Alex Lo starts:
“Potentially, the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an ‘anti-hegemonic’ coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances.”
Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives
This famous warning of Jimmy Carter’s famous national security adviser has now officially come to pass, with the “Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on the International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development”, signed, sealed and delivered on February 4. It was, without doubt, timed precisely to coincide with the Beijing Winter Olympic Games and the official attendance of Vladimir Putin.
And continues here.
Another snip from Alex:
In his controversial 2012 book, The China Choice: Why America Should Share Power, Hugh White, a former Australian defence official, argues for equal co-leadership between the US and China, to avoid confrontation and war in the Asia-Pacific.
About which I’d comment: seems naive to me. Similar to the naïveté of thinking China would develop into a liberal democracy after it joined the WTO. After it was permitted to join, one should say, courtesy Bill Clinton’s silver tongue. I’m more of a John Mearsheimer-ian realist. Listen to John’s latest talk with Andrew Sullivan here. (Free, I believe)
By the way, I worked with Hugh White back in the 1980s when we were both in the Australian Office of National Assessments. He later went on to the Australian National University and wrote books encouraging accommodation with China. I used to share that view. Over recent years though, I’ve come to believe that’s not realistic. And not because of what we, the west, have done. Xi Jinping, and his “brain” Wang Huning, have been set in their path of power assertion since the 80s. Since, that is, before they even joined the WTO.
To the extent that China and Russia are coming together — Brzezinski’s fear — it’s being helped along the way by policies hammering both, and showing weakness by withdrawing from Afghanistan. So reckon I. Oh, and Mearsheimer who argues that Russia wants its own Monroe Doctrine to operate in its immediate neighbourhood and that that’s a valid power-based aim.
