In this episode of CLSC Dialogues, Brian Carlson interviews David Stone, a Russia expert from the U.S. Naval War College, about potential forms of support that Russia might or might not provide to China in the event of a protracted war in the Indo-Pacific. They discuss the likelihood of direct Russian military intervention in support of China, possible ways that Russia might create distractions for the United States and its allies and partners, and Russia’s ability to support China by providing additional weapons, ammunition, or energy supplies. They conclude with a discussion of the likely future trajectory of the China-Russia relationship.
Keywords: China, Russia, protracted war, defense cooperation, energy supplies
Episode Transcript
You're listening to CLSC Dialogues, land power in the Indo Pacific, a China land power studies production. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guests and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, U.S. Army War college, or any other agency of the U.S. government.
I'm Brian Carlson (USAWC/SSI), research professor of Indo Pacific security studies at the China Land Power Studies Center at the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army War College.
HOST (Brian Carlson)
Joining me today is David Stone of the William E Odom professor of Russia studies in the Strategy and Policy department at the US Naval War College. He has published extensively on Russian military history and foreign policy.
Thank you for joining us today, David.
STONE (David Stone)
My pleasure to be here.
HOST
David and I were on a panel together back in October at the PLA conference sponsored by the China Land Power Studies Center and the topic of our panel was China's cooperation with strategic partners in the event of protracted war.
David's paper focus on likely assistance that Russia could provide to China in that kind of eventuality.
My paper attempted to look at how China views strategic partnerships in that kind of situation, and I also focused primarily on Russia.
That will be the main topic of our podcast today.
We'll discuss potential Russian support for China in the event of protracted war, and then we'll end by talking a little bit about the likely future trajectory of the China Russia relationship.
So, in my paper, as I say, I attempted to analyze how China views strategic partnerships and the kind of support that they might expect from Russia and other partners in the event of protracted war. Now Chinese leaders don't say much about this. Perhaps not surprisingly. They might want to protect the confidentiality of discussions with their Russian counterparts.
It's possible that they also don't have a clear understanding of what kind of support Russia might provide in the event of protracted war.
The only official statement I could find on this came from last summer, when a Russian journalist at the newspaper Izvestia asked the Chinese ambassador to Russia what kind of support might China count on for Russia in the event of tensions in the Taiwan Strait?
And the ambassador essentially just reiterated the one China principle. He said that the international community recognizes this principle.
Russia has always supported China on it and we expect that that will continue in the future.
So, he didn't say anything about possible material assistance.
And some Chinese media coverage speculated on this some of the accounts said China's not showing its hand very much, or possibly the unspoken message is that China really isn't counting on Russia for much support.
And might view it as a liability and might not even want much support from Russia in that kind of case.
But there were also media accounts that said Russia could play a useful role, for example in intimidating other countries in the region that have become troublesome for China and Russia.
So, so I looked at it from that angle in the paper, and then David and I both discussed ways that Russia might possibly be of assistance to China in the event of protracted war.
So, we're going to discuss a few of those different topics today.
And so, David, the first question I'd like to ask you is if China were to find itself in a war, especially one that became protracted with a U.S. led coalition in the Pacific, how likely is it that Russia would provide any kind of direct military assistance to China?
STONE
So, that's a question that relates a lot to time horizon. I think in the near term, it's extraordinarily unlikely that Russia would participate. And part of that simply has to do with the commitments that Russia has with the war in Ukraine, there is just not a lot of resources left to give.
As we're taping this the Assad regime has just fallen in Syria, and I would note that as an intriguing example in that in Syria, Russia has a lot of very concrete interests at stake.
And appeared to have no resources available to try to prop up the Assad regime, even with an air base and a naval base in Syria.
And so, if the Russians aren't in a position to provide kinetic support to a direct ally in direct support of their own interests, at least in the near term, it's impossible to think that they'd have much to offer to the Chinese in the event of protracted war in the Pacific now, over the longer term, when the Ukraine war ends and it has to end at some point that might change, but at least in the near term I see it is highly unlikely.
I don't see it as particularly likely even in the long term, but that's a different set of constraints and a different set of reasons.
