Return to Winter: Russia, China, and the New Cold War Against America (10 page)

Xi and Putin have moved closer together on missile defense, as they have in so many other areas; their expression of unity on the issue
may have been the single most important document they signed at their March 2013 summit. The two leaders pledged to work together while voicing common concerns about the deployment of missile-defense systems around the world. They were talking about the U.S., although they didn’t say so.

On the surface, the Russian-Chinese statement of concern about missile defense could have sounded like a note of weakness, a futile complaint against American power. It may have been, too, but for Obama’s big announcement a week earlier, making clear just how “flexible” he intended to be. This American and Western “flexibility”—really, an abdication of responsibility—will only make America’s eventual task harder, should we ever wake from our neo-isolationist slumber.

ECONOMIC COOPERATION

Among the agreements signed during Xi’s March 2013 visit was a deal to proceed with the Power of Siberia natural-gas pipeline, which would provide energy-hungry China with Russian natural gas beginning in 2017. As part of the agreement, the Chinese gave up to $30 billion in loans to Rosneft, Russia’s state-owned oil company, in exchange for a massive boost to their supplies of Russian oil. Both sides benefit: Russia obtains the capital needed to finish an acquisition of the British-Russian oil firm TNK-BP, while China secures the fuel source to power its workhouse economy.

More broadly, both Russia and China play leading roles in the efforts of the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) to create an independent international financial structure—efforts that include starting a development bank and pooling their foreign reserves to protect against currency crises.
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Independently, China has expanded
its economic reach across not just Asia, where it projects its economic might through investment and trade, but also deep into Africa and Latin America. Russia uses its growing oil and energy industry to increase its state power and international political leverage, especially in Central Asia and Europe. Russia’s economic ties with nations operating against U.S. interests—especially Syria, but also Venezuela, Iran, and North Korea—are broadening.

NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY AND “NON-INTERFERENCE”

The Moscow meeting also included several expressions of agreement on a less specific, but hugely significant principle: what both nations speak of as non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations. Xi urged China and Russia to “resolutely support each other in efforts to protect national sovereignty, security, and development interests.” At the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, he said, “We must respect the right of each country in the world to independently choose its path of development and oppose interference in the internal affairs of other countries.”
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Those were friendly words to the ears of Vladimir Putin, who has long opposed what he considers internal interference—code language for U.S. involvement in Central Asia and the Middle East. (He shows no such compunction, of course, when it comes to his own interventions.) Now, the Chinese find the concept of national sovereignty amenable as well, given their concerns about American support for Japan in the South China Sea and other strategic concerns in the Far East. It was all part of a broader expression of “strategic partnership” that included support for each other’s territorial claims and goals. In a press conference with Xi, Putin even referred to Japan and Germany as “the defeated powers” from World War II.
⁴⁰

A WAKE-UP CALL

In spring 2013, the world braced for a potentially catastrophic war on the Korean Peninsula. North Korea’s mysterious young leader, Kim Jong Un, was systematically cutting ties with the South, making threatening statements, and preparing a new missile launch. While periodic provocations from North Korea have become almost commonplace over the last two decades, the crisis unfolding in March and April 2013 seemed more severe, and it highlighted how destructive the leadership gap in Washington is becoming for our national security. While the Obama administration seemed to take the Pyongyang crisis seriously, it appears to lack an understanding of the bigger picture—the role China plays here and elsewhere, and the broader challenge all these crises present to U.S. interests.

There are exceptions to the general lack of understanding. “Chinese behavior has been very disappointing,” said Senator John McCain. “Whether it be on cyber security, whether it be on confrontation on the South China Sea, or whether it be their failure to rein in what could be a catastrophic situation.” Warning that accidental war could break out on the Korean peninsula, McCain blamed China as an enabler of the North Korean regime and its nuclear program. “China does hold the key to this problem,” McCain said. “China could cut off their economy if they want to.”
⁴¹
(From time to time, China does put the hammer down on its troublesome ally, as in May 2013, when Beijing announced that its biggest foreign-exchange bank, the Bank of China, would stop doing business with North Korea’s Foreign Trade Bank, which the U.S. has accused of facilitating transactions linked to weapons of mass destruction.
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)

McCain’s frank talk is refreshing, but the Arizona senator is one of the few engaging in it. Far too few lawmakers on either side of the aisle are willing to put themselves on the line about the fundamental foreign-policy challenges facing the United States, though we desperately
need American political leadership here—it makes a difference. During the height of the Chinese currency manipulation, for instance, Senator Sherrod Brown’s persistent criticism had a real impact; China has much modulated its practices in this regard. Likewise, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s defense of U.S. firms overseas—where, as she put it, they felt that the “deck was stacked against them”—has helped open markets for American companies.
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Leadership means not only speaking up, but also taking real action—and yes, taking action involves risk. But it also holds the promise of finding solutions. We don’t have the luxury of talking around these problems. America’s oft described “intervention fatigue” should not, and cannot, result in responsibility fatigue: the responsibility for our safety and prosperity and our obligation to the free world, which looks to us for leadership.

