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Xi tightens bonds with Moscow
By Brendan O'Reilly
Xi Jinping highlighted the essential nature of the Sino-Russian relationship by making Moscow his first foreign destination after his appointment as president. In talks with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, Xi promised to expand economic, military, and strategic cooperation between the two nuclear powers.
The deepening bond between Beijing and Moscow has immense implications for the entire world - especially the United States. Indeed, it appears that Washington may have made a failed attempt at a "divide and rule" stratagem before Xi's Russian trip.
Xi followed in the footsteps of his predecessor, Hu Jintao, by traveling to Moscow soon after his ascent to the highest halls of power in Beijing. Xi delivered a speech at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations that outlined his foreign policy vision and contained a thinly veiled condemnation of recent American doctrine:
Russian President Vladimir Putin echoed Xi's optimism for the enhanced Sino-Russian bond. Putin stated, "We can already say this is a historic visit with positive results."
During a joint press conference, Xi and Putin jointly expressed concerns about America's ballistic missile defense system. They also pointedly addressed the issue of the "defeated powers" of World War II. This statement was in all probability an implied message of Russian support for China in Beijing's ongoing territorial dispute with Japan. (It must be noted that Russia also contests territory with Tokyo).
China and Russia have been bitter rivals for most of their shared history. During the Tsarist times of expansion into Siberia, Russian and Chinese armies often warred over territory. Even during the Cold War, when both powers were nominally communist, there was a dangerous rivalry between Moscow and Beijing that occasionally devolved into large-scale border skirmishes. Why has the Sino-Russian relationship taken such a friendly turn, especially in the last decade?
Russian Yin, Chinese Yang
On the economic front, the strengths and weaknesses of the two powers compliment each other nicely. Russia is a vast, energy-rich, and increasingly under-populated land with significant scientific expertise. Meanwhile, China's rapidly expanding urban centers are hungry for the natural resources and technical knowledge found in abundance throughout Russia.
Energy politics featured heavily during the Xi-Putin summit. China agreed to lend Russian state-owned energy company Rosneft US$2 billion in exchange for a planned tripling of Russian oil exports to China. Xi Jinping also made a call to expand Sino-Russian trade from the sphere of raw materials into other realms:
While economics is an important factor of the Sino-Russian relations, the primary driver of ties between Moscow and Beijing is strategic. Both powers feel immense pressure from the world's sole "hyperpower". Russia has long viewed expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization deep into Eastern Europe as an aggressive move. China now has very similar concerns about Washington's militarized "pivot" to Asia and support for Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines in their territorial disputes with Beijing. Moscow and Beijing have immense interests in countering Washington's expanding military presence in what is perceived as their strategic backyards.
However, Washington's positioning of conventional military forces near the heartlands of China and Russia is not nearly as perturbing as America's push for full strategic nuclear superiority. Moscow and Beijing jointly view Washington's development and deployment of missile defense systems as an existential threat to their nuclear deterrents.
If the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction no longer held true, then the strategic environment of the globe's major powers could enter a new and dangerous phase - even in the absence of a full-blown Cold War style confrontation.
Why Xi and Putin are MAD
Russia has long condemned US and NATO missile defense plans in Europe as a peril to Russian nuclear deterrence. The United States claimed the system was in response to an Iranian nuclear threat - a threat that the United State's own intelligence services report does not currently exist.
China has even more to fear from American missile defense systems. While Russia maintains an arsenal of well over 1,000 nuclear warheads, China is widely believed to have only several hundred. In the (unlikely) event of full-scale nuclear war, Russia could almost certainly overwhelm any America's missile defense system with sheer numbers. It is not clear whether China could do the same.
Interestingly enough, US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel publicized a change to American missile defense deployments just before Xi's trip to Moscow. Hagel announced a probable repositioning of missile defense systems from Poland to Alaska in order to counter North Korean threats. Secretary Hagel also confirmed plans to enhance missile defense capabilities in Japan. Chinese Foreign Minister Hong Lei quickly denounced these moves: "All measures seeking to increase military capacities will only intensify antagonism and will not help to solve the problem." [3]
While North Korea talks tough, there are serious doubts as to whether its missiles pose a credible threat to the American mainland. On the other hand, American missile defense systems in Alaska and Japan would certainly pose a challenge to China's very real long-range nuclear capabilities.
