Balancing or backscratching? Sino-Russian logrolling during US decline
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Balancing or backscratching? Sino‑Russian logrolling during US decline Kyle Haynes1
© Springer Nature Limited 2019
Abstract How will American relative decline impact security cooperation between Russia and China? The conventional wisdom holds that the Sino-Russian “strategic partnership” is largely a “marriage of convenience” held together only by shared antipathy toward the US-led international order. From a traditional balance of power perspective, given their lack of a shared vision for global and regional order, we should expect Sino-Russian cooperation to deteriorate as US relative power recedes. I suggest, to the contrary, that Sino-Russian cooperation could remain quite durable throughout a prolonged period of American decline and retrenchment. I apply theories of bureaucratic and legislative “logrolling” to demonstrate how China and Russia each have incentives to support one another’s revisionist actions in their respective home regions. An underlying asymmetry of regional importance—China’s prioritization of East Asia, and Russia’s prioritization of Europe—enables this logrolling dynamic. Thus, I argue that while there are few shared interests between them, Russia and China could well maintain a limited but highly consequential cooperative relationship over the medium to long term. As such, the Sino-Russian threat to USled order comes not from a coordinated balancing effort, but from reciprocal support of one another’s region-specific revisionist actions. Keywords Balancing · China · Grand strategy · Logrolling · Russia · US foreign policy Observers of contemporary China–Russia relations are often skeptical about the depth and durability of the Sino-Russian “strategic partnership,” especially as a form of meaningful geopolitical balancing against the USA (Brooks and Wohlforth 2002, 2008; Ikenberry 2010; Lo 2008, 2017). American preponderance, even if not immediately threatening, has proven a significant obstacle to both China and Russia * Kyle Haynes [email protected] 1
Department of Political Science, Purdue University, Beering Hall, 100 N. University Ave, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA Vol.:(0123456789)
K. Haynes
expanding their regional influence and achieving great power status on par with the USA in the twenty-first century. But Beijing and Moscow have few common interests beyond a shared aversion to the constraints imposed by American hegemony. And while both China and Russia chafe under American preponderance, the revised orders that each would seek to impose in their respective home regions are likely to be more harmful to the other’s interests than the current US-led order. In short, Russia and China do have a “shared interest” in that both seek to impose more hierarchical orders in place of the status quo in their home regions. But each one’s ambitions are largely inimical to the other’s interests. Russian interests would suffer under a Chinese-led order in East Asia, and Chinese interests would suffer under a Russianled order in its near abroad (Lo 2008, 2017). The conventional wis
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