DOSHI: Well, good morning, everybody. Thanks very much for braving the streets of Washington, D.C., after two days of snow to make it this morning. I’m Rush Doshi, C.V. Starr senior fellow for Asia studies and director of CFR’s China Strategy Initiative here at the Council. And we’re excited to welcome you today for I think what’ll be a fantastic symposium on “The China-Russia Relationship and Its Global Implications.”
I want to start by saying that today’s two-part symposium is actually also the inaugural event of the China 360 Program, which is one of the four programs under the China Strategy Initiative that we launched just last year. The guiding questions for China 360 are what is China doing around the world and how are countries around the world responding to China’s growing global profile. And of course, one of the most important questions when you think about China’s global ambitions, its portfolio, its behavior, is its relationship with Russia, which is why that’ll be our critical focus today.
We’ve convened to discuss an important really signature special report, Council special report, by Ambassador Bob Blackwill and Richard Fontaine.
As you all know, Ambassador Blackwill is the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow here at the Council after a distinguished career across four administrations serving on the NSC, in the State Department, and as ambassador to India.
Richard Fontaine is the CEO of the Center for a New American Security. He was a longtime foreign policy advisor to John McCain, and he worked on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and at the NSC as well.
After having published their co-authored book Lost Decade last year, these two renowned strategists decided to team up again for another collaboration, this time on China-Russia. And this report is pretty significant. It’s hefty. It has 226 footnotes, and that length of footnotes is sort of a signature, I think, of any collaboration involving Ambassador Blackwill. So definitely do look at the footnotes because a lot of time went into them. A lot of RAs spent time making them just right.
Anyway, this conversation is going to begin in just a minute. It’s going to be moderated by one of our members, one of my friends, Bay Fang, the president of Radio Free Asia. Bay’s spent more than two decades in journalism, including in posts in Iraq and Afghanistan; as bureau chief in China; and was also a deputy assistant secretary at the State Department. I think it’ll be a fantastic conversation.
After that conversation, please do stay around. We have coffee. But more importantly—or, as importantly—we have a panel with CFR fellows Elliott Abrams, Liana Fix, Michelle Gavin, and our director of studies Shannon O’Neil. Together, we’re going to discuss the China-Russia relationship and its global profile: How are countries and regions around the world looking at this relationship? What are these countries—that is, China and Russia—doing in all of these regions?
So, with that, we have an excellent discussion ahead. Thank you all for joining us. I would like to welcome now Bay Fang and Richard Fontaine to the stage. Ambassador Blackwill will be on the screen. Thank you. (Applause.)
FANG: All right. Thank you all for joining us today. This will be a really interesting conversation. I have the pleasure of moderating this opening keynote session, entitled “No Limits? The China-Russia Relationship and U.S. Foreign Policy,” with my good friend Richard Fontaine here in the room and Ambassador Bob Blackwill on our screen.
So I’m just going to dive right in. We’ll have half an hour of conversation, and then you guys will be able to ask questions.
So I wanted to start, actually, with Ambassador Blackwill, if you could just lay out for us how you guys decided to write this report.
BLACKWILL: Thank you, Bay. And good to see all of you, if only remotely.
Richard and I, in the summer of 2003, were hard at work on our book on the pivot and realized that an important subject which we would not have time to address in the book was the one which is the subject of our discussion today. So we launched and co-chaired a CFR study on the subject. We had eight meetings from October 2003 (sic; 2023) to May 2004 (sic; 2024). And as soon as the book was published in June, we went to work on the writing of this report—although we and our terrific research associates at CNAS and CFR had been working on research.
You will see when you have a chance to look at it that it is data-rich, as Rush said. Mike Bloomberg’s philanthropic arm has a mantra for applications for assistance which is “In God we trust; everybody else bring data.” And there’s lots of data in here on the collaboration. We try not to discuss what China and Russia are doing unilaterally with respect to the United States and world order, but what they’re doing together. And we did try to vacuum what is available in the public domain on this subject.
But to conclude, we want to stress that although we hope you’ll find the report impressive and disturbing, it is only a shadow of all these two countries do together daily to undermine U.S. national interest. They can keep secrets. There exists no public record of most of their bilateral meetings, and only scant knowledge of their joint activities and mutual support which they discuss, plan, and carry out. In short, what the report illuminates is a faint rendering of the full scope of what these two adversaries jointly undertake to undermine the foreign policies and national interests of the United States.
