The strategic triangle that once dominated world politics during the heyday of the Cold War has lost much of its glamour since the collapse of Soviet power. Nonetheless, Washington continues to keep a watchful eye on what transpires between Russia and China to pick up on clues that may hold policy implications for US national interests. US strategic moves may likewise foreshadow the policy responses of Russia and China.

An example of this interaction is found in a series of events that took place in 1993 and 1994. In September 1993, China lost its bid before the International Olympic Committee to host the 2000 Olympic Games, allegedly because of US opposition. The defeat by a mere two votes was devastating to Beijing. Two months later, perhaps by coincidence, Russian Defense Minister Pavel Grachev visited China and signed an agreement with his Chinese counterpart to spur ministry-to-ministry defense cooperation. The impact of this development on Washington is hard to assess, but it came at a time when US President Bill Clinton was weighing the annual report to US Congress on whether to renew Most Favored Nation (MFN) trading status for China. On May 25, 1994, far ahead of the deadline, Clinton announced that the United States was ready to renew China’s MFN status. He made it known, in a clear break with tradition, that the MFN issue for China would henceforth be delinked from the human rights question. Clinton’s policy shift anticipated the 1999 US Congressional legislation that awarded China Permanent Normal Trade Relations status, paving the way for Chinese accession to the World Trade Organization two years later.

The Sino-Russo Partnership

While Clinton favored engagement with both Russia and China, he seemed increasingly wary of Russia. Despite the domestic disarray that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia had inherited a powerful nuclear capability that could conceivably be a potent threat. This concern may have been responsible for the West’s post-1993 push to enlarge NATO. The move apparently changed Russia’s initial “Atlanticist” outlook, and by 1995 Moscow had turned both inward and eastward.

In its inward or nostalgic turn, Moscow embraced a “statist” policy to develop a strategic identity and seek regional power status. In Eurasia, Russia looked to a reintegration of the Commonwealth of Independent States, including Belarus and Ukraine. In East Central Europe, it opposed any Western enlargement that would exclude it. Russia aspired to fashion Eurasia under its influence and to create an East Central Europe that would remain a neutral zone.

In a bold eastward turn, Russia expanded its partnership with China to new heights since the 1989 normalization of the two countries’ bilateral relations, ending a 32-year rift. On the heels of the 1993 Sino-Russo ministry-to-ministry defense cooperation, the two countries entered into a strategic partnership in 1996. Chinese President Jiang Zemin’s visit to Moscow in April, his fourth summit with Russian President Boris Yeltsin since 1992, sealed the agreement. Around the same time, representatives of the two countries met in Shanghai, along with delegates from three former Soviet republics in Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kirgizia, and Tajikistan). The Shanghai Forum they created foreshadowed the creation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in June 2001, which Uzbekistan also joined. The next month, in Moscow, Jiang signed a Sino-Russo Good-Neighbor Treaty of Friendship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. An important feature of the treaty is the legal framework it provides, in theory at least, for enduring bilateral cooperation in a wide spectrum of areas, encompassing trade and economy, science and technology, energy, transportation, finance, space and aviation, information technology, and trans-border and inter-regional endeavors. A Russian source describes the treaty and the SCO as the two pillars of Sino-Russo strategic partnership in the new era.

At home, Russians across the political spectrum see NATO expansion as a provocative act. Even after Moscow entered into a new deal to create a NATO-Russia council, which gives Russia an equal footing on security issues with the alliance’s 19 other members, it took steps to make sure that its strategic partnership with China would not be jeopardized. In May 2003, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov was in Beijing to meet with Jiang and other highlevel officials. Ivanov re-affirmed the value of the Sino-Russo military partnership, which he said not only benefited both countries but also helped “promote regional and world peace and stability.” An important part of this military cooperation was the heavy arms sales to China, which beefed up China’s air and naval capability while enriching Russia’s coffers.

Almost immediately after he became China’s president in 2003, Hu Jintao had a rendezvous with Putin in Moscow to renew their commitment to the Sino-Russo “strategic partnership.” They presided over the signing of a number of agreements, including one between the China National Petroleum Corporation and Russia’s Yukos Oil Company for the undertaking of a long-term contract to supply oil to China via a Sino-Russian oil pipeline.

On political issues, President Putin re-affirmed Russia’s support for China’s claims of sovereignty over Taiwan and Tibet, while the Chinese president reciprocated by supporting Russian suppression of the separatist movement in Chechnya. In a communiqué, both sides stressed their support for a multipolar world in which relations among nations are “democratized” and the United Nations plays a key role in the settlement of international disputes. The veiled criticism of unilateralism seemed to bespeak a mutual dissatisfaction with Washington. But the Sino-Russo partnership was a far cry from the kind of alliance that some realists predicted would be directed against NATO and the United States. Putin and Hu explicitly stressed that the partnership was not aimed at any third party.

The US-Russian Tangle: A Delicate Relationship

At the risk of oversimplification, one could argue that US relations with China were heavily driven by two factors: the vicissitudes in the Sino-Russo relationship and—the more important of the two—the Taiwan question. For 30 years after the People’s Republic of China (PRC) came into being in 1949, the United States continued to recognize the rival Chinese regime (the Republic of China, or ROC) that had relocated to Taiwan after losing the civil war on the mainland. The road to eventual US normalization with the PRC in 1979 was paved by US President Richard Nixon, whose grand design was to build an alliance with China—which was then at odds with the Soviet Union—in an attempt to counter the mounting Soviet threat. But the United States still maintains unofficial relations with the ROC. Indeed, under the Taiwan Relations Act, a piece of domestic US legislation, Washington is under an obligation to protect Taiwan’s security and thus continue arms sales to the island.