Ties between Russia and China go far beyond mutual lessons-learned and policy coordination. They have entered into cooperative arrangements that pose clear dangers for the US and its allies. The most apparent of these are in the military realm.
Mark Kelton, Former Deputy Director for Counterintelligence, CIA
Mark Kelton is a retired senior Central Intelligence Agency executive who retired in 2015 with 34 years of experience in intelligence operations. Before retiring, he served as CIA’s Deputy Director for Counterintelligence.
Russia has, for example, sold more than 500 military aircraft; at least 200 helicopters; four destroyers and twelve submarines to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) since 1991. In addition, Moscow has aided Beijing in the development of sophisticated defense technologies such as a ballistic missile early warning system. They are also working together on a proposed UN treaty to try to constrain American ability to contest their growing anti-satellite capabilities. Other military cooperation between the two has included joint military exercises, strategic bomber patrols, parades and the like that, though small in scale, are large in symbolism. All of this is reminiscent of the Treaty of Rapallo with the significant difference that the military relationship between China and Russia today is being conducted in the open rather than in the shadows as was the case with the secret clause appended to that 1922 agreement between the revanchists in Berlin and revolutionaries in Moscow.
Military ties between Russia and China benefit both parties. China gets advanced Russian weaponry while the Russians draw heavily on arms sales to the PRC to boost their own military industries and foreign earnings. That being said, sometime in the not too distant future, China - having itself developed sufficient military production capacity or having stolen enough of Moscow’s military technological known-how to allow it to do so - will reach a point in terms of its military capabilities where the purchase of Russian weaponry becomes relatively less important to it. One can only hope that the leadership in Moscow will come to understand before then that they, like their Soviet predecessors, could one day discover they have enabled an avaristic predator that is at Russia’s throat.
The decisions by the troublesome twosome in Moscow and Beijing to simultaneously step-up military pressure on Ukraine and Taiwan respectively, coincident as they are with the worldwide impact of the COVID pandemic and the entry into office of a new American President, were likely not coincidental. In mounting their dual threats to those countries, Russia and China are at once closely watching the reactions of their respective targets while setting the stage for possible military action. At the same time, Putin and Xi are also surely testing the new American President’s judgment as they consider how best to realize those territorial ambitions. Both benefit from forcing the US to pay attention to, if not confront, potential threats to its interests on two fronts simultaneously. In so doing, both are positioning their military forces and assets; while conditioning their respective targets to the presence of adversary military forces in their territorial waters, on their border or in their air space; as contingencies against any ultimate decision to use force to achieve their aims.
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