FANG: Thank you.
So, Richard, we had an interesting conversation in the—in the green room just about how you actually came up with the—you know, the sort of key idea of this report, which is that this is the—this alliance is the greatest threat to U.S. national interests in sixty years. How did you come up with the sixty years? And then, what is the strategic aim of the alliance? So if they are, as you guys say, the joint architects of a—of a revisionist international order, what does this order look like?
FONTAINE: Yeah. So I think one could always offer various instances from history about what has been most dangerous. Certainly the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was about sixty years ago, was a particularly dangerous time. And this one, too, is a particularly dangerous time, so hence the sixty years since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
But if one looks at what the challenge is presented by China and Russia working together more closely, sort of the highest level of abstraction—we have a little quote in our report from Bismarck, who, you know, famously said in a world of five great powers you should try to be one of three, not two. And in a world of three great powers we’re one of one, not two, right? So what multiple administrations, certainly starting with the Nixon administration forward, tried to do is ensure that the Soviet Union—and then Russia—and China were both more distant from each other than either was from the United States. Now they are both closer to each other by far than either is with the United States.
So that’s kind of a major strategic challenge, but has very operational and concrete manifestations. I mean, Russia is more dangerous to U.S. interests and some of the things that we’re trying to accomplish in the world because of its closeness to China. Russia would not be able to conduct the war in Ukraine the way it is without Chinese material support for that war.
The same is true of China. So China’s military is highly dependent on the transfer of Russian arms and technology, and therefore makes the problem of deterrence from a U.S. standpoint in East Asia more difficult than it would be in the absence of that relationship with Russia. You can look at this on the economic side, on the technology transfer side, on the diplomatic coordination side, and so forth.
And then, you know, the fact that these two are working together and are really glued together by a shared opposition to what they believe is an anachronistic, unfairly Western- and U.S.-dominated international order that does not accord for them the space, and the status, and the influence that they believe they deserve by virtue of their history, and their civilization, and their interests, and their geography, and their weight, and their power means that there are now alternatives they’re trying to put on offer not just for Russia and China itself, but of course also for Iran and North Korea and other rejectionist powers that would not—would be much more isolated in a world where Russia and China were not working together as closely and trying to articulate alternatives to the current international order.
FANG: So, Ambassador Blackwill, Richard spoke a little bit about how China’s support of Russia has affected the Ukraine war. I was wondering if you could look ahead a little bit and if you can talk about how the military cooperation between the two might look in a conflict over, say, Taiwan.
BLACKWILL: Well, let me first say—and I will do this in a general way; it’s discussed in great detail in the report, as Richard said—China’s assistance—its diplomatic assistance to Russia, its military assistance to Russia, and its economic assistance to Russia is indispensable to the conduct of the war on Russia’s part. And we could go into the details if you all wish.
But with respect to Taiwan, one of the things, of course, that we don’t know in fact but we can speculate is that China is learning the lessons of Russia’s combat against Ukraine in Ukraine more than simply, as we do, reading the morning papers. And one would guess that China is intensively briefed by the Russians of the conclusions they draw. Of course, China will have its own view of that. But the battlefield experience that the Russian armed forces have had, especially from the Syrian civil war onward, is indispensable to an army—a military force which has not fought in decades. So lessons learned must be an important dimension of China’s interaction with Russia as the war progresses.
Just one other point about Russia and China and the war. It’s striking to us that despite the fact that China has paid a price in Europe, obviously, for the war and China’s support of Russia—despite that, Beijing’s support of Russia and the war is increasing, not decreasing, despite Europe’s penalties which it’s now exacting on European-China relations.
FANG: So you think that their influence will be in sort of the lessons learned as well as, you know, sort of support militarily? Is that—is that in the—in the game?
BLACKWILL: Well, this is a broader question and a good one, which is: If the United States and China go to war over the Taiwan Straits, for example—and that’s, obviously, the most likely contingency—it seems unlikely that Russia and Iran and North Korea will sit on the sidelines and say, well, let’s see how this turns out; we’re not involved. That doesn’t mean that they will send forces to the Taiwan Straits, but there are many things in the regions that—where they’re located, beginning with Europe, that can distract or complicate the U.S. military performance if there is such a war.
