By Stephen Blank

A virtual flood of studies and articles continues to appear concerning Russo-Chinese relations.[i]

Although the expert consensus remains that no alliance or no formal alliance between Russia and China exists despite their visibly growing intimacy; I would dispute that finding.[ii]

Indeed, Moscow keeps inventing euphemisms to disguise what is going on.

First it was called a comprehensive strategic partnership.[iii]

More recently in November 2018 President Putin called it a ‘privileged strategic partnership.’[iv]

Both these formulations sound like attempts to deceive foreign observers as to the alliance’s real nature.

Thus Putin described comprehensive strategic partnership as follows:

As we had never reached this level of relations before, our experts have had trouble defining today’s general state of our common affairs. It turns out that to say we have strategic cooperation is not enough anymore. This is why we have started talking about a comprehensive partnership and strategic collaboration. “Comprehensive” means that we work virtually on all major avenues; “strategic” means that we attach enormous inter‑governmental importance to this work.[v]

Similarly Foreign Minister Lavrov has stated that,

As regards international issues, we feel – and out Chinese friends share this view – that our cooperation and coordination in the international arena are one of the most important stabilizing factors in the world system. We regularly coordinate our approaches to various conflicts, whether it is in the Middle East, North Africa, or the Korean peninsula. We have regular and frank and confidential consultations.[vi]

It is hard to know how a privileged partnership expands upon a comprehensive one. Moreover, this alliance is not merely a political relationship but one of active military collaboration.

In addition, leading officials in both countries expect this relationship to deepen, including in its military dimensions, during 2019.[vii]   Indeed, President Xi Jinping told Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu that not only can both militaries deal with “common security threats” but also they should increase cooperation and unswervingly deepen their strategic coordination.[viii]

And we can already see practical examples of such coordination as both governments jointly conducted a series of experiments in the atmosphere that not only could alter earthly environments but also apparently disturb electrical connections in the territories below these experiments.[ix]

These experiments look suspiciously like preliminary efforts to test both ground-based and space-based capabilities to achieve the effects of an EMP (Electro-Magnetic Pulse) attack on earth against their adversaries.

Indeed, commenting on these tests, the Chinese journal Earth and Planetary Physics observed that the results were satisfactory but also “such international cooperation is very rare for China.”[x]

Similarly, the Vostok-2018 exercises involving large-scale Russian forces and about 3200 Chinese forces in September -2018 may have originally been intended as an exercise in anticipation of a U.S. attack on North Korea.[xi]

In fact Russian writers, e.g. Vasily Kashin, Senior Research Fellow at the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of the Far East, claim that the 2001 Russo-Chinese treaty enshrined at the very least strategic military and political coordination between both governments.

Specifically, he observes that,

Chapter 9 of the treaty stipulated that “in case there emerges a situation which, by [the] opinion of one of the Participants, can crate threats to the peace, violate the peace, or affect the interests of the security of the Participant, and also in case when there is a threat of aggression against one of the Participants, the Participants immediately contact each other and start consultations in order to remove the emerging threat.[xii]

Kashin further notes that, “While the treaty did not create any obligations for mutual defense, it clearly required both sides to consider some sort of joint action in the case of a threat from a third party.”[xiii]

This means that even before these events in the military sphere, we see a well-developed process of shared learning and exchange of operational and strategic concepts to enhance bilateral relations.[xiv]

This parallels the wider and extensively developed network of bilateral consultations across many ministries of both governments that are then manifested in practice and thereby reflect an alliance, even if it remains an informal one.[xv]These postures and operations go considerably beyond the joint exercises and arms sales that others have written about.[xvi]

The point here, as confirmed by many analysts, is the extensive inter-military dialogues that have gone on for over a decade as part of the larger program of inter-governmental exchanges.[xvii]

Certainly the joint air and missile defenses exercises of 2017 suggests an alliance for in such exercises both sides must put their cards on the table and display their C4ISR.

As Vasily Kashin observes, this exercise took the form of a computer simulation where both sides constructed a joint air/missile defense area using long-range SAM systems like the Chinese HQ-9 and the Russian S-300/400 series.[xviii]

Likewise, both the preceding and ongoing naval exercises before and after 2017 point to deepening collaboration and a vibrant bilateral military dialogue.

Conclusions

Analysts have long chronicled the political, economic, and ideological manifestations of the evolving Sino-Russian partnership. But the steadfast denials of a military alliance dynamic here are not based on the evidence of arms sales, technology transfer, joint exercises, conventional and nuclear coordination and long-term strategic dialogues.

Inasmuch as the U.S. has singled out China and Russia as its adversaries misreading the true nature of their relations gravely undermines the chances for successful American strategy and policy and not only in Asia.[xix]

It is long since time that analysts and policymakers acknowledged the reality that is evolving right before their eyes and stopped taking refuge in clichés and wishful thinking.

Only on the basis of realism can we move forward to deal with this alliance and the challenge of either defeating or disassembling it in exclusively peaceful ways.

