Alex Lo, South China Morning Post, May 18, 2024

When it comes to Washington-Beijing rivalry, a few Americans learned the right lesson from history but the rest do not know what the lesson is.

First there was the rhetorical “no limits” friendship. Now, it’s “for generations to come”. That’s the latest from President Xi Jinping who signaled to visiting Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, about the future of their two nations.

Putin’s trip to Beijing comes as the tide is turning in Russia’s favour in Ukraine, and Brussels and Washington keep blasting Beijing for “supporting” Russia. So, the two leaders give the West the big finger.

What do you expect? You make Russia your biggest enemy and China your “strategic competitor”, which is but one step away from declaring it an enemy. You say it’s a fight for democracy against autocracy. You have committed the most destructive war in Europe since the end of the second world war and collectively wage a full-on economic war on China. When you are doing all that, how do you think Russia and China would react?

American policymakers once understood this basic dilemma which required US adjustment in periodically favouring one against the other, never allowing both to come together, which when combined, dominate the entire Eurasian land mass.

In 1972, when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were working out rapprochement with communist China, the two American leaders had a late-night chat. Kissinger said: “I think in 20 years your successor, if he’s as wise as you, will wind up leaning towards the Russians against the Chinese. For the next 15 years we have to lean towards the Chinese against the Russians. We have to play this balance of power game totally unemotionally. Right now, we need the Chinese to correct the Russians and to discipline the Russians.”

There was nothing in common between Jimmy Carter and Nixon, but there are many similarities between Zbigniew Brzezinski and Kissinger, their respective national security advisers. Brzezinski once wrote presciently: “Potentially, the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an ‘anti-hegemonic’ coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances.”

Of course, what both men feared has now come to pass. Both were “European” in their understanding of history and realpolitik, as opposed to their ahistorical “We can do whatever we like” neoconservative successors.

Both Brzezinski and Kissinger learned deeply from Otto von Bismarck, or more specifically, the latter’s use of what was known as “the reinsurance treaty” to isolate Paris from forming an alliance with Moscow. They modelled their historical analogy of China and Soviet Russia on France and Tsarist Russia.

The secret treaty was a pillar of Bismarck’s diplomacy that kept the balance of power and relative peace in Europe. Once Bismarck was out of power and the treaty was allowed to lapse, Russia and France sought out each other. Their rapprochement in the 1890s, wrote George Kennan, underpinned the alliance system that led to the first world war.

“For Bismarck’s retirement … removed from the scene the last great personal opponent of a closer military-political relationship between Russia and France,” Kennan wrote in The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order. “[A]nd with the lapse of the Reinsurance Treaty there disappeared the last serious formal impediment to such a development … [T]he Franco-Russian alliance of 1894 was without question one of the major components out of which the fateful situation of 1914 was constructed, and of particular importance as a factor causing what began as a Balkan quarrel to grow into a conflict involving most of western Europe.”

Today, containment is again being applied to China, with all the dangerous consequences we can see before us, not only for China and the US, but the whole world. Kissinger didn’t use the term “containment”; he preferred “detente”. But whatever the term, he meant to keep China and Russia apart. But the new US containment against China? It basically forces Moscow and Beijing, and worse, Tehran into a menage a trois.

Some commentators may not be exaggerating when they say we are staring at world war three.