FANG: So, Richard, you actually coined the term “Axis of Upheaval,” I think, in a Foreign Affairs article earlier this year. What—oh, sorry. You know—you know, you were talking about how China and Russia are also increasingly working with Iran and North Korea, and I’m wondering if you can just tell us more about this cooperation.
FONTAINE: Sure. So my colleague at CNAS Andrea Kendall-Taylor and I wrote a long piece for Foreign Affairs that tried to look in some granular detail at this emerging set of relationships among Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. I mean, even since we wrote that article, and certainly since we started writing that article, we’ve seen this increase in pretty dramatic ways. I mean, I think if a year ago most people had said, well, you know, in 2024 you will have thousands of North Koreans fighting in Europe on Russia’s behalf against Ukraine, people would have thought, huh, well, that’s an unusual prediction. But here we are.
So you see this Axis of Upheaval, which we call it that because they really are seeking an upheaval of, again, this existing international order. There’s plenty of things that divide them. They have very different perspectives. They have the definition of interest that’s quite different. But they are united by this shared opposition to what they believe is this unfair Western-dominated international order, which has very concrete manifestations with respect to the long arm of the U.S. military; the alliance system around the world; the rejection of spheres of influence in places where they believe they deserve them; the imposition of sanctions; the insistence on, you know, sort of a uniform definition of democracy, which they reject; and all of these other kinds of things.
And so you see Russia’s war in Ukraine, for example—which has been the primary catalyst of this and accelerated some trends that were happening before that—you see not only North Korean ammunition and weapons and troops party to that war, but also Chinese components and diplomatic protection and support; and you see Iranian drones and missiles. And of course, the other countries that are not Russia don’t work on spec, and so they get, you know, things in return for this. And so, you know, we only know some of what they’re getting for return, but we—in return, but we know that that’s, you know, cut-rate energy supplies; it’s on North Korea’s side, for example, North Korea’s having its assets in Russian banks that were frozen under U.N. Security Council resolution direction being unfrozen, sort of a diplomatic lifeline being thrown to the North Koreans where previously China had the prerogative there. And so you see each of these countries becoming potentially more dangerous than they would be on their own because of the support they can rely on from the other members.
And then, again, in this broader sense you see a place for other sort of rejectionist countries to defect to. So if you don’t like the way the world is ordered now, for many years you could sort of shake your fist at the world or, you know, become something of a rogue state, but there wasn’t this sort of viable alternative to it. And now these four countries plus others are trying to construct what they believe to be a viable alternative to it, and that’s one to which other dissatisfied countries could add weight.
FANG: Yeah. That’s really interesting.
Ambassador Blackwill, can you speak more about the alliance on the economic front and what the implications are for U.S. policy interests there?
BLACKWILL: Well, the economic assistance that China is giving Russia has had a major part in Russia being able to manage—of course, with difficulties—the many Western sanctions that have been applied from the beginning of the war. And just to give you an example, in the first year of the war China provided Russia with about 40 percent of its total imports. In a—in a year and a half, that doubled. Many of the consumer goods that Russia would not get otherwise—for example, automobiles, telephones, and so forth—are now being supplied by China. By the end of 2023, China had become the largest importer of Russian crude oil—at, of course, discounted prices—at 2.3 million barrels per day, up from 1.6 million barrels just two years earlier. And so this is, of course, in this context we’re now discussing it, of great assistance to Russia, but the discounted oil, of course, is also of considerable benefit to China as it struggles with its current economic difficulties.
FANG: Can we talk about your—you guys’ policy prescriptions? Richard, if you could start us off, what should the U.S. and its allies do to counter this axis?
FONTAINE: Well, being completists we have no less than fourteen policy prescriptions for those who wish to see chapter and verse in here. But I won’t go through all fourteen; I’ll just hit a couple of them.
I mean, one, I think from a defense perspective we need to rise to the challenge we now face and increase defense spending in a significant way. We’re now at about 3 percent of GDP of defense spending, which is more or less where we were toward the end of the 1990s at the height of the, you know, peace dividend after the end of the Cold War. Well, the world has changed in a pretty major way, and so we need to make investments in defense that will be commensurate with the challenge that we face.
