Alexander Gabuev writes for all the establishment publications. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Economist, Bloomberg, Foreign Policy, the Financial Times, and Foreign Affairs. Gabuev formerly worked as a journalist for the Russian newsweekly Kommersant, has been a visiting scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai, and is currently director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center based in Berlin. His new essay in Foreign Affairs on the “unholy alliance” between Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping is informative and should send alarm bells ringing throughout Western capitals. But Gabuev, for all of his sophisticated analysis and compelling logic about the growing Sino-Russian axis, misses the elephant in the room: the role of NATO enlargement over a 25-year time period in helping to form and shape the Sino-Russian strategic partnership.
One would never know from reading Gabuev’s essay that NATO enlargement ever occurred. It is not mentioned even once in his lengthy essay about what he calls the “tightening of [the] alignment between Russia and China.” There is nothing in his essay about the circumstances and diplomacy in the early 1990s, in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, when Secretary of State James Baker and other Western leaders told Russian leaders that with a unified Germany as a NATO member, the alliance would not move any farther east toward Russia’s border. Nor does he mention that despite warnings from Russia experts like George Kennan, Jack Matlock, Jr, Richard Pipes, Edward Luttwak, Marshall Shulman, Paul Nitze, Arthur Hartman, Fred Ikle, and others, the Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations and our NATO allies added 16 countries to the alliance, and President George W. Bush in 2007-2008 publicly encouraged Ukraine and Georgia to apply for NATO membership. What did they think Russia would do when a potentially adversarial alliance--an alliance that just claimed victory over the old Soviet Union--pushed right up against its borders--just sit there and take it?
“China and Russia,” Gabuev writes, “are more firmly aligned now than at any time since the 1950s.” This geopolitical nightmare (more about that later) is, Gabuev asserts, the outcome of “Putin’s war against Ukraine.” So, according to Gabuev, it was Putin’s war against Ukraine, not NATO expansion, that pushed Russia and China closer. This conflates symptoms with causes. And it whitewashes the Western hubris in the wake of our Cold War victory that led the world down this path toward a diplomatic revolution that aligned the two Eurasian giants against the United States and the West.
Gabuev is dismissive of those who urge U.S. policymakers to replicate the Nixon-Kissinger “triangular diplomacy” that exploited already existing divisions between Beijing and Moscow in the early 1970s. “Western policymakers,” Gabuev advises, “should abandon the idea that they can drive a wedge between Beijing and Moscow.” “Any hopes of peeling them away from each other,” he continues, “are nothing more than wishful thinking.” We must plan, he writes to “build a long-term strategy that will help maintain peace by accounting for all the ramifications of having to compete with China and Russia simultaneously.” He concludes his essay with noting that “Western policymakers must now reckon with the reality of an increasingly resolute Sino-Russian axis.”
Perhaps the first step in reckoning with that reality is to acknowledge our part in fostering the development and evolution of the Sino-Russian axis since the end of the Cold War. Let us, for example, stop talking about Ukraine becoming the newest member of NATO. Let us, further, stop talking about inserting NATO troops into Ukraine. There is no reason we should not talk to Putin, however much we abhor his aggression in Ukraine. Putin is not Hitler, Zelenskyy is not Churchill, and there is no indication that Russia wants to dominate Western Europe the way the old Soviet Union did. Those Western statesmen who fancy themselves modern Churchillians should recall that Churchill also famously said that it is better to “jaw-jaw” than to “war-war.” We need to practice “strategic sequencing,” meaning prioritizing foreign challenges based on their potential impact on U.S. security. That means focusing on the Chinese threat in the western Pacific. That means working to end the Ukraine War diplomatically, imperfectly. It is not a vital interest of the United States that Ukraine takes back Crimea and its eastern provinces. To paraphrase Bismarck, Crimea and the eastern provinces of Ukraine are not worth the bones of a single American soldier, sailor, marine, or airman.
Gabuev is right about one thing: the geopolitical implications of a resolute Sino-Russian alliance are stark. The alliance of the two nuclear-armed Eurasian giants threatens to upset the geopolitical pluralism of the Eurasian landmass and thereby shift the global balance of power away from the U.S.-led maritime alliance that won the Cold War. Through shrewd diplomacy, the United States exploited the Sino-Soviet rift, transforming it into a full-fledged geopolitical Sino-Soviet split in the last two decades of the Cold War. This took time, patience, and prudence, including ultimately abandoning a long-time ally (South Vietnam) and forging an entente with the world’s most brutal communist regime (Mao’s China).
We learned only after the death of some 58,000 U.S. troops that in the end the independence of South Vietnam was not a vital interest of the United States. We certainly do not want to experience anything like that over Ukraine. We also learned that sometimes you have to deal with unsavory regimes--whether Stalin’s regime in World War II or Mao’s regime during the Cold War--to preserve and protect the nation’s vital interests.
Francis P. Sempa writes on foreign policy and geopolitics. His Best Defense columns appear at the beginning of each month. Read his latest article "Gospels of Foreign Policy Realism." Francis is also a contributing editor for The American Spectator.