Millions look to us as custodians of their defense against aggression and intimidation. They also look to America to uphold the principles we share: democracy, human rights, transparent government, and the rule of law. In short, if we believe in protecting our principles and privileges as American citizens, we must start thinking and acting to address these challenges. If we also wish to maintain our role as champion of such principles around the world, we must conduct ourselves accordingly. That is what we had to do during the Cold War. In this new era, we must make ourselves literate in our new, uncomfortable burdens.

Americans must begin by acknowledging the realities. It took us too long to grasp the threat from militant Islam. When we finally did, we ignored the far more powerful adversaries waiting in the wings who were marshaling their strength and pretending to offer support while studying our weaknesses and exploiting our exhaustion. Russia and China emerged immeasurably stronger from America’s War on Terror. America, on the other hand, emerged deep in debt and uncertain of its calling.

America’s misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan have created the impression of American weakness. Our Axis rivals drew predictable conclusions. They saw that the interventions resulted in years-long chaos and in vast, untenable expenditures. They witnessed the spectacle of the lone superpower bogged down by insurgents. And they recognized a chance to reassert themselves. In his book about the rise of China,
The Contest for Supremacy
, Princeton professor Aaron L. Friedberg describes the opportunity China saw in American duress: “In the words of a People’s Liberation Army–sponsored journal . . . ‘Simply put, the United States has begun to enter a period of relative decline.’ While the United States wallowed, other potential power centers would continue to grow and ‘of course, China first of all.’”
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The official Chinese Communist Party newspaper even gloated in a 2009 article: “U.S. strength is declining at a speed so fantastic that it is far beyond anticipation.”
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Why do we find ourselves so unprepared at this moment in history?

There is plenty of blame to go around in the post-Soviet history of American foreign policy. Both Republicans and Democrats in Washington have helped forge our current predicament. The West missed many chances to disarm the Russian Bear in the post–Cold War era and to force Russian concessions on other issues. The potential for chaos, as first the Soviet Empire collapsed and then Russia itself began to fray, was perhaps too daunting. Bill Clinton seldom criticized Moscow throughout the 1990s, at the time of Russia’s greatest post-Soviet weakness, to avoid exacerbating instability. George W. Bush was taken in by Putin’s charisma, infamously proclaiming that he had looked the Russian leader in the eyes and gotten “a sense of his soul.”
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Bush allowed himself to be lulled into a false security that Putin shared his democratic goals. But at least Bush understood that Putin
had
strategic objectives, even if he misjudged what they were. President Obama doesn’t seem to appreciate that Russian activities
are part of broader geopolitical goals. He dismisses Putin’s tough-guy “shtick” and says that he acts like the “bored kid in the back of the classroom.”
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This is a terribly foolish, cynical way to talk and think.

Likewise, we abstained from any confrontation with China after the Tiananmen Square massacres. U.S. companies had too much invested in China’s stability. We told ourselves for years that economic prosperity in China would, sooner or later, lead to greater democratization.

A decade later, after 9/11, as we focused all our attention and national will on Islamist terrorists, Moscow rebuilt its challenge—aided by President George W. Bush’s overstretch into Iraq and Afghanistan and by our vital need to view Putin as an ally. Meanwhile, political negligence and economic dependence left us mostly passive in the face of mounting Chinese power. Finally, as President Obama struggles to nurse the U.S. economy back to health, he has shown almost no inclination to confront Russia or China. For two decades, it has been a sorry litany of missed chances, poor choices, and hubristic acts of weakness. As a result, we face a challenge more formidable than any since the height of Soviet Communism—certainly one that is more formidable, over the long term, than that presented by al-Qaeda. There is no scenario in which militant Islam can dominate the globe.