The timing and very public nature of the US repositioning is significant. It appears that the American redeployment of missile defense systems from Europe to the Pacific may have been, at least in part, an effort at dividing Russian and Chinese strategic opinion on the system.
If that was indeed a motivation behind the American move, the attempt appears to have failed. Speaking on the planned repositioning of missile defense systems from Poland, Russian Deputy Defense Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said, "That is not a concession to Russia, nor do we regard it as such. All aspects of strategic uncertainty related to the creation of a US. and NATO missile defense system remain. Therefore, our objections also remain." [4]
While no major power is seeking nuclear war, Russia and China must carefully review and amend their military doctrines in the light of American attempts to deploy an effective shield against inter-continental ballistic missiles. Washington's deployments of conventional forces near the frontiers of China and Russia cause further concerns for the potential loss of a credible nuclear deterrent. China and Russia are being pushed into their strategic embrace by a shared perception of American pressure.
Russia and China serve to compliment each other economically and strategically. In the past, Russia worried about the vast Chinese population in close proximity to Russia's resource-rich Far East. China looked north and saw the threat of advanced military technology and the world's largest nuclear arsenal.
Now these asymmetries are viewed as strategically useful. For the time being, Washington appears intent on simultaneously antagonizing the largest and the most populous nations on the planet. Any attempts to divide Russia and China are doomed to failure, so long as both countries feel pressure from a more powerful rival.
Notes:
1. Xi calls for new-type int'l relations, China Daily, March 24, 2013.
2. China's Xi Jinping urges for stronger investment, high-tech ties with Russia, Russia Today, March 24, 2013.
3. China warning after US missile defense plans, The News, March 18, 2013.
4. Russia unfazed by US missile defense, United Press International.
Brendan P O'Reilly is a China-based writer and educator from Seattle.
in a bit more fantastical vein . . .
BRICS go over the wall
By Pepe Escobar
Reports on the premature death of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) have been greatly exaggerated. Western corporate media is flooded with such nonsense, perpetrated in this particular case by the head of Morgan Stanley Investment Management.
Reality spells otherwise. The BRICS meet in Durban, South Africa, this Tuesday to, among other steps, create their own credit rating agency, sidelining the dictatorship - or at least "biased agendas", in New Delhi's diplomatic take - of the Moody's/Standard & Poor's variety. They will also further advance the idea of the BRICS Development Bank, with a seed capital of US$50 billion (only structural details need to be finalized), helping infrastructure and sustainable development projects.
Crucially, the US and the European Union won't have stakes in this Bank of the South - a concrete alternative, pushed especially by India and Brazil, to the Western-dominated World Bank and the Bretton Woods system.
As former Indian finance minister Jaswant Singh has observed, such a development bank could, for instance, channel Beijing's know-how to help finance India's massive infrastructure needs.
The huge political and economic differences among BRICS members are self-evident. But as they evolve as a group, the point is not whether they should be protecting the global economy from the now non-stop crisis of advanced casino capitalism.
The point is that, beyond measures to facilitate mutual trade, their actions are indeed becoming increasingly political - as the BRICS not only deploy their economic clout but also take concrete steps leading towards a multipolar world. Brazil is particularly active in this regard.
Inevitably, the usual Atlanticist, Washington consensus fanatics - myopically - can see nothing else besides the BRICS "demanding more recognition from Western powers".
Of course there are problems. Brazil, China and India's growth slowed down. As China, for instance, became Brazil's top trading partner - ahead of the US - whole sectors of Brazilian industry have suffered from the competition of cheap Chinese manufacturing.
But some long-term prospects are inevitable. BRICS will eventually become more forceful at the International Monetary Fund. Crucially, BRICS will be trading in their own currencies, including a globally convertible yuan, further away from the US dollar and the petrodollar.
