#10
New York Times
October 28, 2001
THE BIG THREE
For Moscow, Beijing and Washington, a Common Goal
By DAVID E. SANGER WASHINGTON
THE last time the Americans, Russians and Chinese were all in a coalition to defeat a common enemy, it was the spring of 1945, when Stalin belatedly joined Harry S. Truman and Chiang Kai-shek in the battle against Japan.
It was a fragile alliance of convenience, ridden with mutual suspicion, and all three leaders knew it couldn't last. It didn't. Within a year, it was being torn apart by the strains of the cold war. And even after Communism died in Russia, the economic glue of globalization wasn't enough to unify the three.
So it was striking last weekend in Shanghai when George W. Bush, Vladimir V. Putin and Jiang Zemin all signed up for the war on terrorism. Each defined his country's participation differently, and they had differing levels of enthusiasm. But there they were.
"Many of us predicted that sometime, somewhere, there could be a major act of terrorism in the United States," Ernest May of Harvard, the dean of American diplomatic historians, said last week. "But it never occurred to any of us that it might trigger a wholly different relationship among the superpowers and other governments — and put America, Russia and China back to roughly where they were at the end of World War II."
Perhaps it won't last; triangular alliances are notoriously unstable. But on Friday, when Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser and a Russia scholar, took a few minutes away from the war to consider the question of whether this time history could play out in a very different way, her answer was optimistic.
"I think it has a good chance of lasting this time," she said. "Because I do think that the Russians in particular are trying to move toward integration into the West. And I think the Chinese, while not politically moving in that direction, recognize that the forces of globalization, and particularly the economic forces, leave them few choices but good relations with the West."
Even after the war on terrorism is over, she said, "I think there will be many more pillars of potential common interest than you had in 1945."
No one is predicting the death of triangular diplomacy. With China's power rising, America's holding roughly steady and Russia still trying to figure out how important it remains on the world stage, it's hard to imagine an absence of rivalry.
Nonetheless, the first reality of this odd moment is that all three are more threatened by instability than they are by each other. There is the new threat of terrorists like Osama bin Laden who act outside the structure of any state, the old threat of regional chaos in Afghanistan, and concern about the potential for radical Islamic uprisings in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.
Mr. Putin and Mr. Jiang seem acutely aware that they have already been subject to terrorism (mostly of the domestic sort) and that their countries are natural targets in the years to come. Each is also battling radical separatist groups — a serious one in Chechnya (with Al Qaeda ties) and a chronic, annoying Islamic rebel movement in western China.
So Mr. Bush's war on terrorism with a global reach provides them with convenient cover for cooperation.
The second reality is that political, military and economic change is moving faster than the leaders in each capital can respond. The Bush administration came to office deeply suspicious of both the United Nations and "nation building," and now it is talking about turning Afghanistan into a United Nations protectorate. This evokes Franklin D. Roosevelt's plan for Korea in 1945, when a desperately poor Korean peninsula was supposed to become a United Nations protectorate under American, British, Russian and Chinese oversight. (It never worked, of course.)
Today, American forces are suddenly operating out of former Soviet territory, sometimes with Russian help. At the C.I.A., there is actually some Chinese intelligence floating around about Muslim extremists near China's short but busy border with Afghanistan. "It's not terribly useful," one administration official said about the information China is sharing, "but that's not the point. It's here."
And missing from the three-way relationship is the explosive mix that blew everything up in 1946: the dynamite of ideology and the lighted fuse of territorial ambition.
Of course, there is always a temptation for the three powers to play one against another. That will only intensify as Presidents Bush and Putin race to cut a deal on missile defenses in the next few weeks, and as China enters the World Trade Organization, an accomplishment the Russians are desperate to match.
An American-Russian accord on missiles could be particularly tricky; a deal that satisfies Russia, with its vast nuclear arsenal, could leave China, with its few long- range missiles, feeling vulnerable.
Still, the ideological war is clearly over. Mr. Putin was drifting west before the World Trade Center fell, and the rush of events since Sept. 11 has pushed him in that direction even faster. And though China is still a Communist country, you would never have known it wandering the capitalist bastion of Shanghai last week. There wasn't a hint of ideological diatribe from the Chinese hosts, just deal-making.
Not only is territorial tension in abeyance, it almost seems reversed. The Russians have been to Afghanistan and have no desire to return. The Chinese are hardly looking to extend their Islamic troubles with an adventure there. And President Bush has made it clear that when it comes to rebuilding Afghanistan, he prefers someone else do the heavy lifting (though it seems likely that the United States will be stuck with much of the task). Ms. Rice, only half-joking, calls this the war of "anti-territorial goals."
And then there is the element missing in 1945: this war is being fought in the era of globalization, for good and for bad.
The economic forces of the 1990's, in which the rich nations got much richer and the poor nations feared they could never compete or catch up, no doubt contributed to the conviction among Islamic radicals that there was a plot afoot to keep their people down. But it also created a stronger common interest in stability to underlie investment and trade for China and the United States — and now Russia.
ECONOMIC globalization, of course, is no guarantee that a triumvirate of nuclear powers, which have always played two against one, will now learn new rules. And lessons from 1946 suggest some potential pitfalls.
The first is that truth is often the first casualty of wartime alliances. During World War II, the White House often portrayed Stalin as a benign authoritarian. That fell apart soon enough, but it was years before Washington also admitted the obvious about Chiang — that he was as corrupt as he was brutal. Mr. Bush's critics see a bit of the same tendency in his warm comments about Mr. Putin, an ex-K.G.B. operative. Ms. Rice, though, says that she and her boss have absorbed history's lesson, and that they will not paper over differences.
She said that Mr. Bush talked to Mr. Jiang about Chinese religious persecution, and that Washington has kept up the pressure on Mr. Putin over Chechnya. "You should never sacrifice long-term considerations for short-term gain," she said.
And she insisted that Mr. Bush would not fall into the trap of focusing on the day-to- day operations of the war, while losing sight of the larger forces in play. She suggested that at the end of World War II, Roosevelt and Truman were "so concentrated on winning the war tactically that some of the strategic considerations — how far east should you meet the Soviet Union, what should you do about Poland and the elections — took a back seat."
But it is early in the war on terrorism, and even earlier in the uneasy new comity among the three powers. There will be plenty of tension to come, plenty of mistakes to be made by all three players. After all, as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said last week, not only is the cold war over, but "the post-cold-war is also over."