You know, another one is creating new relationships with countries that are these kind of global swing states that are in the middle here—so Brazil, India, Indonesia, Turkey, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, these countries that are neither sort of G-7 kind of Western Europe- and U.S.- and Canada-aligned nor in this, you know—this axis, this group that—of Upheaval, or China/Russia-aligned, but are multi-aligned and have different relationships. And so focusing on ways to engage more effectively with those countries in a fashion that will ultimately add on particular issues their weight to the preferences that we have rather than the other I think is important.
You know, it’s probably tilting at a windmill to say that we should have a trade policy—well, I guess we’ll have a trade policy, but sort of an affirmative, assertive trade policy, one that actually is looking for opportunities particularly with countries that see economic benefits on offer from—especially from China. You know, if we wish countries to not be as aligned as closely with Russia or China, then we have to offer something ourselves we actually have, and it’s the world’s biggest market and the world’s biggest source of investment, lots of things we can offer. So if we, you know, build on that—and that’s a set of possibilities that I think we would be wise to exploit.
And then, you know, the other is to sort of take on the challenge that is arising at home with the seriousness that, it seems to me, it deserves. So if we’re half right about the consequences down the road here of increasing China-Russia cooperation, its sort of potentially global impacts, its impacts on U.S. interests and values around the world, and the availability to either side of, you know, other countries sort of joining in these configurations, then, frankly, we should be focused on what it is we need to do with our allies and ourselves in different scenarios in order to reduce that influence in areas that matter most, which would suggest at a minimum a certain level of increased seriousness to our foreign policy discussions.
FANG: Ambassador Blackwill, do you have anything to add to the policy prescriptions?
BLACKWILL: I do. Just to reinforce what Richard said about defense spending, it’s striking that there seems to be a near-consensus—that’s a, of course, singularity these days—in Washington about the threat that China and Russia pose for the United States but that’s not translated into increased defense spending, which is absolutely necessary. So our rhetoric is fine, but the past administrations and the ones before that don’t translate that into defense budget proposals to the Congress consistent with the rhetoric and the Congress does not take the lead in trying to insist that the defense budget be substantially increased. That’s the first point I would make.
Second is we urge, despite the concern that’s reflected in the report, to intensify bilateral interaction with both Moscow and with Beijing. We think it was a mistake to cut off all interaction with Vladimir Putin for the last two-and-a-half years, and think it should be initiated as soon as possible after the inauguration.
The last point I’d make is that we address in the subject—in the report a subject that’s oft-discussed in Washington, which is whether there is an opportunity for trilateral Kissingerian diplomacy which would separate the two over time. And we call this a delusion, and explain why we think that’s the case.
FONTAINE: If I can add just maybe one thing at the risk of now maybe hitting all fourteen, as I just said—(laughter)—we wouldn’t do, but there’s also an important set of discussions to be had with our European allies on a priority basis. I mean, if, God forbid, the United States were to find itself at war with China in the Western Pacific, one, the geographical boundaries of that conflict are certainly unclear, but the resource intensity from the American side is much clearer. And this would be kind of an all-in sort of thing. It would—it would put a very significant demand on the entire global footprint of America’s military forces. That, in turn, opens the possibility of opportunistic aggression in Europe.
And so the kind of conversations we need to be having with our European allies is, if we imagine that kind of nightmare scenario, what are the kind of capabilities that Europe should be investing in now so as to deter war in that circumstance so that, you know, the nightmare scenario doesn’t become a double nightmare scenario? So that’s one.
And then just lastly, to pick up just for a second on Bob’s point about wedge-driving, you know, there’s—we’ll sometimes, you know, see think pieces or ideas, you know, we can sort of, you know, cut this deal and we’ll flip China, and together we’ll take on Russia; or we’ll flip—not many people talk any more about, you know, a reverse Kissinger, flipping Russia and taking on China, but you still hear about these things. Or more modest things, right? Well, Russia and China have this sort of competitive spirit in Central Asia, where they both have historic, you know, claims to influence, and maybe we can sort of dial that up somehow; or, you know, North Korea is potential wedge now that it’s friendly with both China and Russia. And I think we’re pretty pessimistic about even at a more tactical level the ability of the United States to try to heighten these tensions between the two in a way that would drive wedges sufficient to actually improve the balance here and improve the situation.