That Chinese slowdown
It was Goldman Sachs' Jim O'Neill who coined the term BRIC (no South Africa then) in 2001. It's enlightening to check what he thinks about it now.
O'Neill points out that China, even growing by a "mere" 7.7% in 2012, "created the equivalent of another Greek economy every 11-and-a-half weeks". China's slowdown was "structural and cyclical" - a "planned downturn" to control overheating and inflation.
The BRICS push is part of an irresistible global trend. Most of it is decoded here, in a new United Nations Development Programme report. The bottom line; the North is being overtaken in the economic race by the global South at a dizzying speed.
According to the report, "for the first time in 150 years, the combined output of the developing world's three leading economies - Brazil, China and India - is about equal to the combined GDP of the long-standing industrial powers of the North".
The obvious conclusion is that, "the rise of the South is radically reshaping the world of the 21st century, with developing nations driving economic growth, lifting hundreds of millions of people from poverty, and propelling billions more into a new global middle class."
And bang in the middle of this process, we find an Eurasian epic; the development of the Russia-China strategic relationship.
It's always about Pipelineistan
Russian President Vladimir Putin is taking no prisoners; he wants to steer the BRICS towards "a full-scale strategic cooperation mechanism that will allow us to look for solutions to key issues of global politics together".
This will imply a common BRICS foreign policy - and not only selective coordination on some themes. It will take time. It will be hard. Putin is very much aware of it.
What makes it even more fascinating is that Putin advanced his ideas during last week's three-day visit to Moscow by new Chinese President Xi Jinping. He went out of his way to stress Russian-Chinese relations now are "the best in their centuries-long history".
That's not exactly what hegemonic Atlanticists want to hear - still eager to frame the relationship in Cold War terms.
Xi retributed in style; "We did not come to see you for nothing" - as is partially detailed here. And wait till China's creative drive starts yielding dividends.
Inevitably, Pipelineistan is at the heart of the ultimate BRICS complementary relationship.
China's need of Russia's oil and gas is a matter of national security. Russia wants to sell more and more of it, diversifying away from the West; moreover, Russia would more than welcome Chinese investment in its Far East - the immense Trans-Baikal region.
And by the way, the "yellow peril" is not taking over Siberia - as the West would have it. There are only 300,000 Chinese living in Russia.
A direct consequence of the Putin-Xi summit is that from now on Beijing will pay in advance for Russian oil - in exchange for a share in a number of projects, for instance as in CNPC and Rosneft jointly exploring offshore blocks in the Barents Sea and other blocks onshore Russia.
Gazprom, for its part, clinched a long awaited gas deal with CNPC; 38 billion cubic meters a year delivered by the ESPO pipeline from Siberia starting in 2018. And by the end of 2013, a new Chinese contract with Gazprom will be finalized, involving gas supply for the next 30 years.
The geopolitical ramifications are immense; importing more gas from Russia helps Beijing to gradually escape its Malacca and Hormuz dilemma - not to mention industrialize the immense, highly populated and heavily dependent on agriculture interior provinces left behind in the economic boom.
That's how Russian gas fits into the Chinese Communist Party's master plan; configuring the internal provinces as a supply base for the increasingly wealthy, urban, based in the east coast, 400 million-strong Chinese middle class.
When Putin stressed that he does not see the BRICS as a "geopolitical competitor" to the West, it was the clincher; the official denial that confirms it's true. Durban may be solidifying just the beginning of such a competition. It goes without saying that Western elites - even mired in stagnation and bankruptcy - won't let any of their privileges go without a fierce fight.
http://www.atimes.com/
By Brendan O'Reilly
Xi Jinping highlighted the essential nature of the Sino-Russian relationship by making Moscow his first foreign destination after his appointment as president. In talks with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, Xi promised to expand economic, military, and strategic cooperation between the two nuclear powers.
The deepening bond between Beijing and Moscow has immense implications for the entire world - especially the United States. Indeed, it appears that Washington may have made a failed attempt at a "divide and rule" stratagem before Xi's Russian trip.
