NEW YORK: With the crew back home and talks under way over the return of its damaged aircraft, it appears that the United States has successfully diffused the dispute caused by the collision of one of its spy planes with a Chinese jet fighter.
The 11-day standoff between the two nations, however, should serve as a reminder that the United States continues to face challenges from both past and potential superpower rivals. But unlike this most recent incident, both Beijing and Moscow are more likely to confront the United States through their continued support of surrogates, or "rogue states."
On the surface, it would appear that relations with China and Russia under President Bush are much frostier than they were during the Clinton administration. With China, in addition to the spy-plane incident, there is the continued detention of American-based scholar Gao Zhan for reasons yet to be fully explained. Meanwhile, Moscow and Washington have engaged in tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions over allegations of spying.
But in truth, the chill has been growing for some time beneath the diplomatic surface. The decision by China and Russia to arm such unsavory regimes as North Korea, Iraq and Iran has helped maintain a high level of mistrust in Washington.
China transfers missile technology and assistance to Iran, Libya and Pakistan. Russia traffics in conventional arms to Iran. Both China and Russia assist in North Korea's missile development. And North Korea, in turn, sells missile components and launchers to Iran, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan and Syria.
The decision by Russia's President Vladimir Putin to resume conventional arms sales to Iran after a five-year hiatus was particularly significant, in that it reverses the policy of his predecessor. Moscow is also assisting Iran in the construction of a nuclear plant, which both countries claim will be used only for peaceful power generation.
Like the proverbial iceberg, these Russo-Iranian agreements portend a much more formidable structure just below the diplomatic waterline. It underscores an alarming trend in international affairs of alliances of convenience between unsavory regimes and some of the major states that the United States had hoped to engage as partners.
When the Soviet Union collapsed nearly a decade ago, it cast adrift its client states such as Cuba, Iraq and North Korea. Now Moscow and, more dramatically, Beijing are resurrecting linkages to rogue states that had been without patrons. North Korea, Iraq, Iran and others stood alone in the immediate post-Cold War world. Defiant, unpredictable, and seemingly irrational, these regimes brutalize their own citizens, violate agreements, threaten neighbors, and build weapons of mass destruction and missile systems. This political behavior has been well documented over the past decade. What has been less known is the growing loose affiliation between Beijing and Moscow and these regimes.
Whereas Moscow's game plan during the Cold War sought to spawn communist states in Afghanistan, Angola, Cuba, Nicaragua, Vietnam and elsewhere, today the Chinese and Russians play the traditional role of great powers, looking for commercial and strategic advantage. These two major powers strive to play rogues like bargaining chips against the United States and its allies. Rather than coming into direct confrontation with Washington over such issues as sending arms to Taiwan, stationing forces in the Persian Gulf, or expanding NATO eastward, Beijing and Moscow prefer to use indirect means to thwart American influence.
Particularly unsettling from Washington's perspective is that China has surpassed Russia in its pursuit of linkages with pariah states, although under Putin, Russia is putting more emphasis on reestablishing former relationships
The recent cluster of Cold-War era-like confrontations, while capturing the headlines, are more the exception than the rule of how Moscow and Beijing intend to make life difficult for Washington in the 21st century.
For relations among all three of these nations to be placed on a more solid footing, Russia and China need to show they are more interested in pursuing constructive economic and political relations with the United States than they are in continuing to consort with the pariahs of the world.
Thomas Henriksen is a senior fellow and associate director
at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Christopher
Walker is a New York-based writer specializing in international
security affairs.