The Trump Administration’s Pursuit of a Sino-Russian Schism
The pro-Russian tack taken by the Trump administration seems puzzling and even counterproductive to most Americans, to say nothing of our NATO allies and global partners. Recent polling shows a majority of Americans do not trust Putin, that there remains majority support among Americans for Ukraine, and that Americans reject the idea of abandoning NATO or our leadership position among our alliances and partnerships. Why, then, is the Trump administration’s messaging disconnected from domestic and international audiences?
It is not so puzzling when one considers it in the context of the first Trump administration’s major foreign policy goal of driving a wedge between Russia and China. While there may be dismay at Trump’s pro-Putin turn, pursuing a Sino-Russian schism is on par with what he and other Republican presidential candidates said they were going to do. Trump was explicit in his intent to return to this policy. The current Trump administration faces a growing dilemma beyond the failures of the first administration’s policy efforts that sought to create a schism but only solidified the strategic partnership in ways not seen throughout history. None of the conditions to effect such a division existed then, nor do they exist today. The two strategic partners spent nearly two decades ensuring they were aligned to prevent such a schism, so pursuing an ill-informed initiative made failure virtually inevitable. The factors that bind them now exist in spades, making another effort to divide the Sino-Russian strategic partnership even more likely doomed to failure. Worse, in zealously reimplementing a failed policy, it is clear Trump’s team has done so without evaluating and assessing why it failed in the first place. Seemingly obtuse to the realities of the relationship, they have decided to court Putin at the expense of our alliances and partnerships. This has committed the US to a potentially self-destructive geopolitical road to failure.
Flawed Assumptions
When the Trump administration released the 2018 National Security Strategy, a key theme was the country’s need to transition from twenty years of the Global War on Terror (GWOT) to Great Power Competition (GPC). The reinvigoration of the Nixon-Kissinger strategic balance of power triangle and the explicit need to fracture the Sino-Russian strategic partnership was a central theme within this shift. As expected, the State and Defense Departments enthusiastically began developing approaches to drive a wedge between the two strategic partners. Policymakers and strategists cited a collection of potential areas for exploitation. These included the historic Sino-Russian discord involving mistrust, territorial disputes, and power imbalances leading to senior-junior relationships. These areas were all deemed ripe for exploitation. However, almost two years later, there was a universal acknowledgment that efforts had fallen flat, and attempts to play on these had worsened the situation by drawing the two significantly closer.
The recognition that the policy had failed preceded the Biden administration. Thus, the Biden national security team abandoned the misguided undertaking upon taking the reins. It had been abandoned because it failed to achieve its objectives and resulted in undesirable and opposite outcomes—not because a formal evaluation or assessment was performed that would have shown that it was set to fail from its inception and that the pursuit of such a policy was fundamentally misinformed. Initial assumptions were flawed. To be clear, it does not appear that either administration, including the current Trump administration, has ever questioned the strategic partnership within the context of the Sino-Russian normalization process that started well before the Cold War ended and evolved throughout the post–Cold War era to form the strategic partnership we are now confronted with. Multiple administrations failed to understand that the mutual understanding of the implications associated with their Cold War division brought the two partners together, and this mutual understanding has created a rock-solid commitment to avert such a schism again.
A Misinformed Attempt to Exploit the Unexploitable
The issues the national security community, think tanks, and academia offered for exploitation to divide the Sino-Russian partnership were and are real. However, they were no longer valid given how the post–Cold War Sino-Russian relationship evolved, how it currently exists, and how far they have come to achieving their collective and individual strategic objectives vis-à-vis the US. For both partners, allowing another schism to occur would be tantamount to suicide.
The historical animosity between the Chinese, Russian, and Soviet regimes is well-known, documented, and factual. The two-decade-long formal normalization process required them to address this and related factors. The two strategic partners have been surprisingly successful in addressing these disputes at all levels of government and suppressing a reflash of divisive issues. As such, the top-down continuous leadership interactions now represent the tip of the iceberg.
There is also no argument that their cultural animosity, accompanied by deeply rooted racism and distrust, has manifested itself in almost continuous territorial disputes. Territorial disputes characterized their long history, led them to the brink of a nuclear conflict in 1969, and served to collapse three of their four alliance-like treaties. Lingering territorial disputes remain, but they have been solved or shelved to prioritize their areas of strategic convergence. They do recurringly show themselves, but much like bait, their reappearance serves more to reinforce the misinformed ideas among US policymakers that they can be exploited than actually resulting in discord between the two.