Xi followed in the footsteps of his predecessor, Hu Jintao, by traveling to Moscow soon after his ascent to the highest halls of power in Beijing. Xi delivered a speech at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations that outlined his foreign policy vision and contained a thinly veiled condemnation of recent American doctrine:
We are now living in a rapidly changing world...Peace, development, cooperation and mutual benefit have become the trend of our times. To keep up with the times, we cannot have ourselves physically living in the 21st century, but with a mindset belonging to the past, stalled in the old days of colonialism, and constrained by zero-sum Cold War mentality. [1]
Xi went on to assert that close Sino-Russian relations help to "guarantee balance in the world". Xi's speech echoed official Chinese media, which often condemns the United States' attitude towards China as reminiscent of a "Cold War mentality". Clearly, from the Chinese perspective, solid ties with Russia serve to counterbalance America's unilateralist ambitions. Russian President Vladimir Putin echoed Xi's optimism for the enhanced Sino-Russian bond. Putin stated, "We can already say this is a historic visit with positive results."
During a joint press conference, Xi and Putin jointly expressed concerns about America's ballistic missile defense system. They also pointedly addressed the issue of the "defeated powers" of World War II. This statement was in all probability an implied message of Russian support for China in Beijing's ongoing territorial dispute with Japan. (It must be noted that Russia also contests territory with Tokyo).
China and Russia have been bitter rivals for most of their shared history. During the Tsarist times of expansion into Siberia, Russian and Chinese armies often warred over territory. Even during the Cold War, when both powers were nominally communist, there was a dangerous rivalry between Moscow and Beijing that occasionally devolved into large-scale border skirmishes. Why has the Sino-Russian relationship taken such a friendly turn, especially in the last decade?
Russian Yin, Chinese Yang
On the economic front, the strengths and weaknesses of the two powers compliment each other nicely. Russia is a vast, energy-rich, and increasingly under-populated land with significant scientific expertise. Meanwhile, China's rapidly expanding urban centers are hungry for the natural resources and technical knowledge found in abundance throughout Russia.
Energy politics featured heavily during the Xi-Putin summit. China agreed to lend Russian state-owned energy company Rosneft US$2 billion in exchange for a planned tripling of Russian oil exports to China. Xi Jinping also made a call to expand Sino-Russian trade from the sphere of raw materials into other realms:
It is rational now to stimulate developing relations not only in raw economic, but also in investment, high technologies and finances, to start cooperating not only in trade but also in joint research and manufacturing. [2]
Annual trade between Russia and China currently stands at around $88 billion. Both sides have a clear interest in increasing this figure. While economics is an important factor of the Sino-Russian relations, the primary driver of ties between Moscow and Beijing is strategic. Both powers feel immense pressure from the world's sole "hyperpower". Russia has long viewed expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization deep into Eastern Europe as an aggressive move. China now has very similar concerns about Washington's militarized "pivot" to Asia and support for Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines in their territorial disputes with Beijing. Moscow and Beijing have immense interests in countering Washington's expanding military presence in what is perceived as their strategic backyards.
However, Washington's positioning of conventional military forces near the heartlands of China and Russia is not nearly as perturbing as America's push for full strategic nuclear superiority. Moscow and Beijing jointly view Washington's development and deployment of missile defense systems as an existential threat to their nuclear deterrents.
If the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction no longer held true, then the strategic environment of the globe's major powers could enter a new and dangerous phase - even in the absence of a full-blown Cold War style confrontation.
Why Xi and Putin are MAD
Russia has long condemned US and NATO missile defense plans in Europe as a peril to Russian nuclear deterrence. The United States claimed the system was in response to an Iranian nuclear threat - a threat that the United State's own intelligence services report does not currently exist.
China has even more to fear from American missile defense systems. While Russia maintains an arsenal of well over 1,000 nuclear warheads, China is widely believed to have only several hundred. In the (unlikely) event of full-scale nuclear war, Russia could almost certainly overwhelm any America's missile defense system with sheer numbers. It is not clear whether China could do the same.