FANG: Can I just take my moderator’s prerogative, with my Radio Free Asia hat on, to add a fifteenth policy prescription—(laughs)—which is, you know, there is also so much insidious cooperation and mutual reinforcement on the disinformation front between China and Russia. And I think it is really important for us to push back on that and to put some resource towards it, so.
FONTAINE: That’s actually one of the fourteen, so you’ll be very happy to—
FANG: Oh, it is? OK. (Laughs.) I did read the whole thing. (Laughs.)
FONTANE: Obviously, we had a whole thing on public—but again, completists. But yes, you’re absolutely right, so.
FANG: OK. (Laughs.) Thank you very much.
So at this time I’d like to invite CFR members to join our conversation with questions. A reminder that this meeting is on the record. Please, go ahead, and please identify yourself first.
Q: Thank you very much. Guillermo Christensen. I’m a partner at K&L Gates, a law firm, and former CIA. Was a fellow here at the Council.
So a quick observation to your first question and the way—and the information that we got. I’d be more skeptical about the lessons the Chinese are learning from the Russians because in my experience the Russians don’t learn lessons very well internally—their paranoia, their secrecy. And it would be interesting to know just how much they’re sharing with the Chinese, especially given the lack of battlefield success they’ve had in many areas.
Conversely, on the U.S. side and the Europeans, this is a startup war, and it’s incredible to see how many small U.S. businesses are deeply engrained in the Ukrainian defense sector right now teaching and learning. So it’s an interesting topic and perhaps something you can look at.
My question is directed to Ambassador Blackwill. The one country we didn’t touch on yet that I’d be very curious about is the perspective from New Delhi. So this presents—this relationship between China and Russia and the conflict with the United States presents India with some very interesting challenges and opportunities which they’ve spent the last seventy years trying to navigate in a non-aligned perspective. But right now it’s both more interesting and more challenging. I’d be curious about where you see New Delhi and what it’s trying to do vis-à-vis China-Russia, and then balancing with the U.S. Thank you.
BLACKWILL: A good question and one that is worthy of a prolonged discussion, but let me just be epigrammatic here. Of course now India tries to profit from its—in material terms, too—from its relationship with both Washington and with Moscow, and that isn’t going to change. Just to remind the Soviet Union was India’s closest partner and supporter throughout the Cold War, and unlike Americans, Indians have very long memories. Moreover, they’re highly dependent on the Russians for spare parts for their military.
With respect to China, I have perhaps a somewhat heretical view of this. I think that there’s some evidence that India, which came in a decade ago full-bore in the U.S.-India relationship—more than a decade ago—I think is now beginning to ask itself, did we make a good bet on the Americans, for reasons having to do with our faltering foreign policy in the last ten to fifteen years and all the mistakes we’ve made. But also because they ask especially in the military balance—and China of course has had an enormous impact on that in East Asia, to America’s disadvantage—will the Americans in fact do the necessary to balance Chinese power? And I think that’s the overall strategic context of the recent quasi-agreement on borders, which is more ephemeral than perhaps it’s sometimes portrayed, but is a step forward in the bilateral relationships.
So I think they’re watching very closely what this new administration will do with respect to ensuring that the U.S. is up to the long-term China challenge, and they’re not sure.
Q: My question is to Ambassador Blackwill. You’ve emphasized the importance of data—and there is a lot of data in the report—but sometimes it’s not really scaled very well to put it in context, and the economic relationship is part of this global transformation that the report addresses. But if you look at bilateral trade between China and Russia, it’s still only half of the trade between China and the United States, and it’s only 1 percent of global trade. So I don’t see this trade relationship becoming a very important part of this global transformation that you address.
BLACKWILL: Well, I don’t quarrel with your figures, but I think more pertinent figures are what is the economic assistance that China is giving Russia? It may be tiny in terms of global trade, but it’s indispensable to Russia dealing with the sanctions that have been brought against them. At least that’s what we argue in the report.
Q: Mark Kennedy, Wilson Center.
