Strategic games

Massive joint war games by Russia and China signal the two nations' readiness to assume responsibility for regional stability on the basis of a new security framework for Asia.

VLADIMIR RADYUHIN in Moscow

FOR eight days in mid-August, China's Shandong peninsula was turned into a mock battleground with paratroopers swooping down on enemy positions from the air, marines backed by fighter jets charging from the sea, and warships tracking down hostile submarines off the coast in the Yellow Sea. Under their first joint military exercises, Russian and Chinese forces, acting on a United Nations mandate, landed in an imaginary country to stop ethnic strife and keep off a "third force" from taking advantage of the local turmoil. The manoeuvres, codenamed "Peace Mission 2005", involved 1,800 Russian and 8,000 Chinese troops. The deployment of Russian long-distance bombers Tu-22M and Tu-95 armed with nuclear-capable cruise missiles added a strategic dimension to the engagement. Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov and his Chinese counterpart Cao Gangchuan, who watched the manoeuvres, stressed this point.

The Russian defence chief said the Sino-Russian "strategic cooperative partnership" had entered a new stage and was emerging as "a guarantee of security in the Asia-Pacific region". His Chinese counterpart emphasised the "important realistic significance and profound historic impact [of the war games] on safeguarding regional and world peace and security."

The joint manoeuvres, staged under the aegis of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), marked a historic change in China's defence policy and showed that China is ready to take part in coalition action. Never before had Beijing held large-scale military exercises with a foreign country. It has always shunned defence alliances and preferred to act militarily on its own.

This has created an entirely new geopolitical situation in the Asian region. Earlier, experts had ruled out military cooperation within the SCO if only because China was opposed to it. After the Shandong exercises, Sergei Ivanov said cooperation between the two militaries gave "a new dimension" to the inter-governmental international organisation with Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan as it members.

"It is necessary to guarantee security in the SCO's zone of responsibility to facilitate economic growth. If there is no security, there is no growth." he said.

General Yuri Baluyevsky, head of the Russian Armed Forces General Staff, did not rule out the possibility of the armed forces of Russia and China being tasked by the SCO to perform "some or other missions".

According to a highly placed Russian military source, although the SCO is "a strictly political organisation", it already "has a military component, whose role will rise steadily". Officials of the SCO had denied this until recently.

No sooner had the war games ended than Russian defence officials said the format of the joint military drills could possibly expand in future to involve other SCO members and observer countries. (India joined the SCO as observer in July along with Iran and Pakistan.)

A senior Russian defence official proposed staging triangular war games of the Russian, Indian and Chinese militaries next year. "It would not be a bad idea if Russia, India and China staged joint military exercises," he was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.

The SCO is being projected by Moscow and Beijing as the nucleus of a broader Asian security set-up. The Russia-China manoeuvres can, therefore, be seen as the first step in building a "new security architecture" that President Vladimir Putin and Chairman Hu Jintao proclaimed in a Declaration on the World Order in the 21st century they signed in Moscow on July 1.

The new security arrangement would promote "a just and rational world order based on the respect of the right of all countries to equal security" and reject the "mentality of confrontation and bloc-building, efforts to impose monopoly and domination in international relations, attempts to divide countries into the leaders and the led".

The Putin-Jintao declaration inspired a subsequent SCO demand to the United States to set a deadline for its military presence in Central Asia, followed by Uzbekistan's decision to evict a U.S. air base set up for the anti-Taliban operation in Afghanistan in 2001. The Shandong exercises carried a similar message: that Russia and China had reached a level of strategic relationship and were ready to guarantee jointly stability and security in the region.

Western analysts and media were quick to interpret the military engagement as a threat to Taiwan and as the beginning of an anti-U.S. axis. Both assumptions are wrong. While Beijing clearly used the joint manoeuvres to put extra pressure on Taiwan (all Chinese military exercises serve this purpose), Russia has no commitment to support China militarily and will never join in any military action against Taiwan. Beijing wanted the war games to be held in Zhejiang, a coastal province near Taiwan, but Moscow insisted that the location be shifted 800 km north, to Shandong.

There is a more likely target for hypothetical Russia-China joint operations, Russian experts said. They are convinced the two countries were training for a peace-keeping mission on the Korean peninsula, where a possible destabilisation would directly affect the security interests of both Russia and China.

"One must be totally blind not to project the Russia-China drill to the situation on the Korean peninsula," says the political analyst Dmitry Evstafiev. "Even while Beijing is focussed politically on the problem of Taiwan, functionally the joint exercise was a pure and simple blueprint for an operation in Korea (the kind of troops committed, the choice of airdrop areas and the targets of attack, among other things). That said, neither China nor Russia had any specific country in mind. They were just practising for a model situation."

The anti-American thrust of the military exercises is greatly exaggerated. Neither Russia nor China (or any other country, for that matter) can afford to enter into any anti-U.S. coalition. But they would want to defend their neighbourhoods from the kind of instability U.S. intervention tends to entail.

The U.S.-sponsored "Velvet Revolutions" in Georgia and Ukraine have worsened the economic and political situation in the former Soviet states. Three years after the U.S. set up military bases in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, the former had its President overthrown in a coup, while the latter lived through an Islamist revolt.

"We are not joining hands with China to spite the U.S. We are doing it to jointly use the opportunities America is unable to use," the Kremlin-connected magazine Expert said. "If we do not chase a new world order, it will come chasing us."

However, Russia's new military partnership with China has revived fears of a Chinese threat to Russia. The political analyst Andrei Piontkovsky likened this partnership to an "alliance of a rabbit and a boa constrictor". "By drawing Russia into a hard-line anti-American bloc and severing Russia's ties with the West, China intends to simplify the task of eventually swallowing us whole," Piontkovsky warned. "Confrontation with the West and the development of a `strategic partnership' and effectively a military alliance with China will leave Russia not only marginalised but also subject to China's strategic interests. And it will lead in the end to the loss of control over the Far East and Siberia, first de facto and then de jure."

The Kremlin is at pains to reassure the country that it is aware of the risks involved in the new partnership. "We are not setting up any military blocs with China," Sergei Ivanov said. The Russian military has also suggested that restrictions on the supply of the most advanced Russian weapons to China are still in place. General Baluyevsky said that the long-range Russian bombers that took part in the joint war games were not for sale.

Also, there is no question of Russia severing ties with the West. The Kremlin hints that Moscow will yet play the China card in its interaction with the West.

Moscow perhaps sent a signal to Washington that if it continued to squeeze Russia from the former Soviet space in its blind pursuit of energy and influence instead of jointly promoting development of the region, Russia would ally itself with China to counter the push.

Reports said Russia could after all waive the curbs on the sale of top-of-the-line arms to China at a meeting of the Russian-Chinese inter-governmental commission on military-technical cooperation later this year. Before that Putin is to meet twice with U.S. President George Bush, on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York and at a summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation organisation.