Washington’s Taiwan connection has bedeviled its relations with the PRC ever since, even more so after 1988 when Taiwan’s leaders showed growing inclinations toward a separatist course outside the One China scenario. During a brief confrontation between mainland China and Taiwan in early 1996, the United States dispatched two naval battle groups to the Taiwan Strait to show moral support for Taiwan (and perhaps to please President Clinton’s congressional friends). An accidental war with China was barely averted only with the timely withdrawal of the US carrier Independence while the second carrier, the Nimitz, was still on its way from the Mediterranean Sea. The near-miss drove home Beijing’s seriousness about Taiwan to the Clinton administration, forcing it to undertake a soul-searching review of Sino-US policy. The final decision for Clinton’s all-out engagement policy toward the Chinese, which he pursued during his second presidential term, was to avoid ever being dragged into an inadvertent war with China for the sake of Taiwan.

What happened to Clinton is nothing strange. In what has become almost a set pattern, every US president since Ronald Reagan has started his presidency with a high-profile, sympathetic stance toward Taiwan to the bewilderment of China, only to subsequently relent. The same problem has haunted the administration of US President George W. Bush since 2001. Bush seems to conform to this pattern, though in his case the speedy turnaround was in part precipitated by anti-terrorist needs after September 11, 2001. During his 2000 campaign, Bush called China a “strategic competitor,” and after taking office, he pledged that the United States would do anything within its power to protect Taiwan’s security. Following the April 1, 2001, spy-plane incident, however, the president dropped the “strategic competitor” characterization. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Beijing promptly offered its support for the “war on terror” and the Bush Administration regarded China as an ally. By the time Bush visited China in February 2002, tensions between the two countries had visibly eased since the first months of his presidency.

US enthusiasm toward Taiwan cooled distinctly during 2003, in part because of the increasingly opaque separatist agenda of ROC President Chen Shui-bian. Washington felt uneasy about the Taiwanese leader’s avowed plan to hold an insignificant plebiscite alongside the island’s scheduled presidential election in spring 2004. To that, Chen added a call for the rewriting of the ROC Constitution. If Chen’s plan was to use a plebiscite to affirm and legitimize the ruling Democratic Progressive Party’s platform of a separatist Taiwan republic completely cut off from China, it would have provoked an almost certain armed invasion from Beijing. Sensing the potential catastrophe, the Bush administration cautiously distanced itself from Taiwan and warned its leaders that they alone would bear the responsibility for all consequences.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell succinctly summed up the corresponding change in attitude of the Bush administration toward China, commenting that Sino-US relations in 2003 were at their best since US President Nixon’s opening gestures toward China in 1972. The reasons for the change went beyond Taiwan’s loss of favor or even China’s supportive role in the war against terrorism. Another reason was China’s demonstrated diplomatic mellowness, shown in its initiative in brokering a negotiation to resolve the international crisis surrounding North Korean nuclear weapons.

The Bases for Cooperation—and Divergence

With necessary variations, three pillars seem to underpin both Russia and China’s relations with the United States: the war on terrorism, aversion to the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and mutual economic interests. Differences in their respective views on these seemingly common concerns with the United States suggest that the road ahead will not be easy. For instance, the US anti-terrorist preoccupation with Al Qaeda is quite different from the Russian and Chinese concerns over domestic separatism. Bush’s nonproliferation concern, centered on the “axis of evil” states of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, clashes with the Russian view, since Putin has never considered Iran a danger. Like France and Germany, Russia openly opposed the war in Iraq. The Chinese were more muted in their disagreement over the Iraq issue but concurred broadly with Bush that the North Korean nuclear problem had to be contained. The Taiwan question remains a perennial spoiler. As for economic interests, the Russians were more concerned with their entry into the WTO, and the Chinese were preoccupied with fighting Washington’s pressure to reduce US trade deficits and to allow the Chinese renminbi to appreciate against the US dollar.

A complicating factor was the presence of US Air Force in the former Soviet republics in Central Asia, first established in the Afghanistan campaign and then expanded during the most recent Iraq war. This prompted the rumored move by Russia and China to broach a trilateral “strategic partnership” with India. The unprecedented joint naval exercise staged by China and India in early November 2003 seemed to lend some credence to this rumored move. In September 2003, Russia, China, and three other Central Asian member states of the SCO signed an agreement in Beijing for the installation of a common Anti-Terrorist Center in Uzbekistan. The implications, if any, for Washington remain to be seen.

Critics of the Bush administration often allege that its policy has driven Russia and China (along with the Central Asian states) closer together. There have been contrary signs, however, that Russo-US relations have improved since the end of the Iraq war. At their meeting in June 2003, Bush and Putin not only signed the Treaty of Moscow, which limited each country’s strategic nuclear arsenal, but also portrayed a common basis of mutual interests among the two countries. On the eve of his summit with Bush at Camp David in September 2003, Putin expressed his willingness to assist the United States in the reconstruction of Iraq. Nevertheless, he coupled the offer with a call to the world to rein in US military power.

A Chinese commentator described Russo-US relations as being characterized by “intermittent tensions and long feuds punctuated by short periods of rapport.” Roughly the same may be said of China’s relations with the United States since the end of the Cold War. While their similar plights may have pushed them together, Russia and China do not seem to be colluding to challenge US hegemony. The game being played now is qualitatively different from what prevailed during the Cold War, when the United States played the “China card” against the Soviet Union in a cut-throat competition and in a different alignment pattern. Today, Russia and China are on the same side in resisting a perceived threat from the sole surviving superpower that is the United States, but in a non-zero-sum game.