You had mentioned that the axis of autocracies may want to gather more disaffected people to increase their weight. What role do we see BRICS playing in this? Is BRICS being set up as a counterfoil to the G-7?
FONTAINE: Yes, it is, by the sort of most ardent proponents of BRICS, although when you talk to officials from governments who have recently joined BRICS, they’ll say, well, that’s not really what this is; this is more opportunities for trade or to diversify our international relationships, and things like that.
But if you look at certainly China and Russia’s and Iran’s interest in these things, to have a visible quasi-viable alternative structure and set of preferences and priorities to point to is important now in this kind of battle of narratives, and so they’re making a lot about BRICS diplomacy and to show, for example, that, you know, you thought Russia was isolated? Well, Russia’s not as isolated as you would have thought. You would have thought that the G-7 sort of tells the world what things are going to look like; well, that’s a minority of the world’s population, and look at our combined economic weight, and things like that.
So, you know, the specifics and the concrete aspects of that are still not quite there. I mean, what is the positive agenda of the BRICS? I mean, you can find some things—BRICS Development Bank and, you know, they don’t like, you know, dollar domination of the financial—global financial infrastructure and things like that. So, you know, some of these things are pretty nascent, but as a directional move, certainly it’s being seen by China and Russia in particular as one—and probably at this point the most visible alternative to this kind of G-7, Western-led, rules-based order that we talk so much about.
BLACKWILL: Could I chime in on that, just to support what Richard said? There was last year, as you know, a BRICS summit. Thirty-four countries attended it, twenty heads of state, and if you look at the communique on the war in Ukraine, it could have been written in Moscow, and probably was written in collaboration between the Russians and the Chinese. With respect to the war, it was consistent with China’s twelve-point peace—quote/quote, “peace proposal,” and if you read it, you would have thought that, like Venus on the half-shell, the war suddenly sprung up and nobody knows why or how. And this was signed on by these thirty-four countries. So we know what the intent of Russia and China are with respect to BRICS, as Richard said, and they’re working very hard on it, and there are five or six more applicants to join it, with the result that I just described, going forward.
FANG: Yeah.
Q: Thank you. Good morning. Paul Saunders with the Center for the National Interest. I look forward very much to reading the report.
I’m very much with you on the idea that it’s delusional to try to split China and Russia, now or certainly any time in the near future. At the same time, it seems to me that that relationship is going to evolve over time. And as a non-economist, I guess I see Russia with sort of a limited stock of technology that it can provide to China. I see China in a position moving forward to generate a lot more new technology than Russia will be able to generate. And I see China kind of taking over Russia’s economy in many respects, and creating a deepening dependence. I wonder how you view that, and just more broadly how you view that relationship evolving.
BLACKWILL: Yeah. I think that—well, if you look at the percentage of trade, for example, that Russia conducts pre-war—with China and with the rest of the world pre-war or pre-invasion of Ukraine and after—dramatic difference, right, and things like that.
And you know, on the technology side, there are areas in which Russia is probably still ahead of China and has some technology China is interested in, especially on the military side—you know, air defense systems, submarine quieting technology, jet engines—you know, some things like that, although, you know, in some of these areas, China is very likely closing the gap between itself and Russia.
But even if you imagine all of the technology that China might want gets transferred to China, you know, if the question then is sort of what is the value proposition for China of being in this relationship with Russia, there are things that go beyond just adding up the numbers of the economic relationship or who is dominated by who. So for example, China has a strong interest in having its flow of hydrocarbons come over land through Russia as opposed to by sea from the Middle East where they’re potentially vulnerable to the U.S. Navy if they ever got in a conflict. So you can look at the absolute numbers, but that’s a qualitative difference that is in the interest of both countries, Russia to sell and China to buy.
You can look at—on the diplomacy side, I mean, Russia obviously has a veto in the U.N.—seat at the U.N. Security Council, and also is sort of frontally—I think the message from Russia—from Russian leaders to Chinese leaders with respect to things like the war in Ukraine is, you know, if we lose in Ukraine, there’s going to be—the West is going to try to foment a color revolution in Moscow, and guess who’s going to be next? So Russia’s got a little bit of a frontal role, and that itself is in China’s interest.