Interestingly enough, US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel publicized a change to American missile defense deployments just before Xi's trip to Moscow. Hagel announced a probable repositioning of missile defense systems from Poland to Alaska in order to counter North Korean threats. Secretary Hagel also confirmed plans to enhance missile defense capabilities in Japan. Chinese Foreign Minister Hong Lei quickly denounced these moves: "All measures seeking to increase military capacities will only intensify antagonism and will not help to solve the problem." [3]
While North Korea talks tough, there are serious doubts as to whether its missiles pose a credible threat to the American mainland. On the other hand, American missile defense systems in Alaska and Japan would certainly pose a challenge to China's very real long-range nuclear capabilities.
The timing and very public nature of the US repositioning is significant. It appears that the American redeployment of missile defense systems from Europe to the Pacific may have been, at least in part, an effort at dividing Russian and Chinese strategic opinion on the system.
If that was indeed a motivation behind the American move, the attempt appears to have failed. Speaking on the planned repositioning of missile defense systems from Poland, Russian Deputy Defense Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said, "That is not a concession to Russia, nor do we regard it as such. All aspects of strategic uncertainty related to the creation of a US. and NATO missile defense system remain. Therefore, our objections also remain." [4]
While no major power is seeking nuclear war, Russia and China must carefully review and amend their military doctrines in the light of American attempts to deploy an effective shield against inter-continental ballistic missiles. Washington's deployments of conventional forces near the frontiers of China and Russia cause further concerns for the potential loss of a credible nuclear deterrent. China and Russia are being pushed into their strategic embrace by a shared perception of American pressure.
Russia and China serve to compliment each other economically and strategically. In the past, Russia worried about the vast Chinese population in close proximity to Russia's resource-rich Far East. China looked north and saw the threat of advanced military technology and the world's largest nuclear arsenal.
Now these asymmetries are viewed as strategically useful. For the time being, Washington appears intent on simultaneously antagonizing the largest and the most populous nations on the planet. Any attempts to divide Russia and China are doomed to failure, so long as both countries feel pressure from a more powerful rival.
Notes:
1. Xi calls for new-type int'l relations, China Daily, March 24, 2013.
2. China's Xi Jinping urges for stronger investment, high-tech ties with Russia, Russia Today, March 24, 2013.
3. China warning after US missile defense plans, The News, March 18, 2013.
4. Russia unfazed by US missile defense, United Press International.
Brendan P O'Reilly is a China-based writer and educator from Seattle.
in a bit more fantastical vein . . .
BRICS go over the wall
By Pepe Escobar
Reports on the premature death of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) have been greatly exaggerated. Western corporate media is flooded with such nonsense, perpetrated in this particular case by the head of Morgan Stanley Investment Management.
Reality spells otherwise. The BRICS meet in Durban, South Africa, this Tuesday to, among other steps, create their own credit rating agency, sidelining the dictatorship - or at least "biased agendas", in New Delhi's diplomatic take - of the Moody's/Standard & Poor's variety. They will also further advance the idea of the BRICS Development Bank, with a seed capital of US$50 billion (only structural details need to be finalized), helping infrastructure and sustainable development projects.
Crucially, the US and the European Union won't have stakes in this Bank of the South - a concrete alternative, pushed especially by India and Brazil, to the Western-dominated World Bank and the Bretton Woods system.
As former Indian finance minister Jaswant Singh has observed, such a development bank could, for instance, channel Beijing's know-how to help finance India's massive infrastructure needs.
The huge political and economic differences among BRICS members are self-evident. But as they evolve as a group, the point is not whether they should be protecting the global economy from the now non-stop crisis of advanced casino capitalism.
The point is that, beyond measures to facilitate mutual trade, their actions are indeed becoming increasingly political - as the BRICS not only deploy their economic clout but also take concrete steps leading towards a multipolar world. Brazil is particularly active in this regard.
Inevitably, the usual Atlanticist, Washington consensus fanatics - myopically - can see nothing else besides the BRICS "demanding more recognition from Western powers".
