Russian President Vladimir Putin sees “strategic interaction” with China as a centerpiece of his foreign policy, one of his advisers said Monday.
“Strategic interaction with China is one of the top priorities of our foreign policy,” Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov said, according to TASS, a state-run media outlet.
Putin will spend this weekend in Beijing for a diplomatic summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The two leaders will sign agreements formalizing “cooperation in the sphere of trade, energy, outer space, intellectual property protection, and some other areas,” Ushakov said. The announcement is the latest example of an explicit alignment between Russia and China, as opposed to the U.S.-led alliance in the Eastern Hemisphere.
“The relations have reached quite a high level and to some degree serve as an example of how two major states can and should build an interstate dialogue,” Ushakov said.
But there are limits to how much the two states can cooperate, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Saturday. “I think there’s a natural nonconvergence of interest,” Mattis said of their partnership.
Mattis is playing a lead role in adjusting U.S. policy toward an increasingly powerful China. Last week, he changed the name of the largest combatant command in the military from the U.S. Pacific Command to the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command — a symbolic change that speaks to how American leaders view the need to strengthen alliances and military operations throughout the Pacific Rim.
“Relationships with our Pacific and Indian ocean allies and partners have proven critical to maintaining regional stability,” Mattis said. “We stand by our partners and support their sovereign decisions, because all nations large and small are essential to the region if we’re to sustain stability in ocean areas critical to global peace.”
That shift is tailored to China’s emerging aggression, particularly in the South China Sea. But Russian leaders have emphasized they will align with China on such controversies.
“The idea of the Indo-Pacific region … is designed to divide the regional countries into friends and foes, the good and the bad, or democratic and not-very-democratic countries,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Morgulov said last week. “Both Russia and China hold a diametrically opposite view. They are against creating blocs and believe that an effective and system-wide response to security challenges in Asia Pacific must include a comprehensive military and political detente and uniform rules of the game.”
China is also focused on strengthening its position in the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean.
“The so-called ‘string of pearls’ refers to a network of Chinese naval bases and civilian ports and shipping centers from the South China Sea to Bangladesh and the port of Gwadar in Pakistan, which some interpret as strategic encirclement of India,” Michael Lind wrote for the National Interest in a recent analysis of “the coming of Cold War II.”
Mattis emphasized that the United States will not be driven from the region. “This is our priority theater, our interests, and the regions are inextricably intertwined,” he said at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore. “We’ve replaced, for example, third-generation fighters with fifth-generation fighters, we’ve added our most capable ships to the commander of Indo-Pacific Command’s fleet during the last year or two, and we will continue to address this theater as a priority and properly defined as now the Indo-Pacific Command.”
