THROUGHOUT the upheavals of the past couple of decades in Russian-American relations, there has been one American politician and thinker whom Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has consistently sought out, engaged with and paid tribute to. That is Henry Kissinger, the doyen of cold-war diplomacy and the author of rapprochement with China and detente with the Soviet Union. Mr Kissinger’s realist view of the world apparently strikes a chord with Mr Putin, who thinks the collapse of the Soviet Union was the biggest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century. The triangular relationship between America, the Soviet Union and China that Mr Kissinger helped shape has provided a useful framework as Mr Putin has sought to revise the post-cold-war order.
Nearly 50 years after Richard Nixon’s opening to China, Mr Kissinger might recognise a mirror image of his own policy in a display of ever-closer ties between Russia and China, this time at America’s expense. Starting on September 11th, Russia will hold joint military exercises with China, advertised as the biggest war games for decades. To be held in eastern Siberia, Vostok-2018 will feature 300,000 Russian troops—a third of the country’s armed forces—1,000 aircraft, 36,000 tanks and armoured vehicles. The Russians will be joined by 3,200 Chinese troops and 900 tanks and armoured vehicles, as well as troops from Mongolia. Unlike the drills on its western borders, such as the naval exercises concurrently taking place in the Mediterranean, which prepare the armed forces for a potential conflict with the West, Vostok-2018 is designed to show the strength of Russia’s rapprochement with China, a country which only a few years ago it saw as a direct military threat.
Not just a war machine
The exercise will coincide with the Eastern Economic Forum, a big economic and political pow-wow in Vladivostok that is due to be attended by China’s President Xi Jinping and Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe. Mr Putin and Mr Xi may inspect the war games together. But the show is really meant for America’s eyes. Mr Putin would like it to be seen as a reversal of the Nixon deal. As Vasily Kashin, a Russian East Asia expert, argues in a recent paper, Sino-American co-operation against Moscow has long been viewed by Russia as “possibly the gravest failure in the course of the cold war, to be avoided in the future at all costs”.
Russia’s relationship with China started to thaw in 1989, when Mikhail Gorbachev visited Beijing. Boris Yeltsin continued the schmoozing in the 1990s. Mr Putin settled the last border dispute with China in 2004. America and its allies did not worry, partly because they saw Russia as a declining power deeply wary of China, and partly because the rapprochement was not aimed at them. But things have changed.
After its annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the ensuing Western sanctions, Russia turned to China as a political ally against the West, and as an alternative source of investment and credit. Although China has limited appetite for investing in Russia, and considers its actions in Ukraine reckless, it has exploited Russia’s rift with the West to enhance its own influence. Mr Putin and Mr Xi also have a personal bond forged by their common fear of “colour revolutions” (popular uprisings), which they see as having been America’s doing. Russia and China also hold joint exercises between internal security forces trained to put down such uprisings.
During his visit to Moscow in April, General Wei Fenghe, a former commander of the Chinese army’s ballistic-missile forces and one of several loyalists promoted by Mr Xi this spring, sent a clear message to America. “The Chinese side”, he said, “has come to show Americans the close ties between the armed forces of China and Russia.”
Christopher Johnson, a former CIA analyst now at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank, says America appears to be complacent, clinging to the conventional wisdom that the two giant neighbours will never grow too close, because they distrust each other so much. “In the recent past the notional opponent in the Vostok exercises was China. Now it is China sending some of its best kit to exercise with the Russians against another large notional opponent,” he notes.
From Russia’s point of view, says Alexander Gabuev of the Carnegie Moscow Centre, Mr Putin’s show sends two messages. One is addressed to China. By selling it Russia’s latest military technology, including S-400 surface-to-air missiles and SU-35 fighter jets, and inviting it to take part in its largest military drill even though it is not a formal ally, Mr Putin is showing that Russia no longer sees China as a threat. (Previously, Russia’s leaders were terrified that China might covet the vast and sparsely populated Russian regions of Siberia and the far east.) Now, the logic goes, China should repay Russia for its trust by giving it more money to offset the effect of American sanctions.
The second message is to the West: “If you don’t want to push Russia deeper into China’s embrace, stop pushing it into a corner with sanctions.” Yet this reinforces China’s wariness of Russia, and its aversion to a strategic alliance. Having observed its neighbour over the years, it is perfectly aware that Russia would still rather look to the West, where it parks its money and children, than to China—and that its opportunistic shift could easily be reversed.
Russia’s and China’s obsession with America reveals the difference between the new Russia-China understanding and its American prototype of the 1970s. As Thomas Graham of Kissinger Associates says, America in the 1970s was in the pivotal position, talking to China and the Soviet Union from a position of economic and military strength. Today, it is Beijing that is the pivot, and Russia, not China, is the weakest of the three powers. Mr Putin, however, often plays a weak hand well. His relationship with China may be opportunistic, but it can still hurt America.
In the long run, however, America should be more concerned about China’s economic and political expansion into eastern Europe and the former Soviet space, including Central Asia and even the Baltic states. And so should Russia.