Without fanfare and in a further indication of Russia's closer integration with the West, the US and Russia have signed a three-page-long nuclear-arms reduction treaty, and Russia has become a partner of NATO.
After collapsing in the early 1990s, Russia is finally finding its peace with itself and its former enemies.
Now we see a Russia that cooperates with the US and other major powers to promote peace and stability around the world. We see a Russia that walks away from confrontations and arms races and rushes toward economic development.
The Russians have reoriented their policies toward privatization and free markets. The US does not yet call the Russian economy a free-market economy. But, given time, the Russians are getting there under a democratic system. A historic evolution of Russia is in progress, from the political, military, economic and ideological archenemy of the West for over half a century to a democratic partner.
The US has achieved one of its long-standing policy goals: to make Europe whole and free.
These developments have placed a lot of pressure on the People's Republic of China. When the Soviet Union collapsed, China's paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping (
Obviously the Chinese took a different approach from that adopted by the Russians to handle their domestic and foreign-policy problems. Beijing opened up its economy without carrying out any meaningful political reform. China's development was so unbalanced that the gap between the rich and the poor became one of the most extreme in the world. The communist government, which was supposed to take care of the workers and farmers, the disadvantaged class of China, sacrificed their rights and left them impoverished in the name of better jobs and better living standards.
Even insisting that it needs a stable international environment for its economic development, China, unlike Russia, has not found peace with its own people or its neighbors.
China continues to build up its military as it pursues military modernization and to bully Japan whenever Tokyo offends Beijing.
China has vowed to swallow up Taiwan either by force or by "peaceful means" and has charged that the US is blocking Beijing's goal. China seems either blind to Taiwan's democracy or simply reluctant to face reality.
Of course, the Chinese have exploited their past humiliations and the nationalism of their people. But a regime that depends on nationalism for its survival does so at great risk of being pushed over the brink and facing a situation it may prefer to avoid.
When then US president Richard Nixon and his national security assistant Henry Kissinger seized the split between China and the Soviet Union to play the so-called "China card" to serve the interests of the US, China's Mao Zedong (
These so-called "triangular relations" led to the normalization of relations between the US and China and detente between the US and the Soviet Union. It was credited with ending the Vietnam War. The major victim of the big powers' machinations was Taiwan, which was under Chiang Kai-shek's (蔣介石) authoritarian rule and claimed to represent the whole of China, including Mongolia.
China, on the other hand, benefitted so much from playing the "Russia card" that it has tended to forget that that card no longer exists.
Russia is so accommodating to the needs of the US that it raised no objection to American use of military bases in former Soviet republics. Moscow became a partner of NATO in the NATO-Russia Council and is to allow NATO to expand to include former Soviet republics.
American special forces are training troops in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, a scenario that was unthinkable a few years ago. With the disappearance of the "Russia card," it is time for China to adjust and reorient its domestic and foreign policies. The government must reconcile itself with its people, begin long-overdue political reforms and respect human rights.
It should respect Taiwan's right to exist as a democratic and sovereign state if the people of Taiwan so desire.
"It's the economy, stupid," ran former US president Bill Clinton's famous campaign slogan. China's future depends on its economic development and necessary political reforms, not the acquisition of additional territories or the bullying of its neighbors.
China's persistent military build-up and threat to use force against Taiwan could only ruin whatever it has achieved on the economic front and lead China into another disaster.
James Wang is a Washington-based journalist.
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