman estimate that 20 million people died between 1945 and 1989 in 130 wars, many of them fueled by superpower rivalry. Mistaking Xi for a new Stalin [or a NSC-68 perception of "Stalin"!] could lead the United States to repeat those mistakes.

The Cold War lasted 40 years. For most of that period, victory was uncertain. For Washington to be successful in what may be an even longer contest, it must diagnose the severity of the threat precisely and calibrate efforts to contain and deter Beijing accordingly. False analogies from the Cold War hurt both of these efforts. Washington shouldn’t spend trillions on nuclear arms, missiles, and space weapons. It shouldn’t fight proxy wars. And most important, it shouldn’t stumble into a direct confrontation with China. U.S. foreign-policy makers must resist the impulse to check every Chinese move around the world, like Truman believed he had to do with Stalin. This line of thinking compelled U.S. Cold War strategists to double and triple down on the tragic, unnecessary war in Vietnam. Today, Americans know that they did not need to contain communism in Vietnam to defeat the Soviets. (And by the way, Eastern Europeans—Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, and many others—played the central role in defeating Soviet communism and ending the Cold War, not Americans.) Threat assessments, in other words, should never go unquestioned. Are freedom and democracy really under worldwide assault if Laos or Rwanda imports Chinese-made Internet equipment? Or if the Chinese develop Belt and Road Initiative projects in Ghana or Italy? Should every Chinese citizen in the United States be treated as a spy? By trying to contain the Chinese everywhere, Washington may undermine containment in areas where its vital national security interests are actually at stake. [my emphasis]

Interestingly enough, another Foreign Affairs piece, The Ideology Delusion: America’s Competition With China Is Not About Doctrine by Elbridge Colby and Robert Kaplan 09/04/2020, also cautions about using ideological rivalry as the organizing principle for US China policy.

I've been not-a-fan of Robert Kaplan's for a while. See my posts: Over the cliff with the neocons one more time? 09/03/2007; Neocon bigwig Robert Kagan Kaplan on the virtues of war and chaos 01/03/2015; Robert Kaplan promotes war and the alleged virtues of imperialism 06/04/2015.

Elbridge Colby served as deputy assistant secretary of defense in 2017-18 during the Trump Administration. He is a principal at a shady group called the Marathon Institute, which Eli Clifton profiled in Pundits with undisclosed funding from arms manufacturers urge ‘stronger force posture’ to counter China Responsible Statecraft 05/14/2020. Clifton reports:

And from 2014 to 2017 and 2018 to 2019 Colby worked at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) which counts Northrop Grumman as one of its biggest donors (contributing more than $500,000 between October 1, 2018 to September 30, 2019) as well as contributions from Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Bell Helicopter, BAE Systems, General Dynamics, Boeing and DynCorp.

Kaplan is also associated with CNAS, whose own list of 2018-19 donors is available online.

Kaplan and Butcher's-Bill Kristol were the founders of the now-defunct Project for New American Century (PNAC). which was also focused on promoting China as a military threat to the US. But wrecked their brand name with their advocacy of the Iraq War which dramatized their catastrophically bad judgment in foreign affairs.

The Center for a New American Security, founded in 2007, features luminaries from the Obama Administration, providing a somewhat more bipartisan cast than we normally associate with the old PNAC. A couple of recent special reports from CNAS involved their preferred China policy, Rising to the China Challenge: Renewing American Competitiveness in the Indo-Pacific 01/28/2020 and Total Competition: China’s Challenge in the South China Sea 01/08/2020.

The Foreign Affairs article by Elbridge and Kaplan is fairly vague about their view of the threat they see China representing to the United States, such as:

China very likely seeks to form a regional trade area favorable to its economy—a modern-day analog to the tribute system that placed China at the heart of East Asia from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century. In a world now defined by rising barriers to trade, China would gain enormous advantage in shaping a large market area that conforms to its standards and benefits its workers and companies. Its drive for hegemony also has a strategic purpose. China has long felt fenced in by U.S. allies and by other rivals. Now it intends to compel neighboring states to take their security cues from Beijing. And after a “century of humiliation,” China is eager to stand tall, asserting its power in Asia and beyond. [my emphasis]

But they do argue against a focus on ideological differences between China and the US:

Even beyond Congress, though, there is wide agreement forming across the political spectrum about why China poses a threat to the United States. For many, it is above all because China is an oppressive one-party state, governed by a Marxist-Leninist cadre, whose leader, Xi Jinping, has amassed more personal power than anyone in Beijing since Mao Zedong. Both the Trump administration and Democratic Party presidential candidate Joe Biden have lambasted China for its execrable human rights record, which includes, among other brutalities, putting a million Uighur Muslims in concentration camps. The leading Democratic Party-aligned foreign policy thinkers Kurt Campbell and Jake Sullivan wrote in these pages last year: “China may ultimately present a stronger ideological challenge than the Soviet Union did. . . . China’s rise to superpower status will exert a pull toward autocracy. China’s fusion of authoritarian capitalism and digital surveillance may prove more durable and attractive than Marxism.”