The Axis partners are capable of just that and have deployed their resources precisely to that end—even as they recognize the complexity of the world they live in and the limitations on their own efforts. Both Russia and China, of course, maintain relationships with the United States that are often cooperative in certain areas. Moscow and Washington have made substantial progress in trade and investment relations, which will be aided further by Russia’s joining the World Trade Organization. China and the United States are also economic partners; the Chinese have also taken part in joint military exercises with the United States to increase familiarity and lessen chances of conflict or misunderstanding in common international waters. Unlike
the non-state actors of the Islamic world, Moscow and Beijing are in the business of survival. Martyrdom does not interest them. They don’t go about provoking manifestly stronger adversaries—and they recognize, for the time being, the United States’ clear, if dwindling, military edge. But they will exploit weakness whenever it serves their interests—politically, economically, militarily, and also by proxy, where their willingness to make mischief often has the bloodiest consequences.

Indeed, in some ways, it is the Axis’s behavior in the most dangerous, unstable regions of the world today—North Korea, Syria, Iran, and Latin America—that demonstrates the most about Russia and China’s intentions and long-range strategies. Let’s examine the Russian and Chinese facilitation of rogue regimes, which shows how their actions further a well-conceived strategy while American vacillation and inconsistency show our lack of anything like a big-picture plan.

CHAPTER 2

Rogue Regimes: How the Axis Uses Proxies to Win

“I’ve been known to be an optimist, but here are the Russians sending [the Syrians] up-to-date missiles, continued flights of arms going into Syria. Putin keeps our secretary of state waiting for three hours. . . . It doesn’t lend itself to optimism, all it does is delay us considering doing what we really need to do. The reality is that Putin will only abandon Assad when he thinks that Assad is losing. Right now, at worst it’s a stalemate. In the view of some, he is succeeding.”

—
JOHN
M
c
CAIN
¹

“China should be named and shamed for its role in enabling North Korea to remain and grow as a threat. North Korea is one of the most sanctioned countries on the planet, but Beijing (with only brief exceptions) has effectively watered down and otherwise dulled the impact of international sanctions on North Korean ‘stability.’”

—
STEPHEN YATES
²

“Moscow has formed partnerships with China, Iran, and Venezuela to prevent the U.S. from consolidating a regional order under its auspices. Like the USSR, its predecessor and inspiration, today’s Russia pursues key allies in the Middle East and Latin America, such as Syria, Iran, and Venezuela, with whom it can jointly frustrate American and Western efforts to consolidate a peaceful regional order.”

—
ARIEL COHEN AND STEPHEN BLANK, THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION
³

“For more than a decade, Pyongyang and Tehran have run what is essentially a joint missile-development program.”

—
GORDON G. CHANG
⁴

T
he setting was elegant: the dining room of New Century, the richest equestrian club in Moscow. The fare was extravagant: smoked trout, duck liver, venison soup, rhubarb sorbet, veal cheeks, and pear soup with caramel. The audience was distinguished: a gathering of members of the Valdai Club, a group of international academics and journalists that had flown in for the annual dinner with Vladimir Putin, Russia’s once and future president. It was December 2011, and Putin was poised to retake the reins of power, once the formalities of the March 2012 elections were completed.
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Putin conducted a wide-ranging discussion with his audience, covering everything from the Russian government’s loss of public trust to his own indispensable leadership. He lambasted the United States’ plan to build a missile-defense system that, in his view, posed a deliberate threat to Russia’s national security. “You ask me whether we are going to change,” he said, directly addressing the Americans at the event. “The ball is in your court. Will you change?” Then Putin said something that could not help but make headlines around the world.

The only reason the United States had any interest at all in relations with Moscow, he said, was that Russia was the only country that could “destroy America in half an hour or less.”
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It would be difficult to find a statement more revealing about Putin’s true position regarding the United States.

By this, we do not mean to suggest that Putin has any intention of launching a nuclear attack on America. We refer to his general disposition toward the United States: We are not only an adversary; we are an enemy. Moreover, as Putin well knows, one can pursue the destruction of one’s enemy without initiating an Armageddon. And perhaps the most effective means of doing so is to facilitate and support the tactics, policies, and general well-being of rogue nations hostile to the United States. As the record of the last few decades shows, Russia and its Axis partner China have become expert at doing just this.

For many years now, Russia and China have directly facilitated the interests of North Korea, Iran, and other rogue nations such as Syria and even, in America’s backyard, Venezuela. Notwithstanding moves like that of the Russians to write the UN resolution on Syria’s chemical weapons or that of the Chinese to rein in North Korea on nuclear testing, both nations believe it is in their long-term good to undermine American interests and power.