Stephen Blank is a Senior Fellow with the American Foreign Policy Council.

Editor’s Note

One can debate what kind of alliance these two authoritarian states are forging.

But clearly as the Australian strategist, Ross Babbage has argued, both are working towards the goal of making the world safe of authoritarian states.

It is important to factor in how these two states reinforce one another’s actions, plan joint actions, or operate counter to one another as a key element of the strategic shift from the land wars to crisis management with peer competitors.

And the study of how authoritarian states work together — in both support as well as cross purposes — is a neglected study.

We recently reviewed a book about Japan and Nazi Germany which had many insights into the alliance and its dynamics.

https://defense.info/book-review/2018/12/germanys-last-mission-the-failed-voyage-of-u-234-to-japan/

There is also interesting information on the Japanese-Nazi alliance contained in a book on Bletchley Park which we have reviewed as well.

https://defense.info/book-review/2018/11/the-secrets-of-station-x-how-the-bletchley-park-codebreakers-helped-win-the-war/

[i]To give three of many examples, Marcin Kaczmarski, Mark N. Katz, and Teija Tillikaiinen, The Sino-Russian and US-Russian Relationships: Current Developments and Future Trends, Finnish Institute of International Affairs, Helsinki, 2018 www.upi.fiia.fi; Richard J. Ellings and Robert Sutter, Eds., Axis of Authoritarians: Implications of China-Russia Cooperation, Seattle, WA: National Bureau of Research, Asia 2018; Jo Inge Bekkevold and Bobo Lo Eds., Sino-Russian Relations In the 21^stCentury, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018,

[ii]Ibidem.

[iii]““Interview to the Xinhua News Agency of China,” www.kremlin.ru, June 23, 2016

[iv]Alla Hurska,” Flawed ‘Strategic Partnership’: Putin’s Optimism On China Faces Harsh Reality,” Eurasia Daily Monitor, December 12, 2018, www.jamestown.org

[v]“Interview to the Xinhua News Agency of China,”

[vi]Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, “Statement and Answers to Questions From the Media by Russian Foreign Minister S.V. Lavrov at the Press Conference on the Results of Russia’s Chairmanship of the UN Security Council, New York, October 1, 2015,” BBC Monitoring.

[vii]“Russia, China To Bolster Ties In 2019: Envoy,” http://tass.com/politics/1038117 December 27, 2018; “China, Russia Agree To Boost Military Ties, XinhuaDecember 21, 2018, Retrieved from BBC Monitoring

[viii]“China: Xi Meets Russia Defence Minister,” Xinhua, October 20, 2018, Retrieved from BBC Monitoring

[ix]“China, Russia Test Controversial Technology Above Europe-Paper,” South China Morning Post, December 17, 2018, www.scmp.com

[x]Ibid.

[xi]Brian G. Carlson, “Vostok-2018: Another Sign Of Strengthening Russia-China Ties,” SWP Comment, No. 47, November, 2018, https://www.swp-berlin.org/fileadmin/contents/products/comments/2018C47_Carlson.pdf,

[xii]Vasily Kashin, The Current State Of Russian-Chinese Defense Cooperation, Center For Naval Analyses, 2018, p. 14

[xiii]Ibid.

[xiv]Ibid.

[xv]Marcin Kaczmarski, An Asian Alternative? Russia’s Chances of Making Asia an alternative to Relations With the West, Centre for Eastern Studies, Warsaw, www.osw.waw.pl, 2008, p.p. 35-36

[xvi]Schwartz, Wishnick, Vostok-2018

[xvii]Kaczmarski, pp. 35-36; Jacob Kipp, “From Strategic Partnership to De facto Military Alliance: Sino-Soviet Mil-Mil Contacts in the Modern Era, 1945-2018, Presented to the NPEC Conference, Washington. DC, 12 July 2018

[xviii]Kashin, p. 20.  C4ISR stands for Command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance

[xix]The National Security Strategy of the United States Of America, https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf, December, 2017

The featured photo can be found here:

Russia and China actively collude to bring down the only thing America cares about

By Kenneth Maxwell

On January 15, 2019, the British prime minister, Mrs Theresa May, suffered the greatest parliamentary defeat in British history when members of the House of Commons voted 432 to 202 to kill her BREXIT deal which sets out the terms of Britain’s exit from the EU on March 29th.

She had pulled a previously scheduled vote before the Christmas parliamentary recess fearing defeat.

But the delay only added to the disenchantment.

She tried mightily to keep the 10 members of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) on board. She has depended on the support  of the DUP to sustain her minority Conservative government since she lost conservative seats in an ill-timed general election she called in 2017.

But it was the so called “back stop” in the EU/UK exit agreement which involved the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, the only land border between the EU and UK, that proved totally unacceptable to the DUP, and consequently they vociferously failed to support her.

In fact it was the “back stop” that became the final straw that broke the camel’s back of her EU/UK Brexit deal.

The problem was in some respects of Mrs May’s own making.

Her “red lines” had called for Britain to leave the customs union and the single market.