The criticisms of China are true. The United States is indeed in an exceptionally serious competition with China that requires it to take a hard line on many fronts. And Washington should never shy away from its unabashed embrace of republican government and respect for human dignity. But ideology does not lie at the root of the matter between the United States and China—even if elements in China’s Marxist-Leninist elite think it does. The very scale of China’s economy, population, and landmass and its consequent power would cause profound concern for U.S. policymakers even if the country were a democracy. Seeing this competition as primarily ideological will misconstrue its nature—with potentially catastrophic results.

That particular line of argument from China hawks is worth watching. I'm a bit suspicious of the Elbridge-Kaplan argument. The donors to organizations like CNAS (and probably the Marathon Institute) are probably willing to go with ideological or non-ideological arguments as long as the sell more weapons and military services.

An ambiguous warning on US-China relations

Trying to understand what's actually being said in foreign policy position papers can be a lot like reading tea leaves, or maybe necromancy.

William Blake's depiction of the Witch of Endor conjuring the spirit of the prophet Samuel

The stereotypically establishment foreign policy association, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), recently published a paper by Robert Blackwill and Thomas Wright, The End of World Order and American Foreign Policy (Council Special Report #86, May 2020). Blackwill was a deputy national security adviser in the Cheney-Bush Administration. wright directs the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institute. This paper includes a disclaimer noting that CFR "takes no institutional positions on policy issues," so the paper is not an official CFR position.

This paper is partially reminiscent of the infamous Project for a New American Century (PNAC), in that it centers on countering China. That in itself isn't strange, of course, because China is clearly the rising power in the world and either already has or is likely to soon have the world's largest economy. So of course other countries have o seek ways to accommodate or otherwise adjust to China's increasing international power. That much is a banal observation in 2020.

As CFR's President Richard Haass put it in his book, A World in Disarray (2017),

No relationship [in the post-Second World War period] has been more important than the one between the United States, the dominant power of the era, and China, the country widely seen as posing the biggest challenge to American prin1acy. lt is also true that no relationship was likely to experience more difficulties. Much of history is the result of friction leading to conflict between existing and rising powers, reflecting the difficulty in peacefully accommodating the changing power balance and relationship between the two. ...

... the relationship between the two remained surprisingly good in the aftermath of the Cold War. Growing economic ties filled much of the space that hadl been taken up by shared concern about the Soviet Union. Two-way merchandise trade alone grew from $20 billion in 1990 to nearly $600 billion twenty-five years later.2 Investment likewise grew from negligible to truly substantial amounts. Meanwhile, diplomatic interaction both increased ancl expanded as top-level summits came to be supplemented by frequent meetings involving both governments' bureaucracies discussing the full range of bilateral, regional, and increasingly global issues.

But the congruence was broader. The underlying premise of China's national security following the chaos of Mao's Cultural Revolution was that the country needed several decades of economic development if it was to be stable and secure, that the rate of clevelopment needed to be rapid, and that such growth could take place only amid regional stability and decent relations with the world's largest and most innovative economy. All of this provided a rationale from China's perspective for behaving with restraint and maintaining good relations with the United States so that trade would grow and technology transfers would be forthcoming. [my emphasis]

This background is a reminder that we all need to be cautious of hair-on-fire representations of US-Chinese relations, i.e., the presentation of China as a newly-emerged bogeyman. It's an evolving relationship, and US policy makers have been very aware of China's development over the last several decades and have generally welcomed it.

Haass depicted the state uf US-China relationship as of 2016-17 as follows:

Overall, Sino-American relations a quarter of a century after the end of the Cold War are difficult to describe or categorize. In many ways, the two are still searching for a rationale to take the place of the anti-Sovietism that informed their relationship prior to 1989. The Chinese speak of a new model of a major-country relationship, but the two governments have not for the most part been able to fill in the blanks and move past generalities. Adding to the uncertainty is the vulnerability of the relationship to a crisis growing out of competing claims in the South China Sea, Sino-Japanese tensions, or Taiwan.

