As the North Korean nuclear crisis slowly but surely escalates to a soft boil, China has officially asked Russia for help in cooling tensions between the US and the dictatorship of Kim Jong-Un before red lines are crossed by either side. Coming less than a week after new US president Donald Trump seemingly enlisted Chinese communist general secretary Xi Jinping in a quasi-alliance to eliminate the North's accelerating weapons program, it sets up an apparent contradiction at the heart of US-China relations in the strategic security realm - a reaffirmation of the Sino-Russian Eurasian axis which stands in direct defiance of Washington's apparent newfangled threat of unilateral coercion against rogue states like North Korea and Syria. All this in spite of continued US-China integration in the economic realm that both sides cheerfully blessed in Trump's recent summit with Xi at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
Whether or not Washington expected Beijing to turn so quickly to Vladimir Putin - a move that also further signals Chinese ambivalence over the West's confrontation with Russia in Syria - the imperative for trilateral horsetrading between the world's greatest powers is growing by the day.
There were compelling reasons for China to turn without hesitation back to Russia. For one, Russia remains a far bigger strategic military power, courtesy of the world's largest stockpile of nuclear weapons - the only credible existential threat to the US mainland. With the distant but undeniable prospect of nuclear war breaking out on the critical Northeast Asian crossroads of the Korean peninsula, Russia's entry introduces a major new element of risk and potential cost to any one-sided US military action, which Washington's heightened nuclear posture in the region has unmistakably signaled the small but real possibility of all-out nuclear strikes to neutralize Kim's vast army as quickly as possible in the event of a general Korean conflict.
In a more fundamental sense, China simply cannot directly confront America over North Korea. In concrete terms, what it gains by defending Kim from Trump is too negligible compared to the benefits of playing to Trump's tune to the greatest extent possible short of its own non-negotiable red lines. Should it see that neither Kim nor Trump will back down, Beijing will do its utmost to retain a neutral stance, yet this leaves it unacceptably vulnerable to the risk that the Pyongyang regime falls violently in an all-out war and that suddenly its longstanding buffer to the US military's sole East Asian mainland deployment is obliterated.
That leaves Xi with no option but to draw Putin in to balance Trump. By posing North Korea as a broader East-West balance-of-power issue, not simply a US-China bargaining point, Beijing subsumes any denuclearization efforts into the wider legitimate context of maintaining strategic equilibrium. It simultaneously relieves China of the burden of directly confronting the lopsided US military superiority which can so readily ratchet up the pressure on Pyongyang to the point of apparently threatening regime change, however unlikely that ominous escalation scenario remains in all cases.
Russia for its part would appear particularly unwilling to further fuel regional tensions with any of its own military posturing in the Far East; but its current nadir of relations with the US over Syria and Ukraine alike gives it the leeway to incrementally constrain American options that China lacks - for instance, by selling advanced antiaircraft or antimissile systems such as the S-300 to Pyongyang, or possibly even stepping up military cooperation with the Kim regime in the form of advisers. All this would be in direct contravention of existing UN agreements and protocols, but if there's any time when the Kremlin could feel unshackled by these, now would be it: with both it and Washington having reneged not merely strategic and nuclear arms control agreements in themselves, but more importantly the status-quo logic behind them, the bar for more drastic cold power plays has been significantly lowered.
Should Putin conclude that Trump still doesn't realize that with Kim, it's simply not the case that all options are on the table, he could well decide that the imperative to block another UN-unauthorized attack on a member state - even a pariah - actually outweigh the prior infractions of the offending target. At the very least, it gives Moscow yet another bargaining chip with respect to its more core interests in Ukraine and Syria; and gives Washington yet another reminder of the imperative of finding common ground on fundamental security policy with Russia no less than China.
The main point is that the deep fissures between East and West - between the US-led global alliance bloc of primarily liberal democracies and the Sino-Russian Eurasian authoritarian axis - are coming to a head simultaneously in all three critical regions, namely Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. What transpires in one sector now automatically reverberates to the others. The sooner that all sides - especially the Trump administration, which is seemingly intent on exhausting the pursuit of all its maximalist starting goalposts - realize that a general East-West accord is becoming necessary, the more readily all crises can be tackled in a unified and coherent manner.
No comments:
Post a Comment