The back-stop was an insurance policy that in the event that the two sides could not reach an agreement, Northern Ireland was to remain within the EU’s regulatory and customs arrangements.

This was intended to prevent the re-emergence of a hard border between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland, the elimination of which was one of the great achievements of the “Good Friday” agreement which ended the violent Northern Irish “time of troubles” when the British army intervened and Catholic and Protestant paramilitary forces clashed throughout the province, and the IRA carried out a bombing campaign and political murders in Ulster and England.

There is some irony that the perennial British-Irish question should become a stumbling bloc to British exit from the EU.

However, the Conservative Party and the DUP do agree on one thing. That is they will unite to prevent a general election and to keep the Labour Party out of government.

So when the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn put down a no-confidence motion in the government after Mrs May’s catastrophic defeat they joined together the very next day to defeat Corbyn by 325 to 306.

Not that Corbyn was surprised by this outcome.

He has never been a great fan of the EU which he has long seen as a capitalist plot.

Nor is he a fan of the DUP having for years been a sympathiser with Sinn Fein, the Irish nationalists.

And despite the total disarray of Mrs May’s government, Corbyn is still behind in the opinion polls.

The Northern Irish question and the “back stop” is in a curious way a revenge of King James the First and his 1609 “plantation” of English and Scottish Protestants in Northern Ireland on the land seized from the exiled Catholic Irish earls.

By 1620 there were 40,000 Scottish Presbyterians in Ulster. The Protestant Oliver Cromwell’s violent repression in Ireland took place after his victory in the English Civil War.

The failed attempt by King James the Second with French support to take back the English throne via Ireland was defeated by the Protestant Dutch William of Orange, King William III, then co-ruler of Britain, and who was married with the protestant Queen Mary II, who was James’s eldest daughter.

It was Ulster Protestants that invented identity politics.

The bonfires and marches and noisy commemorations of “King Billy” and of the 1690 Battle of the Boyne, and extreme presbyterianism, is at the core of Northern Irish identity politics, and is the life blood of the DUP.

If Theresa May thought the DUP had it in their DNA to compromise she was sadly deluded.

They inherit 400 years of stubbornness.

David Cameron who was caught by a television crew while on his morning jog the day after Theresa May’s catastrophic defeat in the House of Commons, said that he “did not regret” calling the referendum, which of course, caused all the trouble in the first place.

It was his deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, moreover, who during the Conservative-Liberal-Democrat coalition government that Cameron led, introduced the Fixed Parliament Act of 2011, which introduced fixed-term elections and which created a five year period between general elections.

This allows Theresa May to lose a vote in the House of Commons on the central plank of her policy and yet remain as the prime minister, and then to go on and win the support of her party and the DUP in a non-confidence vote twenty four hours later.

Nick Clegg is now in California as a chief adviser to Mark Zuckerberg where he is Vice President for global affairs and communications at Facebook.

So while Cameron jogs and Clegg defends Zuckerberg, Brexit is back to gridlock in the British Parliament, which knows want it does not want, but does not know want it wants.

The country meanwhile remains bitterly divided.

The business community dispairs and prepares for a “no-deal” crash out at 11 pm on March 29, 2019, the date and time set in law for Britain’s EU exit.

Which is something the hard line Brexiters in the Conservative party, led by Jacob William Ress-Mogg, the MP for North West Somerset, their alt-right wing leader, has always wanted all along.

Jacob Rees-Mogg has been called the “honourable member from the 18th century.” He is an alt-Catholic who, he says, would prefer to take the “whip from the Roman Catholic Church, not with the Parliament.” (The “whip” in question is the parliamentary party member who guarantees voting according to the party leadership’s directives.)

His personal wealth (together with his wife) was estimated to be £150 million in 2016. He has six children and is opposed to abortion under any circumstances and voted against same sex marriage. Though it is unlikely he much approves of the current Argentinian Pope on Rome.

But Jacob Rees-Mogg, much like the DUP,  is better described a being an MP from the 17th century. 

It is a very odd irony that the alt-Protestant DUP and the alt-Catholic Ress-Mogg should now hold the Conservative party and the fate of Brexit in their collective uncompromising obstructionist hands.

Editor’s Note: As the EU crisis deepens, a key aspect of the crisis is how identity politics community wide redefine the collaborative framework which has been put together, in many ways cobbled together, which is called the European Union. Many aspects of what is referred to as the EU are not part of the initial treaty of Rome, notably the agreement for the free flow of Europeans within the EU geographical space.

But more broadly the past two decades of globalization are being rolled back yet it is not the return of the classic nation state. Although the Pentagon has referred to the return of great power politics, what can be lost in characterizing the next phase of historical development, is the semi-sovereign nature of the world’s most powerful nations.

Collaboration and global rules are a key part of how the great nations conduct their trade, commerce and global security; at the same time identity politics and national identities are being reasserted to modify to some extent how collaboration and global rules are themselves being redefined.

The featured photo is of Jacob Rees-Mogg and is credited to the Edmund Burke Institute.