No peacetime network of alliances has been as extensive, enduring, and effective as the one that Washington presided over after World War II. The American alliance system has pacified territories that were once fields of death. It has created a balance of power that favors democracies.
But the existence and achievements of this system may actually make it difficult for Americans to understand the challenge they now face. Across the Eurasian continent, Washington’s enemies are joining forces. China and Russia have established a “borderless” strategic partnership. Iran and Russia are strengthening their military relationship, which US officials see as a “serious threat” to the rest of the world.
Americans may wonder if this relationship of interdependence will one day become an official alliance of America’s enemies—reflecting the institutions that Washington itself presides over. Whatever the answer, it’s the wrong question.
When Americans think of alliances, they usually think of their own alliances—formal, highly institutionalized relationships between countries that are bound by binding security guarantees and genuine friendship and trust. But, as history reminds us, alliances can serve many purposes and take many forms.
Some alliances are nothing more than non-aggression pacts that allow predators to get their prey rather than devour each other. Others are military-technology partnerships in which countries build and share the capabilities they need to disrupt the status quo. Some of the most destructive unions in the world are characterized by poor coordination and even less affection. They are simply crude agreements designed to attack the existing order from all sides.
Alliances can be secret or open, formal or informal. They may be intended to keep the peace or to aid aggression. A union is simply an association of states that seek to achieve common goals. And relationships that seem far less impressive than today’s US alliances have caused geopolitical earthquakes in the past.
This is the key to understanding the relationship between America’s antagonists today. These relationships can be ambiguous and ambivalent. They may lack official protection guarantees. But they do increase the military power that revisionist states can mobilize and reduce the strategic isolation in which these states might otherwise find themselves.
They add to the pressure on the weakened international system by helping their members counter American power on many fronts simultaneously. And if in the future the antagonists of the US increase their cooperation, sharing more advanced defense technologies or engaging more actively in crisis or conflict situations, this could upset the global balance in an even more alarming way.
The most aggressive countries in the world are uniting not for the first time. In the mid-20th century, a number of revisionist forces created sinister combinations to aid their serial attacks on the status quo.
In 1922, the still-democratic Weimar Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Treaty of Rapallo, which promoted cooperation between the two nations that had lost World War I. Between 1936 and 1940, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan made agreements that culminated in the Triple Pact, a loose alliance aimed at establishing a totalitarian “New World Order.” In addition, Berlin and Moscow signed the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, a non-aggression pact that included protocols on trade and the division of Eastern Europe.
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And as the hot war gave way to the cold, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Chinese leader Mao Zedong concluded the Sino-Soviet Alliance, which united the two communist giants in their struggle against the capitalist world.
These are some of the most dysfunctional and failed partnerships in history. In some cases, they are temporary truces between deadly rivals. In neither case was there any semblance of the deep cooperation and strategic sympathy that distinguish American alliances today.
This is not surprising: vicious and ambitious regimes such as Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China are united only by the desire to turn the world upside down. Yet this story is valuable in that it shows how even the most transitory, strained partnerships can disrupt the existing order, creating strong pressures to support aggressive projects.
Analyzing the destruction caused by previous revisionist alliances allows us to understand what is really important in the combinations that are being formed today. These connections are numerous and deepening.
The ever-expanding Sino-Russian partnership brings together two of the largest and most ambitious countries in Eurasia. In Russia’s longstanding relationship with Pyongyang and Tehran, aid and influence already flow both ways. China is moving closer to Iran, complementing its long-standing alliance with North Korea. Over the years, Pyongyang and Tehran have cooperated in missile development and atrocities. This is not a revisionist coalition. It is a more complex web of connections between autocratic powers seeking to reshape their regions and thereby reshape the world.
Photo: AR/BTA
These relationships benefit from proximity. Russia, China and North Korea share land borders with each other. Iran can reach Russia by inland sea. This invulnerability, which cannot be cut, favors Eurasian revisionist ties. Just as the military conflict in Ukraine is pushing them closer together, making Russia more dependent on its autocratic brethren and willing to make deals with them.
