From DC to Jerusalem

Ian Bremmer over at Slate.com has a very interesting article up today about how the recently warming Sino-Russian ties do not represent a strategic threat to the United States. Essentially, the article argues that Russian-Chinese interests diverge to a much greater extent than they converge in the long term.

The articles conclusion is right on the mark. From slate.com No need to worry about Sino-Russian Axis:

First, Russia is one of the world’s leading exporters of oil and gas. China’s demand for both has grown enormously in recent years—and will continue to rise as its economy expands. The two countries are building a solid buyer-seller energy relationship.

But the differences in their foreign-policy goals emerge when we remember that Russia needs high energy prices, while China would like to see them fall. So many international conflicts today have potential implications for energy prices that Russia and China will frequently find themselves on different sides of key issues.

. . .

Today, trade with Russia, estimated at around $40 billion, accounts for just 2 percent of China’s trade total. According to Chinese customs data, U.S.-Chinese trade reached $262 billion in 2006. Trade with the European Union came in at around $272 billion. Given the importance of trade for the Chinese leadership’s vision of China’s future, these numbers reveal that Beijing’s interest in any anti-Western alliance will remain limited.

. . .

Russia and China will continue to find tactical advantage in working together on specific foreign-policy issues. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is, in part, a tool designed for that purpose. Some of that coordination is bound to come at the West’s expense. But the two countries’ foreign policies will continue to diverge, limiting the likelihood of any anti-Western alliance.

Time Magazine’s China Blog recently released part one of its interview with Thomas P.M. Barnett, one of my personal favorite foreign policy thinkers and author of The Pentagon’s New Map. There, he discussed his opionion that the United States should forge a military alliance with China because we are much more alike than we are different.

From China Blog, Why the US and China are destined to be allies:

TIME: In your last book, you call for a US-China military alliance. How do you think that goes over in Tokyo?

Barnett: (chuckles a bit): “They’d (the Japanese) have a hard time with it, I understand that. But from our perspective it would be putting China’s rise to use, helping integrate them into the global system not just economically, but in a security sense too. We’d be playing the same role that Britain did at the end of the 19th century and in the 20th, during a previous era of globalization. It’s actually an easy choice for us, if we think strategically. But yes, it would mean a diminution of [Japan’s] status vis a vis us. Look, they are wedded to their choices, and in most of the post war period they’ve been unwilling to be what I call a frontier integrating power [a country willing to actively try to bring countries outside the core into the club of rich nations that play by an established set of fairly transparent rules). They haven’t had the ambition or the purpose to do that. And it’s understandable. This is not a criticism. Their experience in the middle of the 20th century was so negative that it shaped their present in profound ways; they became a more passive power, for understandable reasons.

I think Barnett’s point jives very well with Bremmer’s article. China can be expected to act reasonably responsibly in the international system because the regime’s very existence requires it provide economic opportunities for its population. Working to forge an alliance with China, as Barnett argues, could aid us in our quest to make them what he terms as a ‘frontier integrative power’ when their rise to world prominence is complete.