They do this under the cover of a doctrine they call “non-interference”: States should be able to do what they wish, whenever they wish, inside their own boundaries. The two nations that benefit most from this seemingly high-minded doctrine are Iran and North Korea, both of which enjoy extensive economic, political, and military ties with the Axis nations—Russia in particular with Iran, and China in particular with North Korea. As this chapter will show, the Axis nations have played an ongoing role in strengthening and facilitating the interests of these regimes.

Making matters even worse, Russia and China, by supporting these rouge states, have also facilitated terrorism. It is beyond dispute that Hezbollah has gotten weapons from Iran—in many cases, almost certainly Russian-made weapons. North Korea almost certainly sent to Syria the technology that built the nuclear plant that Israel destroyed in 2007. The non-interference doctrine has made it much easier for traffic in arms and military technology to flourish between these regimes. As if Russian backing of Iran and Chinese support for North Korea weren’t bad enough, there is also compelling evidence that Iran and North Korea, in concert with their sponsors and independently, have begun working together on developing nuclear-weapons technology.

In short, whether around the world or closer to home, Russia and China have done the bidding of forces inimical to U.S. interests, democratic values, and international stability. This chapter will
explore how each key rogue regime has thrived with Axis backing and will examine the motivations that drive Russian and Chinese support of them.

NORTH KOREA

China wanted a “new type of great power relationship” with the United States, said Chinese president Xi Jinping in June 2013, as he prepared to meet President Obama for the “shirtsleeves summit” in Los Angeles. Xi wanted to make clear, he said, that China, as the world’s rising power, could work constructively and profitably with the U.S., the world’s established power. In part, his message was cautionary: He wanted the Americans to take China seriously and to understand that the relationship between the two nations had to be forged on mutual respect—not the mutual fear that, he said, had often led to wars between established and rising states.

As a sign of his good faith, he pointed to the “big gift” he had recently given Washington: his public pressuring of the North Korean regime to enter nuclear talks, very much against Pyongyang’s wishes.
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Xi’s intervention with the North Koreans was indeed welcome, as far as it went. But even the wording Xi used—a “big gift”—gives away that from his perspective, reining in North Korea is an American interest, not a Chinese one. More crucially, Xi’s apparent change of heart about Pyongyang and his assurances to Washington are part of a long historical pattern in which both China and Russia say one thing to America’s face and then turn right around and resume their support of rogue regimes.

It is well known that only one country can exert any serious influence on the behavior of the North Korean regime: China. The alliance between the two nations dates back to the early days of the Cold War, when Mao famously described the relationship as being as “close
as lips and teeth.”
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Since then, it’s gone through its share of bumpy patches, but China has never fully abandoned Pyongyang—and it has a decades-long track record of supplying the North Koreans with weaponry, economic aid, and diplomatic cover. If every rogue nation had that kind of support from its sponsor, the world would be more unstable than it is currently. At best, China acts as a braking influence on Pyongyang, and even then, only when the North Koreans’ behavior becomes so volatile that it threatens China’s broader interests. For the most part, this happens when the Kim regime acts recklessly on the nuclear issue, as it did repeatedly in 2013.

In February 2013, the Hermit Kingdom launched its third nuclear test, this time of a “miniaturized and lighter nuclear device with greater explosive force than previously.” In April, the regime ratcheted up its threats against the United States and its “puppet,” South Korea, with a series of moves. It warned foreigners to evacuate South Korea so they wouldn’t be caught in a “thermonuclear war.” The country’s KCNA news agency predicted that once war broke out, it would be “an all-out war, a merciless, sacred, retaliatory war to be waged by North Korea.”
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That warning followed on the heels of the North’s decision to suspend the activity of its 53,000 workers at the Kaesong industrial park that it runs with South Korea, the last vestige of cooperation between the two countries. Kim also threatened to scrap the 1953 armistice ending the Korean War and to abandon the joint declaration on denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

Then in April and May, Kim’s regime launched a series of short-range missiles into the East Sea (just off the Korean Peninsula’s east coast) and at least one missile into the Sea of Japan.
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The regime even released a hysterical, but disturbing, fictional video depicting missile strikes on the White House and the Capitol in Washington. From its graphics to its music and almost parodic voice-over, the video was absurd; it might even have been funny, in a
Team America
sort of way.
As another manifestation of the regime’s madness, though, it left few observers laughing.

