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Westernizing Russia and China

Michael Mandelbaum
May/June 1997
Summary -- 

In one sense Russia and China pose the same problems. An international order of trade and cooperation has been established, and the two countries are in the process of joining. But their central governments are weak -- Russia's military is quasi-independent of Moscow, China's factories do not heed Beijing. Humiliation over national decline prompts symbolic defiance of the United States. Ukraine and Taiwan remain dangerous flash points that call for tacit deterrence. Like adolescents, Russia and China are in a transitional stage requiring patience and guidance rather than confrontation.

Michael Mandelbaum is the Christian A. Herter Professor of American Foreign Policy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, The Johns Hopkins University, and Director of the Project on East-West Relations at the Council on Foreign Relations. This essay is adapted from a forthcoming book sponsored by the Twentieth Century Fund.

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TWO COUNTRIES, ONE PROBLEM

In the wake of the Cold War, the two most important countries for the United States are Russia and China. The reasons for their importance are plain: their size, their economic potential, and their military power. What is less obvious, but just as important for post-Cold War American foreign policy, is the fact that despite important differences between them, these two nuclear-armed, formerly orthodox communist countries pose the same challenges for the United States.

The similarities between them are rooted in the fact that both Russia and China have abandoned orthodox Marxism-Leninism but have not yet established stable alternative political and economic arrangements. The common, central challenge that these two large countries pose is this: with the end of the Cold War, an international order is in place, consisting of explicit rules, implied norms, and working institutions for relations among sovereign states. It began in the West with the United States as its chief sponsor and most powerful member and has spread, unevenly, throughout the world. Russia and China are ambivalent about joining this order. Unlike a few small countries -- Cuba, North Korea, and Burma -- that have sought to isolate themselves, Russia and China are not international hermits. Nor is either seeking, as both did during the Cold War, to overturn this order. Neither country, however, accords it unqualified support and allegiance.

Coping with Russia and China requires foreign policies different from those the United States reflexively employed during the Cold War. Indeed, the task requires a different set of political categories, and the recovery of a tradition of American foreign relations that predates the long contest with communism.

WEAKNESS AT HOME, POWER ABROAD

Friction between the United States, on the one hand, and Russia and China, on the other, stems in part from the fact that both Russia and China are multinational states. Each is dominated by a single group -- ethnic Russians or Han Chinese. Minorities constitute small percentages of their total populations but are large and self-conscious enough to resent, and even rebel against, what they see as imperial rule.

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