Overview:
Russia and China are both taking advantage of a weak US government to gain strategic benefits.
February 23rd, 2022.
As the crisis in Ukraine continues it is worth examining its possible global impact and how it is interlinked with other possible flashpoints.
Many years ago, Kissinger influenced the likes of Nixon and Bush with his policy of triangular diplomacy regarding Russia (Soviet Union) and China.
“Triangular diplomacy, to be effective,” Kissinger explained in White House Years, the first volume of his memoirs, “must rely on the natural incentives and propensities of the players.” Kissinger explained that the opening to China and détente with the Soviet Union were pursued as parallel policies designed to enable the United States to “maintain closer relations with each side than they did with each other.”
It was always better for the United States, he wrote in Years of Upheaval, “to be closer to either Moscow or Peking than either was to the other.” “America’s bargaining position”, he reiterated in his book Diplomacy, “would be strongest when America was closer to both communist giants than either was to the other.”
In his most recent book World Order, he again noted that the design of triangular diplomacy was to balance “China against the Soviet Union from a position in which America was closer to each Communist giant than they were to each other.”
Triangular diplomacy avoided undue moralism. Kissinger, quoting Bismarck, wrote that “a sentimental policy knows no reciprocity”. “Predictability”, Kissinger continued, “is more crucial than … idiosyncratic moralistic rhetoric.”
The management of a balance of power is a permanent undertaking, not an exertion that has a foreseeable end. To a great extent it is a psychological phenomenon; if an equality of power is perceived it will not be tested. Calculations must include potential as well as actual power, not only the possession of power but the will to bring it to bear. Management of the balance of power requires perseverance, subtlety, not a little courage, and above all understanding of its requirements.
This does not mean that the United States should accommodate Russian aggression in Ukraine or China’s aggressive moves in the South China and East China Seas. As Kissinger recalled in his memoirs, détente with the Soviets did not prevent Nixon from bombing Haiphong Harbour in North Vietnam, opposing Soviet designs in the Indo-Pakistan War, and ordering a nuclear alert to deter Soviet intervention in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Nor did the opening to China forestall continued defence cooperation with Taiwan.
Triangular diplomacy as practiced by Nixon and Kissinger did not mean abandoning US security interests or shrinking from confrontation when those interests were challenged.
Eurasia is still the world’s dominant landmass, home to most of the world’s people and resources. The global balance of power still requires that no major power or alliance of powers controls the key power centres of Eurasia. For the United States, having better relations with China and Russia than either has with each other still makes sense in the post-Cold War world.
The current Sino-Russian rapprochement should concentrate the minds of US policymakers on diplomacy designed to prevent a full-fledged Sino-Russian security alliance
Source The Diplomat 2nd August 2016.
These words still hold true today. According to James Clapper, a former Director of National Intelligence, the fault can be traced back to the Obama administration which should have done more to punish Russia for annexing Crimea in 2014.
Biden, who was vice president at the time and forged links with Ukraine, seems to be continuing with Obama’s light touch foreign policy.
Similarly, James Burnham in Containment or Liberation? (1953) warned that the political consolidation of the Sino-Soviet bloc would result in the communists’ “complete world victory”. The classified US national security document that served as the doctrinal foundation for the Cold War containment policy—NSC-68—established Eurasian political pluralism as the overarching goal of American foreign policy.
This should still apply today, perhaps even more so as China has grown in strength.
The current relationship between Russia and China has reached a stage of cooperation. They are both supplying weaponry to Myanmar which is being used to attack civilians. This includes the provision of fighter jets with strong ground attack capabilities.
Watch for increased pressure on Taiwan and Chinese incursions into the South Pacific to open a route to the Antarctic, via diplomacy, aid and straightforward, in-your-face displays of strength.
They are both taking advantage of a weak US government to gain strategic benefits.
The balance between the three has changed and I can’t see anyone in the Obama/Biden administration with the knowledge and understanding to regain the balance in the short term.
This is why events involving a “quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing” can have a major impact on New Zealand and Australia due to the interconnectivity of international geopolitics. The weakness of the West’s response to the Ukraine crisis and the cosiness between Russia and China has freed China to devote its attention to Taiwan and the route to Antarctica via the South Pacific.