These relationships have their limits. Of the Eurasian revisionists, only China and North Korea have a formal defense treaty. Military cooperation is expanding, but none of these partnerships even remotely rival NATO in terms of interoperability or institutionalized cooperation. Nevertheless, revisionist collaboration produces some familiar effects.
Take, for example, the way Sino-Russian cooperation has spurred disruptive military innovation. Although China has been subject to a Western arms embargo since 1989, its record military modernization has been facilitated by purchases of Russian aircraft, missiles and air defense equipment. Today, China and Russia are jointly developing helicopters, conventional attack submarines, missiles and missile attack early warning systems. If one day the US goes to war with China, it will be fighting an adversary whose capabilities have been greatly enhanced by Moscow.
Photo: AP/BTA
At the same time, Russia’s defense technology relations with other Eurasian autocracies are flourishing. Iran sold Russia missiles and drones for use in Ukraine and even helped it build facilities capable of producing the latter on the scale needed for modern warfare. In return, Russia has reportedly promised to supply Iran with advanced air defenses, fighter jets and other technology that could tip the balance in the perennially contentious Middle East. As in the era of the Rapallo Treaty, revisionist states are helping each other build the military power they need to disrupt the status quo.
US analysts still sometimes refer to relations between US adversaries as “alliances of expense”, implying that smart diplomacy can hasten the divorce. This is unlikely to happen anytime soon.
Eurasian autocracies are united by illiberal governance and hostility to US power. Growing international tensions give them more and more grounds for mutual support. Indeed, Russia, which remains isolated from the West, will have no choice but to turn to partnerships with China, Iran and North Korea. The US can periodically slow this process – as it did in 2022-23 by threatening China with heavy sanctions – but it is unlikely to be able to reverse the overall trend.
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More sensitive cooperation could lead to more remarkable military breakthroughs. Russian technology will reportedly be used in China’s next-generation attack submarine, albeit through a process of “simulated innovation” rather than direct transfer. If Russia ever provided China, whose submarines are still noisy and vulnerable, with the latest noise reduction technology, it could erode US advantages in an area where Washington still has a clear edge over Beijing.
More generally, when military cooperation morphs into joint production or technology transfer rather than the sale of finished weapons, it becomes harder to track — and increases the likelihood of a leap in capabilities that surprises outside observers.
Revisionists in Eurasia could create further problems by cooperating more closely in crisis situations. If Russia deploys naval forces in the East China Sea during tensions between the United States and China, or if Moscow and Beijing send ships to the Persian Gulf during a crisis between Iran and the West, they could complicate the theater of operations for American forces, increasing the risk, that fighting with some may cause unwanted escalation with others. Revisionist forces may even aid each other in open warfare.
Eurasian autocracies are certainly not ready to die for each other. But they probably realize that a crushing American victory over one of them would make the others more vulnerable. So they might try to help each other by helping each other – if they can do it without going into direct and open combat.
It is an intellectual and analytical challenge. The US may have to revise its estimates of how long it will take its adversaries to achieve key military objectives, given the help it is getting – or could get – from its friends.
Photo: US Navy via AP/BTA
Washington must also reconsider assumptions that it will confront its adversaries one-on-one in a crisis or conflict, and consider the assistance—covert or overt, kinetic or non-kinetic, enthusiastic or hostile—that other revisionist powers may provide in an escalation. of the tension. Above all, the US must deal with the risk that relations between adversaries will contribute to a certain globalization of the conflict.
Finally, U.S. officials should consider how the partnerships of these rivals may evolve in unexpected or non-linear ways. Recent history is instructive. Although the strategic relationship between China and Russia has been building for decades, this relationship – not to mention Moscow’s ties to Pyongyang and Tehran – has grown significantly during the conflict in Ukraine. How might a future crisis over Taiwan play out? Or how a more serious breakdown of order in a particular region might lead revisionist forces to intensify their campaigns in others?
2024-03-31 11:24:13
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