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A New Reality
Still, little did we dream back then that as early as October 2004 Russian President Putin would visit Beijing to finalize an agreement on border issues and brag that relations had reached "unparalleled heights." He also signed an agreement to jointly develop Russian energy reserves.
Barack Obama and George W. Bush at the White House.
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A revitalized Russia and a modernizing China began to represent a potential counterweight to U.S. hegemony as the world's unilateral superpower, a reaction that Washington accelerated with its strategic maneuvers to surround both Russia and China with military bases and adversarial alliances by pressing NATO up to Russia's borders and President Obama's "pivot to Asia."
The U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine on Feb. 22, 2014, marked a historical breaking point as Russia finally pushed back by approving Crimea's request for reunification and by giving assistance to ethnic Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine who resisted the coup regime in Kiev.
On the global stage, Putin fleshed out the earlier energy deal with China, including a massive 30-year natural gas contract valued at $400 billion. The move helped Putin demonstrate that the West's post-Ukraine economic sanctions posed little threat to Russia's financial survival.
As the Russia-China relationship grew closer, the two countries also adopted remarkably congruent positions on international hot spots, including Ukraine and Syria. Military cooperation also increased steadily. Yet, a hubris-tinged consensus in the U.S. government and academe continues to hold that, despite the marked improvement in ties between China and Russia, each retains greater interest in developing good relations with the U.S. than with each other.
The sports slogan has it that nothing is over "until the fat lady sings," but on this topic, her tones are quite clear. The day of the U.S. playing China and Russia off against each other is no more.
One perhaps can hope that someone in the U.S. government will inform President Trump that his Russian and Chinese counterparts are singing from essentially the same songbook, the unintended result of arrogant miscalculations by his immediate predecessors. Implications for U.S. national security are enormous.
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