Of course there are problems. Brazil, China and India's growth slowed down. As China, for instance, became Brazil's top trading partner - ahead of the US - whole sectors of Brazilian industry have suffered from the competition of cheap Chinese manufacturing.
But some long-term prospects are inevitable. BRICS will eventually become more forceful at the International Monetary Fund. Crucially, BRICS will be trading in their own currencies, including a globally convertible yuan, further away from the US dollar and the petrodollar.
That Chinese slowdown
It was Goldman Sachs' Jim O'Neill who coined the term BRIC (no South Africa then) in 2001. It's enlightening to check what he thinks about it now.
O'Neill points out that China, even growing by a "mere" 7.7% in 2012, "created the equivalent of another Greek economy every 11-and-a-half weeks". China's slowdown was "structural and cyclical" - a "planned downturn" to control overheating and inflation.
The BRICS push is part of an irresistible global trend. Most of it is decoded here, in a new United Nations Development Programme report. The bottom line; the North is being overtaken in the economic race by the global South at a dizzying speed.
According to the report, "for the first time in 150 years, the combined output of the developing world's three leading economies - Brazil, China and India - is about equal to the combined GDP of the long-standing industrial powers of the North".
The obvious conclusion is that, "the rise of the South is radically reshaping the world of the 21st century, with developing nations driving economic growth, lifting hundreds of millions of people from poverty, and propelling billions more into a new global middle class."
And bang in the middle of this process, we find an Eurasian epic; the development of the Russia-China strategic relationship.
It's always about Pipelineistan
Russian President Vladimir Putin is taking no prisoners; he wants to steer the BRICS towards "a full-scale strategic cooperation mechanism that will allow us to look for solutions to key issues of global politics together".
This will imply a common BRICS foreign policy - and not only selective coordination on some themes. It will take time. It will be hard. Putin is very much aware of it.
What makes it even more fascinating is that Putin advanced his ideas during last week's three-day visit to Moscow by new Chinese President Xi Jinping. He went out of his way to stress Russian-Chinese relations now are "the best in their centuries-long history".
That's not exactly what hegemonic Atlanticists want to hear - still eager to frame the relationship in Cold War terms.
Xi retributed in style; "We did not come to see you for nothing" - as is partially detailed here. And wait till China's creative drive starts yielding dividends.
Inevitably, Pipelineistan is at the heart of the ultimate BRICS complementary relationship.
China's need of Russia's oil and gas is a matter of national security. Russia wants to sell more and more of it, diversifying away from the West; moreover, Russia would more than welcome Chinese investment in its Far East - the immense Trans-Baikal region.
And by the way, the "yellow peril" is not taking over Siberia - as the West would have it. There are only 300,000 Chinese living in Russia.
A direct consequence of the Putin-Xi summit is that from now on Beijing will pay in advance for Russian oil - in exchange for a share in a number of projects, for instance as in CNPC and Rosneft jointly exploring offshore blocks in the Barents Sea and other blocks onshore Russia.
Gazprom, for its part, clinched a long awaited gas deal with CNPC; 38 billion cubic meters a year delivered by the ESPO pipeline from Siberia starting in 2018. And by the end of 2013, a new Chinese contract with Gazprom will be finalized, involving gas supply for the next 30 years.
The geopolitical ramifications are immense; importing more gas from Russia helps Beijing to gradually escape its Malacca and Hormuz dilemma - not to mention industrialize the immense, highly populated and heavily dependent on agriculture interior provinces left behind in the economic boom.
That's how Russian gas fits into the Chinese Communist Party's master plan; configuring the internal provinces as a supply base for the increasingly wealthy, urban, based in the east coast, 400 million-strong Chinese middle class.
When Putin stressed that he does not see the BRICS as a "geopolitical competitor" to the West, it was the clincher; the official denial that confirms it's true. Durban may be solidifying just the beginning of such a competition. It goes without saying that Western elites - even mired in stagnation and bankruptcy - won't let any of their privileges go without a fierce fight.
http://www.atimes.com/
)
Now that I'm getting punchy again (as my mom used to say when I was growing up) "it's time to go back to school."
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