The Russia-China Axis. Douglas E. Schoen

late September 2013, the U.S. announced that Iran had successfully hacked into unclassified Navy computers running email services and internal intranets. It showed a new sophistication from Iranian hackers, suggesting they now have the capability to break into U.S. military systems. They had previously focused their attacks on U.S. banks and other private networks, and the U.S. didn’t consider Iran a major cyber player. How did the Iranians ramp up their capabilities so quickly?

      “They’re getting help from the Russians,” said cyber-security specialist and former State Department official James Lewis in a Wall Street Journal story that cited “current and former officials” who believe that the Iranians have developed “a growing partnership with Russian cybercriminals.”²³

      MILITARY AND NUCLEAR BUILDUPS

      “What preserved peace, even in Cold War conditions,” Vladimir Putin has said, “was a balance of forces.”²⁴

      On the fundamental measure of national security—military readiness—the Axis nations are building up while the U.S. is slashing its defense budget through the imposed sequestration and other automatic cuts. While the U.S. pursues wholesale reductions, the Axis pursues wholesale augmentations; while we allow our equipment, materials, and technologies to degrade, they pursue constant upgrades. Perhaps most worryingly, while the American president advocates so-called nuclear zero—a world without nuclear weapons—the Russians and Chinese bolster their atomic arsenals.

      While all signs point to a strengthening Russian-Chinese relationship and more formalized cooperation and coordination, the United States is pulling back from its commitments and leaving allies from Japan in the Far East to Poland in Eastern Europe worried and vulnerable. As we have seen in Ukraine, the Russians have already taken advantage of this vulnerability. In the Far East, it may only be a matter of time before the Chinese attempt to do the same. While the Russians and Chinese make demands, the United States makes concessions. And while the Russians and Chinese pursue what they dubiously call “a new, more just world order,” the United States backs away from world leadership, hiding behind the illusion of “leading from behind.” It all adds up to a calamitous American message: The U.S. simply has no coherent national defense strategy.

      Obama’s broader disarmament agenda, both in offensive and defensive capabilities, is at odds with treaty commitments he made to our allies. His anti-nuclear ambitions are music to the ears of the Axis, but they leave the U.S. increasingly vulnerable. As former Senator John Kyl puts it: “The U.S. is now stuck with numbers and technology capable of dealing only with low-level threats.”²⁵

      On the other side, things couldn’t be more different. Putin gave Xi an honor he has allowed no other foreign leader: a visit to Russia’s strategic-defense command headquarters and “war room.” He even let Chinese media film the visit, as Xi observed giant computer screens of military intelligence.²⁶

      One key aspect of the Sino-Russian strategic partnership, military exchange, involves Russian arms sales to China and high-technology sharing. China’s weapons purchases from Russia over the past 20 years account for $29 billion of its $34 billion in arms imports.²⁷ For the Russians, this ongoing exchange has two major objectives: bolstering the former Soviet defense-industrial complex following the USSR’s collapse, and arming a country that shares the goal of weakening U.S. control in the region.

      The Chinese, meanwhile, have grown their military power exponentially over the last two decades, projecting force across Asia to the borders of India, with new naval ports imposed on client countries. Some Western estimates put Chinese military spending second only to the Americans’, at $200 billion annually,²⁸ having grown from $20 billion 10 years ago.²⁹ The Chinese have even begun threatening stalwart Western allies in the Pacific and East Asia—warning Australia, for example, that it would be “caught in the crossfire” if the nation went ahead with plans to offer a base for U.S. Marines.³⁰ The Chinese have bullied the Philippines over the Spratly Islands, and they are engaged in a tense provocation with Japan over the disputed Senkaku Islands (called the Diaoyu Islands by China)—an ongoing battle which has made starkly clear America’s declining power in the region. By the late 2020s—a little more than a decade from now—Chinese ships should outnumber American ships in the Pacific.³¹

      In July 2013, an armada of Chinese and Russian warships sailed through the Sea of Japan in joint naval exercises that included live firing. Beijing called it the largest joint exercise the Chinese military had ever undertaken with another country. The Chinese fleet commander said the goal was to strengthen “strategic trust” with Russia—and that seems to be how it was received. “This shows unprecedented good relations between China and Russia,” said Professor Wang Ning, a Russian Studies specialist at the Shanghai International Studies University. “It shows that the two countries will support each other on the global stage.”³²

      All of this plays neatly into what has come to be called the China Dream: a goal shared by both top military leaders and Communist Party officials to surpass the U.S. as the world’s preeminent military superpower by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist revolution. Xi calls it simply “the dream of a strong nation,” but the dream is inseparable from military prowess.

      “To achieve the great revival of the Chinese nation, we must ensure there is unison between a prosperous country and strong military,” Xi has said.³³ He has spared no resource to focus the military on “combat readiness” and “fighting and winning wars.” No one need spell out whom the war would be fought against. There is only one candidate: the United States, China’s only Pacific and East Asian rival.

      “In my opinion,” writes General Liu Yazhou, “the competition between China and the U.S. in the 21st century should be a race, that is, a contest to see whose development results are better, whose comprehensive national power can rise faster, and to finally decide who can become the champion country to lead world progress.”³⁴

      Meanwhile, Russia is using its petro-wealth to rebuild its conventional military while also modernizing—and greatly expanding—its nuclear arsenal. Already, Russia’s nuclear weapons outnumber America’s. The 2008 Georgian war made clear, or should have made clear, that the Russians intend to reclaim the entirety of their old Soviet sphere of influence. The West’s failure to lift a hand to help a democratically in that struggle emboldened Russian confidence.

      “TELL VLADIMIR”: THE U.S. ABDICATION ON MISSILE DEFENSE

      On the surface, it was a customary scene: a pool of journalists waiting for the start of a news conference with President Obama and Russia’s then-president, Dmitri Medvedev, in March 2012. But sitting close together beforehand, the two leaders shared an impromptu exchange inadvertently caught by a “hot” microphone.

      “It’s important for him to give me space,” Obama told Medvedev, referring to Vladimir Putin, who had just won election to succeed Medvedev as Russia’s next president. “This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.”

      “I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir,” Medvedev said.

      Then, as the two men sat back in their chairs, barely audible over the videotape, Obama could be heard saying, sotto voce: “Tell Vladimir.”

      Obama and Medvedev were trying to iron out a long-running dispute between the two countries on American plans to deploy a missile-defense system in Eastern Europe—a system that the U.S. conceived mainly as protection against Iranian nuclear ambitions. The United States insisted that the missile-defense shield was intended to counter Iranian nuclear ambitions; Russia claimed that the real target of American missile-defense plans was Moscow. What mostly spooked the Russians about the American plan was the missile shield’s final phase, then in development, which would allow the U.S. to use interceptors to shoot down long-range ICBMs, a core part of Russia’s nuclear arsenal. Those U.S. plans angered Putin, who saw them as an encroachment on his sphere of influence and a betrayal of his cooperation with the West after 9/11—much as he had seen a betrayal in the American plans to expand NATO. He made clear that he would resist the American missile-defense effort at any cost.