Now, again, there’s ways that—where they divide, certainly in, like, their risk tolerance and, you know, dissatisfaction with the way things are. But I think the economic relationship is—it will evolve, but I don’t know that that’s going to significantly change the glue that has these countries being drawn together.
I mean, I guess just one last point on this: one often hears—although less so these days—that, you know, Putin—you know, this is sort of inevitably going to fall apart because Putin can never psychologically accept the face that Russia will be a junior partner with China. I just don’t think there’s—one, what alternative does Putin and Russia have? And two, in some ways it’s not clear that that’s how the Russian leaders or even the Chinese leaders necessarily see this, that they’re sort of—I mean, certainly by economic weight, by population and all these other things, China is the bigger and more powerful country and Russia is dependent on China in a way that China is not dependent on Russia. But again, given the sort of frontal role—who is sort of standing up for this alternative vision and pushing back most vigorously against the West—it’s Russia, not China. And so in that respect it’s not clear to me that they see themselves as just sort of, well, we’re junior partners, and at some point Russian greatness won’t allow us to, you know, sustain that posture.
FANG: Thanks. We have a question coming in from a member online.
OPERATOR: We’ll take the next question from Robert Hormats.
Q: I’d like to follow up Richard’s point on the trade issue, because one of the most important elements in trying to contain this grouping—particularly China—and to get other countries who you mentioned might be more attracted to China because of trade relations—the United States needs to have a coherent trade policy with countries other than the G-7, OECD countries, which means a number of the emerging markets, the Global South.
The problem is that in this administration, which you would have thought might have been inclined in that direction, it has been the opposite, and they, like the previous administration, opted out of TPP. And there has really—as the Chinese and others have developed closer trade ties, not just through Belt and Road but through various other trade groupings, they have also used those for strategic collaboration as well. The problem in the United States is, A, we haven’t done that in the last eight years, and B, the general political environment in this country simply doesn’t understand—is very negative on any trade deals at all, it appears, but has never really been educated to the point that you’ve made, that if you want to have a long system of alliances and give other countries alternatives to dealing with China or other countries, you need to have some glue holding them together with the United States and others, and that is largely in the area of trade.
So my question really is not just saying that we need more and closer trade ties, but trying to make an educational case to the American people that these are not just of economic importance but are of strategic importance, and that lesson seems to be totally lost in Washington, and there seems to be virtually no one of any stature in Washington who makes that geo-economic, geo-strategic link and argues that trade is going to be important if you want to have a coherent strategy to contain what we’re seeing between China, Russia, and other countries.
FONTAINE: Yeah, I really agree with what you’re saying with one potential caveat, which is, I think sometimes those of us who see the strategic link with trade agreements overdo the strategic part and that ends up leading more casual observers to believe that the U.S. needs to take an economic hit in order to contain China or something like that. I mean, in 2016, most of the arguments—back when it looked like TPP might have a shot of getting through the Congress—made for TPP were not made on economic grounds; they were made on grounds that, you know, if we don’t set the rules, China will set the rules. You know, if we don’t solidify trade relations with these countries then China is going to be in the ascendance somehow. And you know, in retrospect I wonder if that left in some minds, including on Capitol Hill, the notion that we would actually be left behind economically when in fact the opposite was the case; it would have been a net economic benefit to the United States as well as a strategic benefit.
That said, you know, despite the fact that some of us would love to see TPP go through, I think we do have to live in the world of political reality, and that’s not going to happen anytime soon or maybe anytime at all. But that doesn’t mean you can do nothing on an affirmative trade agenda. I mean, we could have a digital trade agreement with multiple countries in East Asia tomorrow if we wanted to do so. There are other sectoral agreements that we could strike with countries around the world that neither—are neither China nor Russia in areas like critical minerals or potentially clean technology and other things like that, that probably would not really ruffle too many feathers politically. I mean, we’re not talking about ag and autos and some of these other kinds of things.
So to do something would be nice. And yet, we’ll see what happens with tariffs and everything else on day one of the new administration.
FANG: Thank you so much, Richard and Ambassador Blackwill. Thank you all for joining this meeting, and I hope you can all stay and join us for our plenary discussion at 10:30 on “Global Perspectives of the China-Russia Relationship.”
FONTAINE: Thank you.
FANG: Thank you. (Applause.)
(END)
This is an uncorrected transcript.