Still, for all this, the durability of the Sino-American relationship is striking, something worth commenting on given the changing strategic context and power balance between the two countries as China has grown in both absolute and relative terms. The relationship has clone fairly well under Democrats and Republicans alike and under a number of Chinese leaders. Again, history would have predicted far more friction, and while it is still possible that something approximating a new cold war could materialize, it is by no means inevitable. [my emphasis]

Blackwell and Wright present a diagnosis of US-China relations in 2020 that has much more of a new-cold-war vibe:

On the face of it, the answer would seem obvious: the United States should try to reconstitute a shared strategic understanding between the major powers based on these national interests—a classic world order bargain, if you will. But such a pathway is problematic. Although it may seem strategically sensible and prudent to many observers, for others the gap between the United States and China is too large to bridge, and a compromise could undermine Washington’s regional alliances. Moreover, there is for the foreseeable future no appetite in Washington on either side of the aisle, or in Beijing, for such a comprehensive effort. The U.S. executive branch and Congress are focused on drawing up bills of indictment against China (many justified), with no prescriptive suggestion except for public coercion that diplomacy, difficult as it may be, could ease the bilateral tension. Opinion polls show that the American people favor alliances, free trade, and a foreign policy that includes support for human rights, democracy, and the rule of law.) With U.S. treatment of China a major issue in the 2020 presidential campaign, it is difficult to imagine a national consensus on any dramatic change of course that accommodates to some degree China’s preferences regarding world order.

For its part, China seeks to comprehensively undermine U.S. alliances and to eventually replace the United States as both the most important power in Asia and the world’s technological leader. Beijing is making progress in that long-term effort, as its coercive power grows and Washington falters internationally. Whatever the objective reality, Beijing’s behavior suggests it could well believe it is playing a winning hand.

In any case, both nations at present are fully committed to their core convictions of how best to conduct their societies and governance, promote their national interests, and organize the international system. It is difficult to imagine either side offering major compromises on any of these fundamentals anytime soon. [my emphasis]

They present a general framing that I find dubious. They describe a post-Second World War world order that was rules-based and founded on generally accepted principles of the international order, led by an enlightened and generally benevolent United States. They see China and Russia as making "major departures from the shared understandings of the 1990s". As a result, "the return of great power rivalry" has "shattered hopes in that multilateral order." (my italics)

China and Russia in particular defend a Westphalian and nineteenth-century model of order organized around balance of power, national sovereignty, and spheres of influence. They oppose the U.S. model of humanitarian intervention, democracy promotion, strengthened alliances, and opposition to spheres of influence. Meanwhile, the United States distances itself from its own world order traditions. [my emphasis]

Everyone, including especially American citizens, have good reason to have a critical view of what that "model of humanitarian intervention" looked like. Haass observes:

Like most other countries, China opposed the U.S. decision to attack Iraq in 2003, believing it was unwarranted. China went along with what it thought was a limited humanitarian intervention in Libya in 2011, but, like Russia, it was critical when the effort expanded into one of regime change. China also was more supportive than not of sanctions to curb lran's nuclear ambitions and, as will be discussed in greater detail below, committed itself to take steps to reduce its own carbon emissions starting in 2030. [my emphasis]

It's also hard to guess what they particularly have in mind with their very general recommendations, which reads like boiler-plate diplomatic vagueness: more competent governance in the US (duh!), wield diplomatic leverage more effectively, improve relations with Canada and Mexico, try to improve relations with the EU and NATO allies, and so on.

Their paper is so full of such boilerplate that it's hard to judge what they are actually advocating. Again, I'm very wary of their description of the post-1945 world order collapsing into a "Westphalian" world due to Russia and China's bad actions and goals. We remember the Cold War understandably as primarily a contest between the US and the Soviet Union. But we also had a cold war - which became a hot war in Korea - against China. And because of dogmatic, ill-informed anti-Communist assumption, along with the purges of many diplomats with substantial expertise in the Far East during the McCarthy period, the fear of China contributed to some very dubious foreign policy decisions. A supposedly expansionist China was one of the main justifications for the Vietnam War, which was an even worse disaster for the US than the Iraq War. A 21st century rerun is not something I want to see.

But there are parts of the Blackwill-Wright paper I find attractive:

The COVID-19 crisis ought to mark the end of the post-9/11 era. The United States has overly invested in the greater Middle East, and Washington should stop trying to fix the most dysfunctional and self-destructive region on earth. It is time to withdraw U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan in the next year without requiring agreement with the Taliban; recognize that the possibility of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine issue is more remote by the day; end support for the Saudi war in Yemen; revive and update the JCPOA to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons; be clear that, although the United States hopes Iran becomes a democracy, that is a decision for the Iranian people, and the United States should not be actively trying to bring this about; and downgrade U.S. relations with its Arab partners, to focus on matters of mutual interest rather than offering general support for their domestic and international objectives. While continuing its enduring commitment to Israel’s safety and security, the United States should redirect its resources from the Middle East to matters that are far more relevant to its national interests today and in the future. [my emphasis]

That kind of foreign policy pragmatism makes sense!