“We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies.”
—Lord Palmerston (March 1, 1848)
History suggests that no two nations’ relations ever deteriorate so much that it becomes impossible to find common ground if both perceive that a third nation’s ambitions threatens them more. Examples abound, but the classic is Britain’s instant alliance with the USSR the moment that Adolf Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941. Winston Churchill had been denouncing Soviet Communism for almost a quarter of a century, but as he told his private secretary after hearing of Operation Barbarossa, “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”
Other examples of the way that the 4th century BC Sanskrit adage, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” has worked in international relations include the Second United Front between the Chinese Communists and Chinese Nationalists against the Japanese before the Second World War, and the truce between the British and the Malayan Communist Party during it. Further back, there was no love lost between Britain and France in the early eighteenth century, but they allied against the feared hegemony of Spain between 1718 and 1720, and the same American colonists who had fought the French throughout the Seven Years War then made an alliance with them against Britain in 1778.
All that would be necessary for a profound realignment in Russo-American relations would be a recognition on the part of Vladimir Putin that China’s ultimate ambitions pose much more of a long-term threat to Russian interests and security than does American capitalism. It ought to have started to dawn on him already. Russia has a long history of dealing with America, but the new China will cause acute discomfort when it starts to treat its neighbour to the north in the same aggressive manner that it currently projects towards Taiwan, South Korea, and Australia, let alone its Uighur, Hong Kong, and Tibetan subjects.
The Sino-Russian border covers 2,615 miles, the sixth-longest in the world. Long the cause of border disputes—which very nearly ended in a full-scale war in March 1969, which the Chinese state media says was caused by Russian aggression—its final demarcation was only settled in July 2008, with rank Russian appeasement over various disputed islands that must still rankle in the Kremlin. The strategically important Bolshoy Ussuriysky Island, known to the Chinese as Heixiazi, is shared roughly 50/50, for example, and could be a flash-point.
With China’s massive population and its growing needs on its side of the frontier, and Siberia being under-populated but rich in minerals, oil, gas, and water, Beijing might once again cast covetous eyes northwards in its ravenous global quest for resources.
If it were ever to dawn on Vladimir Putin that Russia would be much worse off in a world in which a contiguous neighbour like China was hegemonic, rather than the trans-oceanic United States—or having no hegemon at all—then it would not be impossible to find common ground. Putin has shown that he is entirely driven by Realpolitik, as his reasonably good early relations with the George W. Bush and Trump Administrations suggest. He would not be held back by ideology in ditching his currently good relations with China the moment that it suited him.
