It
was a brilliant move in 1971, when President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger
took advantage of China's desire for support against the USSR with the historic
US opening to China. That chess move created a strategic triangle with the US
in the driver's seat and turned ideology upside down, playing the two communist
regimes against each other.
Now with few in the US and Japan paying attention, tensions with
Russia are resulting in Washington getting the short end of the stick, with
risky implications for the Asian and global order: Sino-Russian relations are
the closer than they have been at any time in the past half-century, giving
them a chance to reshape the global order to their liking.
It is Henry Kissinger's
worst nightmare. Where the strategic logic of the Nixon-Kissinger opening to
China was to gain advantage for the US by having better relations with both
Moscow and Beijing than they had with each other, now it looks like China will
be the winner as the rift grows between Washington and Moscow.
While there is a tendency to focus on historic
differences, racial fears and geopolitical competition, the new Sino-Russian
trend may be more of a marriage of convenience than anybody in the Washington
foreign policy elite will admit. Their new amity is reflected in two recent Pew
polls, Russians had a 79% favorable rating of China; and contrary to a global
trend of negative views of Russia and Putin, 51% of Chinese polled had a
favorable view of Russia.
It is not a coincidence that Russian
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently accused the US of a military build-up
in Asia, and also criticized US-Japan-ROK cooperation on missile defense.
US-led sanctions against Putin's Russia has led it to look East, particularly
to China, even if it means a weakened Moscow being the very Junior Partner. Its
long term energy future lies in Asia, and nearly half a trillion dollars in gas
and oil deals with China will bolster a sagging Russian economy.
China gains a valuable
partner-instead of a rival-for stabilizing and modernizing Eurasia-which
increasingly China sees not as a backwater, but its economic future. China's
new "One Road, One Belt" pivot West to Eurasia seeks to turn its
vulnerability - a border with 14 nations -- into a strategic asset. Together
they seek to realize MacKinder's vision of a dominant role in the Eurasian
heartland . By Matthew Burrows and Robert Manning
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