Kim’s behavior got so out of hand that in March, China and the U.S. co-authored UN sanctions against Pyongyang covering banking, travel, and trade.
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Xi’s foreign minister, Yang, stood alongside Secretary of State John Kerry in April 2013 and said, “China is firmly committed to upholding peace and stability and advancing the denuclearization process on the Korean peninsula.”
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In May, Xi told the North Koreans to return to diplomatic talks about their nukes.
¹³
As Xi put it bluntly: “No one should be allowed to throw a region and even the whole world in chaos for selfish gain.”
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His tough words made clear how exasperated the Chinese had become with North Korea—what some call China’s “Pyongyang fatigue.”

The U.S. was encouraged. But a closer look at China’s North Korean track record makes clear that the Chinese never truly move against North Korea. Xi’s gestures notwithstanding, they continue to support the regime in all the ways that really matter. Without the Chinese, Pyongyang couldn’t even keep its lights on. Beijing supplies nearly all the fuel for the outlaw regime and 83 percent of its imports: grain, heavy machinery, consumer goods, you name it. The Chinese also supply the luxury goods, including pleasure boats and glamorous vehicles for the North Korean elite. Despite its leading role in authorizing the 2013 UN sanctions, China has kept this trade going—much of it in violation of those same sanctions. In light of all this, it’s hard to see China’s decision to cut off the North Korean bank accused of weapons dealing, mentioned in Chapter 1, as much more than a throwaway gesture.
¹⁵

The North Koreans, if anything, are “doubling down,” as the
Wall Street Journal
put it in April 2013, on their Chinese dependence, suggesting that they have confidence in the steadfastness of their Beijing sponsor. Almost all of the nation’s recent economic development, such as it is, is owing to Chinese support, including deals signed by Chinese
mining firms eager to get in on North Korea’s largely untapped mineral wealth, which some recent reports estimate may be worth as much as $6 trillion. Other Chinese investments have included transportation, power generation, and infrastructure. Roughly two-thirds of North Korea’s joint ventures with foreign partners are Chinese.
¹⁶

“North Korea’s lifeline to the outside world,” says the
Daily Telegraph
’s Malcolm Moore, is the port city of Dandong, on the Chinese border.
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About 70 percent of the $6 billion in annual trade between the two countries flows through Dandong. The black-market economy, meanwhile, may be even larger than the official trade. Even after the 2013 sanctions, trade continued unimpeded in Dandong, despite China’s shuttering of the Kwangson Bank, which had channeled billions in foreign currency to Pyongyang.

Only the Chinese can enforce what the UN has put in place. But, as Moore writes, North Korea’s elites continue to get whatever they need in Dandong: “Their shopping list includes luxury food and fine wine, Apple iMacs for Kim Jong Un, 30, as well as Chinese-built missile launchers and components for their nuclear arsenal.”
¹⁸
Trucks leave the city every day transporting grain, fertilizer, and consumer goods to North Korea.

The 2013 UN sanctions also stipulated weapons seizures. But as one Western diplomat put it, “that will remain a largely ineffective measure until the Chinese implement it.”
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Don’t bet on that happening. North Korea still makes money off its lone export—weapons. The regime sells Soviet-era technology on the black market, especially to some bankrupt African nations. Although this trade is often intercepted during inspections of North Korean ships, some of it gets through, and it almost certainly couldn’t do so without Chinese acquiescence.
²⁰

In September 2013, Beijing released a 236-page list of equipment and chemical substances banned for export to North Korea—“fearing,” as the
New York Times
noted, “that the North would use the items
to speed development of an intercontinental ballistic missile with a nuclear bomb on top.”
²¹
This seemed an encouraging sign of Beijing’s willingness to clamp down on Kim’s regime and his nuclear ambitions, especially as Western officials have long known that sanctions cannot work without Chinese enforcement. But the list also revealed just how extensive Beijing’s knowledge is of the North Korean nuclear program. And it’s one thing to make a list, another to enforce it. Finally, these embryonic gestures of cooperation, if cooperation it is, must be balanced against a much longer and ongoing track record of adversarial behavior. (Just two months later, the
New York Times
reported on a U.S. study detecting new construction at a North Korean missile-launch site—including satellite imagery suggesting that North Korea may have begun producing fuel rods for its recently restarted five-megawatt reactor.
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)