Prominent foreign policy scholars tackled the potential threat of Sino-Russian relations at a talk Monday in the Sanford School of Public Policy.
Experts weighed in on international issues—including China's and Russia's recent territorial encroachments and the possibility of an alliance between them against the United States. Dan Blumenthal, director of Asian studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and Jakub Grygiel, George H.W. Bush associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, served as a two-man panel at the event co-hosted by the Alexander Hamilton Society and the American Enterprise Institute Executive Council.
One of the main issues the speakers agreed on was that a Sino-Russian alliance would be potentially dangerous to U.S. interests.
“The number-one issue for us in terms of the US-Russia-China relationship is that the two countries don’t bind together against the United States,” Blumenthal said.
He added, however, that historical animosity between the two countries made such an alliance unlikely in the near future. The countries' natural gas deal earlier this year—in which Russia sold 38 billion cubic meters of gas to China for $400 billion—had not been as fruitful toward building an alliance as media expected, he noted.
Russia and China are both “lonely” powers with limited alliances, Grygiel said.
“The only commonality is that they don’t like the status quo,” he said, referring to the current state of world order dominated by the U.S.
But Grygiel added that both Russia and China shared an interest in keeping the border between the two countries stable. Although Russia is interested in expanding into Western Europe, and China into the South China Sea, neither power has any interest in the other’s territorial ambitions.
Grygiel added that China was more subtle than Russia in its territorial advancements, preferring to employ “salami-slicing” or divide-and-conquer tactics. He noted that China has been testing the reaction of the U.S. and other Western countries in gradually encroaching into the South China Sea.
He also expressed concern over a possible transfer of more advanced air technology from the Russians to the Chinese.
Blumenthal, however, said such a transfer was not problematic and added that the current Chinese military was “essentially Russian-made.”
Blumenthal noted that mishandling of opening negotiations between the U.S. and China during the 1970s had hampered the United States' bargaining position over the past few decades.
“China had a pattern of negotiating that we’ve fallen into since then,” Blumenthal said. “It also put the People’s Republic of China at the same level as every other great power, when it clearly wasn’t at the time.”
After an hour, the panel opened up to questions from the audience, which comprised approximately 100 people. One audience member wanted to know whether Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine had set the precedent for China to occupy countries in the South China Sea. Blumenthal dismissed the possibility, saying that China had been encroaching into the region long before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Li Guan, a Fuqua student from China, said she enjoyed the talk but disagreed with the panelists on several points.
"[I disagreed] when they were saying that Russia and China have no choice but each other,” she said. “China has a principle that we do not ally with anyone.”
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