![]() ![]() This, of course, is in stark contrast to the former Sino-Soviet alliance, which required conformity. In the worst-case scenario, they can agree to disagree. But what does it matter? This issue-based alignment in no way creates a hierarchy: Neither Beijing nor Moscow is in a position to impose its views on the other. One may object here by pointing out that while China and Russia are not in an alliance, they are nevertheless in an alignment on important strategic issues. Yet such constraints lead to disagreements over strategy and squabbles over leadership. Neither side is overly keen to subject itself to the constraints of an alliance, which usually entails a commitment to come to each other’s defense, and to closely consult over foreign policy. Ironically, the reality that China and Russia are not formal allies makes it harder for the United States to play one off against the other. Crucially, China and Russia have learned lessons from their turbulent past and remain determined to avoid a repetition of the 1960s. Repeating the Nixon/Kissinger feat would be difficult today because none of the factors that made it possible - first and foremost, deep mistrust and hostility between Beijing and Moscow - are likely to materialize in the foreseeable future. Later that year, Moscow floated hints of a pre-emptive nuclear strike on China, though there is no evidence as yet that anyone in the Kremlin was serious about these threats. In response to a Chinese provocation, the Soviets blanketed the Chinese bank of the Ussuri river with rocket fire. In March 1969, tensions boiled over along the Sino-Soviet border, where the two countries fought a brief undeclared war. The skeletal Soviet diplomatic staff in Beijing feared for their very lives as enraged Red Guards besieged the embassy. Most ties - political, economic, and cultural - had been severed. When Kissinger ventured out on his secret visit to China in 1971, Sino-Soviet relations had been in a tailspin for more than a decade. But they would never have succeeded if China and the Soviet Union had not parted ways for their own reasons years before. President Richard Nixon and Kissinger recognized the historic opportunity and reached out to China in what became the most significant geopolitical realignment of the Cold War. Within only a few years of its founding in 1950, the alliance crashed. Outwardly monolithic, the alliance in fact suffered from deep fissures largely born of China’s dissatisfaction with its subordinate role of a “younger brother” to the Soviet Union. They are certainly better than during the short-lived Sino-Soviet alliance of the 1950s, when the Chinese positioned themselves as Moscow’s most important partner in the global Cold War. Relations between China and Russia are better today than they have been at any time since the two empires first came face-to-face in the depths of Inner Asia in the 17th century. If history has taught them anything, it is that it’s much better to be good neighbors than to be at each other’s throats.Ī Short History of the Sino-Soviet Alliance Finally, China and Russia work hard to avoid frictions, both because they have no desire to see these frictions exploited by third parties and because they understand - rightly - that they are destined to be neighbors. The two countries are miles apart ideologically, and neither expects the other to embrace the same worldview. Unlike in the past, the Sino-Russian relationship is not hierarchical and does not require Russia’s unquestioning deference to China’s wishes. The assumption that the United States can drive a wedge between China and Russia is flawed. approach to the Sino-Russian relationship rests on the assumption that Russia resents its junior position vis-à-vis an ever more powerful China, and that such resentment - and Moscow’s mistrust of Beijing’s intentions - can be profitably exploited. Kupchan recently put it, “leave a bad marriage.” Stephen Blank argues that this “ever-greater disparity … may, in time, allow the and its allies to exploit Russian feelings of resentment and resistance to subordination.” If only the United States found a way to fuel Russia’s fears of China to the point where it might, as Charles A. The argument hinges on a seeming power disparity between a declining Russia and its ambitious and much more powerful neighbor. Important voices have called for a readjustment of America’s confrontational approach to Russia in a bid to play Moscow as a card against Beijing. Fifty years after Henry Kissinger’s game-changing secret visit to China - which led to the Sino-American rapprochement and became a key turning point of the Cold War - there is no shortage of new would-be Kissingers. ![]()
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