The Cold War Sino-Soviet ideological competition for global communist leadership is also well documented. Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin for his violent and excessive suppression of Soviet society alienated Mao. Mao viewed Khrushchev’s condemnation of Stalin as traitorous. Nearly fifteen years later, after another Alliance treaty failure, the two engaged in a vicious border conflict over a territorial disputed island. It brought them to the brink of a nuclear conflict. Today, the divisive ideology is absent, the military forces along the Sino-Russian border long gone even before the Ukraine War, and the discord replaced by a convergence of strategic interests focused on a mutual desire to realign the international order and establish sovereign spheres of influence.
In summary, none of the exploitable conditions and divisive issues US policymakers put forth to validate their pursuit of a second Sino-Russian schism exist today. The playing field is completely different, thus the exploitable seams offered by national security professionals have proven to be bunk. At best, where they still exist, they are subjugated to the partner’s commitment to strategic alignment, including a vision of a world order that reverses the outcome of the Cold War. This reveals a mutual understanding of their past failure in allowing the US to divide them and that should they allow such a schism to occur again, it would have similar existential ramifications for both of them.
Discounting the Sino-Russian Treaty
The Trump administration has again failed to undertake a basic analysis of the Sino-Russian relationship. As evidence of this failure, consider that Trump officials—as well as the national security community, think tanks, and academic experts that advise them—never reference, showing indifference to, the nearly quarter-of-a-century-old Sino-Russian treaty that has successfully underpinned the relationship. Neither side has violated the treaty since its signature in 2001. Thus, there is little recognition that this treaty is a historical one-off. The treaty, the 2001 Treaty of Good Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation, while generic, has been in the background as they weathered the unipolar moment and individual confrontations with the West and evolved their relationship to the point where Xi stated, “Right now there are changes—the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years—and we are the ones driving these changes together.” Unlike Western treaties, which seal the deal and outline how the signatories will comport themselves going forward, the 2001 treaty embodies the Eastern cultural mindset whereby treaties are not where negotiations stop but where negotiations involving individual strategic interests begin. This reality is widely overlooked.
The 2001 treaty was signed after a nearly two-decade effort to normalize relations. It has served two purposes. First, it negated the reasons two Trump administrations believed they could pursue a Nixon-Kissinger geostrategic balance of power triangle coup part deux by allowing them to move beyond their divisive squabbles and ensuring no exploitable daylight for US policymakers. With this success and the trust developed along the way, the treaty enabled the strategic partnership’s evolution. Second, their diplomatic, economic, and military relationship has exponentially increased. Beyond the forty-four face-to-face meetings between Xi and Putin since 2012, it established dozens of working groups across the depth and breadth of their government’s ministries. These have allowed them to address a spectrum of issues that include space exploration and 5G technologies, the establishment of bilateral and multilateral military exercises and patrols, the transfer and collaboration of military and dual-use technologies that have the potential to erode and degrade Western advantages, and diplomatic coordination within international organizations. The reality of the relationship was best captured by Mikko Hautala, the former Finnish ambassador to Russia, who stated, “The PRC-Russian relationship is much closer than we think. They have had almost monthly senior leadership meetings (since 2020). They are serious about developing relations and are focused on a common strategic goal. The number and nature of the participants impart more in play than we want to acknowledge. They have a common fundamental idea that they must move the world to multipolar world, weaken position of West, and exert their power.”
When think tanks and academics mention the 2001 treaty, they often minimize it by saying it falls short of a mutual defense alliance. By default, they compare it to the North Atlantic Treaty. Taken at face value, this is indeed true. However, the treaty does contain security and defense-related articles. Arguably, Article 9 provides for a generic NATO Article 4 by similarly stating they will hold consultations when one of the partners deems peace is threatened, undermined, or their security interests are threatened by aggression. Unlike NATO Article 4, Article 9 goes further, saying that the consultations are to “eliminate such threats.” It leaves room for interpretation for sure but imparts that they will act. The aggregation of this article with the other security and defense-related articles imparts a broad relationship. Again, generic in a manner, and nothing so narrow as a collective defense clause defined by the term “armed attack” such as NATO’s Article 5. That said, even NATO struggles with understanding the application of Article 5, so while it is true that the 2001 treaty does not explicitly specify that an attack on one is an attack on both, that does not mean this context is implicitly absent.
