Mao Zedong arrived in Moscow in 1949 expecting to be feted
for delivering China, the world’s most populous country, to communism. Instead,
Josef Stalin humiliated him by making him wait for a meeting.
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Although Stalin and Mao eventually signed a Treaty of
Friendship, Mao chafed at being treated like a hayseed from a backward country.
By the 1960s, Mao was openly feuding with the Soviets over leadership of the
communist world. The Soviet Union and China even battled each other in 1969
over disputed territory along their long border.
That created an opening for Richard Nixon’s trip to China on
February 21, 1972, a diplomatic overture aimed at peeling China away from the
Soviet orbit.
In the short term, Nixon’s eight-day visit was an
unambiguous success. Chinese leaders agreed to help spy on the Soviet Union.
Nixon won reelection. The stage was set for China’s eventual integration into
the global economy.
But as we mark the 50th anniversary of that visit, some US
officials and foreign policy analysts have second-guessed the wisdom of
partnering with Beijing. Even Nixon apparently looked back on the strategy with
mixed feelings, and possibly some regret. Russia was a military threat, but
never an economic rival. China, however, is becoming the first power in a
century capable of challenging American dominance on both economic and military
terms.
Some American policymakers felt that China would eventually
rise, with or without US help. If you take that view, then welcoming China as a
friendly partner, instead of a hostile power, made sense. Today, China has a
far bigger stake in the international system and the US economy than Nixon
could have imagined possible.
Still, over the years, American policymakers have oversold
the benefits of engaging China and have underplayed the risks. Steps by China
toward a free-market economy did not turn it into a democracy, as many argued
it would. And although many American businessmen grew wealthy off China’s
success, and American consumers were able to buy a lot of cheap stuff, many
American workers suffered when factories moved to China. Over the last 20
years, Washington has been too preoccupied with the war on terrorism to think
about how to prevent the US from becoming too dependent on a communist country
that could prove to be fundamentally at odds with us.
President Xi Jinping of China makes no secret of his view
that of the United States is a fading superpower that is intent on blocking
China’s ascent to its rightful place in the world. Donald Trump slapped tariffs
on Chinese goods, bringing an era of hopeful engagement to an end. But Trump’s
isolationism benefited China, which filled the void of America’s global
retreat. President Joe Biden, who has rallied Europe, Australia and Japan with
talk of fighting autocracy and making democracy bloom around the world,
presents a thornier problem for Xi.
If the US and Europe remain united, they form an economic
bloc that is still roughly twice the size of China’s economy. But by framing
the struggle as a fight between the “free world” and dictatorship, the Biden
administration risks pushing Russia and China closer together into what some
are calling a “new axis of autocracy”. This time, Moscow is the little brother,
seeking support from Beijing. It could prove to be among the most consequential
geopolitical developments in decades.
“What the West is doing now is the exact opposite of what
Nixon did back then,” Adrian Geiges, the co-author of the forthcoming “Xi
Jinping: The Most Powerful Man in the World”, told me.
“Russia and China are not natural partners. They are
partners because of the common enemy — the US and Western Europe.”
It is too early to tell how far China will stick its neck
out for Russia in its confrontation with the West over Ukraine. China’s leaders
have long argued for a world free of formal military alliances. They have been
cautious about getting entangled in other countries’ military conflicts.
But President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi took pains to
present a common front recently when they issued an extraordinary joint
statement hours before the opening night of the Winter Olympics in Beijing. The
statement pledged that their cooperation would be “superior” to the one forged
between the two countries during the Cold War. No area of cooperation would be
off limits, presumably including Russia giving China its most advanced
weaponry.
The two countries began edging closer together in 2014,
after Russia’s invasion of Crimea prompted Western sanctions. Russia weathered
the fallout with some support from China, which beefed up trade and its
purchase of Russian oil and gas.
This month, the friendship appeared to break new ground. The
statement marked the first time that China has supported Russia’s demand for an
end to NATO expansion. By signing onto the text, Russia also supported China’s
claim to Taiwan and both sides said they were “seriously concerned” about the
US decision to forge a military alliance with Britain and Australia and to
cooperate “in the field of nuclear-powered submarines”.
The most striking thing about their statement was its
sweeping declarations. It reads like a manifesto calling for the US to
recognize that it is no longer the boss of the world.
Two months after Biden presided over a “democracy summit”,
Putin and Xi assailed “certain states’ attempts to impose their own ‘democratic
standards’ on other countries, to monopolize the right to assess the level of
compliance with democratic criteria, to draw dividing lines based on the
grounds of ideology”. The world has changed, they asserted. Russia and China
should be respected as “world powers” that get to dictate what happens in their
own backyards. The statement can be read as an attempt to peel America’s allies
away, or to make Americans lose the will to fight.
The truth is that the world has changed. American democracy
does not look as shiny as it used to. Many people in around the world are tired
of Westerners telling them what to do.
And yet the world is not jumping at the chance to be bossed
around by the world’s largest surveillance states, either. It is not an
exaggeration to say that fate of the world depends on our ability to get the
response to this “axis of autocracy” right. Americans have to stand up for our
values and our allies without ending up in a catastrophic war. No matter how
testy relations become, we should remember that the biggest threats we face
today — climate change, the pandemic and nuclear proliferation — threaten
Russia and China, too.
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