The 2001 treaty was never meant to mirror the North Atlantic Treaty. It is generic and vague by design. This is what has given it its strength and longevity. Sino-Russian leaders built and have leveraged the treaty to mitigate the very issues the US believes it exploited during the Cold War and again serve as exploitable vulnerabilities. Having been on the receiving end of it once before, they understand the US play. The treaty has endured as a framework allowing them to mutually consult, act to close off any exploitable daylight, and—as their relations with the US have soured—evolve from an emphasis on alleviating their relational discord to empowering collaboration in the pursuit of their enduring strategic objectives involving the establishment of advantages over the West across diplomatic, informational, military, and economic areas. While US policymakers understand the success of their own Cold War strategy, they somehow seem obtuse to the fact that the victims of its success are well aware of the past and present ramifications.
Understanding Existential Outcomes
Neither side expected the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Nor did they foresee the subjugation of the PRC to the Western economic order during the initial two decades of the post–Cold War era. The Cold War Sino-Soviet schism left both open to regime change, but it was only the Soviets who succumbed to this fate. Nearly two years before this, it was the suppression of the Tiananmen Square democratic protests that likely averted a similar fate for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Just as it did then, a Sino-Russian schism would have existential repercussions today. For Xi, it would lead to China’s isolation on the world stage, the CCP’s domestic discreditation, and potential economic collapse as the West attempted to undermine China’s economy.
For Putin, as the weaker economic player, hence the junior in the senior-junior analogy, losing China by willingly violating the treaty, thus collapsing it, or inadvertently through a US-China confrontation, would lead to the economic subjugation of Russia to the West. This represents the complete antithesis of Putin’s vision of the international order and the establishment of a Eurasian-centric order with Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union at its geographic and political center. It would also have significant implications for Russia’s vision for the Arctic and its control over the Northern Sea Route. While the results of a modern-day Sino-Russian schism might be reversed from those of the Cold War due to their relative power disparities, they would nonetheless be existential to both parties. Ignoring that both parties are likely aware of this is ignorance, arrogance, or both.
Committed to a Road to Failure
The Trump administration has waded headlong into reinvigorating a failed policy without acknowledging why it failed during the first administration. Further, the administration seems to have a limited understanding of the actual state of play within the Sino-Russian relationship. Gorbachev’s visit to Beijing in 1986 began the long road to normalization of relations and, more importantly, the reversal of the US success in dividing the two during the Cold War. Both Putin and Xi understand this legacy and the rationale behind why their predecessors undertook the journey of normalizing relations. It was to rectify their schism. The fact the US national security community, think tanks, and academia openly tout the success of the Nixon-Kissingerian geostrategic balance of power triangle while simultaneously dismissing the longest enduring Sino-Russian Treaty meant to reverse it, as well as enabling the relationship to evolve into a strategic partnership, is profound. All evidence is that regardless of their squabbles, at least for now, the strategic partners are firmly aligned to their 2001 treaty, thus ensuring there is little meaningful exploitable daylight between the two for US policymakers to pursue.
The evolution of the Sino-Russian strategic partnership, or Alliance, or whatever one fancies it, shows that both Putin and Xi recognize that there is simply too much at stake to allow another Sino-Russian schism. Putin will assuredly take advantage of whatever the Trump administration is willing to give up at the expense of US allies and partners, and that enables him to attain his enduring strategic objectives. What is also likely is he will not violate the 2001 Sino-Russian Treaty in a trade for better relations with the US. It is the Sino-Russian strategic alignment that is the one constant that provides them both stability and advantage against the West. Trump’s aggressive rhetoric toward Denmark over Greenland, Panama over the Panama Canal, and Ukraine over its sovereignty as a free and independent state prove that the Sino-Russian strategic partnership has enabled Xi and Putin to move closer than ever toward establishing the international order they generically envision—defined by individual sovereign geographical spheres of influence within an international order dominated by a handful of great powers. The Trump administration’s commitment to a fundamentally flawed and misinformed policy to divide the Sino-Russian strategic partnership was and remains a road to failure. Additionally, this pursuit comes at the expense of US alliances and partnerships, arguably at the heart of what made America great, so this road to failure will likely have exponentially larger, irreversible, and negative consequences on the US this time around.
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