HOST
If we look at the long term and we consider the possibility of some kind of direct Russian military intervention.
What is the difference based on what kind of scenario we're talking about, for example, if it's a Taiwan scenario or a South China Sea scenario, is that a lot different from, say, a potential scenario on the Korean Peninsula?
STONE
I think it does make something of a difference, and it gets back to this question of Russian interests, Russian interests in the South China Sea are fairly marginal.
Certainly, Russia sees itself as having a cooperative relationship with the PRC and that is a Russian interest. South China Sea not particularly relevant to Russian interests. Korea, on the other hand, is right next door.
There's no direct border but very, very close; I am sorry, there is a direct border but it’s a short border. But Russia has a border with North Korea. Vladivostok is the key Russian city and port in the Far East is very close to North Korea.
And so, anything that happens in Korea matters a lot to the Russians. And so, what they might do would depend a great deal on what particular scenario we are talking about, it's easy for Korea experts to imagine bad scenarios, for example, the North Korean regime collapses and something has to be done and China, the US and South Korea have different ideas about what that might look like.
Or Kim Jong Un decides to be a little bit ambitious and attack the south. That's a very different scenario, but certainly Russia has more at stake in the game when it comes to North Korea.
HOST
We've started off by discussing possible scenarios in which Russia might or might not provide some kind of direct military assistance to China in a war, including one that became protracted.
Another possibility that we discussed during our panel was the possibility that Russia wouldn't directly intervene militarily.
But it might do certain things to create distractions for the United States and its allies and partners that could complicate the effort to fight China in a protracted war.
And it seems to me that there are , broadly speaking, at least a couple of different possibilities in this regard.
One would be in or near the actual theater of war, and another is far away from the theater.
So, on the latter point, China and Russia have built this partnership that allows them to not be worried about a threat from the other, so this has given them the opportunity to pursue their interests in their own regions.
We've seen Russia, of course, posing a dire threat to European security, while most notably with the war in Ukraine. While there are growing concerns about the potential security threat that China might pose in Asia.
So one possibility is that in a scenario of protracted war, Russia might do certain things in in Europe far away from the theatre of war in Asia that could create complications for the United States and its allies and partners.
The review Commission on the National Security Strategy, published the report last summer, saying that the US military isn't prepared for challenges, that it's likely to face in the coming years, especially from Russia and China and there's also been a lot of discussion about the fact that the US military isn't really equipped right now to fight simultaneous great power wars against Russia and China.
So, in the event of a war in Asia involving pitting China against a U.S. led coalition, if it became protracted, what do you think Russia might do? Are there certain things it might do in Europe to create distractions?
STONE
The fundamental thing I would say is that Russia will pursue Russian interests and if it can pursue Russian interests in a way that is of use to China, then that's fine.
But I don't see Russia as exerting a great deal of time, energy and risk for someone else's interests. So, the question would be, would a protracted war in Asia, which would certainly have enormous effects on American military commitments, American military resources, and the world economy would that create the for Russia to do something in Europe.
And I think that again this comes back to something of a short term, long term; in the short term, Russia really does not have a lot of resources to spare. I think given the constraints of the Ukraine war, if Ukraine was over and Russia had to recover, then that's a possibility even there, though, I think there's a limit.
One of the things that's been pretty clear about Vladimir Putin's foreign policy has been that he is quite leery of the prospect of a war with NATO, that seems to be something that he really does not want to risk. He's been quite careful to avoid that.
And with the loss of so much Russian land power in the Ukraine war, it's hard to imagine him wanting to start a war in Europe against NATO. Now non-NATO neighbors, that's a separate question. But at the moment at least, I think Vladimir Putin would be leery of that possibility.
Certainly, that is something that American planners need to be aware of, but at least in the short term and even in the longer term, I think a tangle with NATO does not see something like something that Vladimir Putin would choose as a voluntary act.
HOST
Turning then to scenarios in which Russia might try to create distractions closer to the theater of war in Asia. China and Russia have conducted a lot of joint military exercises in recent years - Ground exercises going back to 2005, Joint naval exercises going back to 2012 and more recently joint air patrols, and other activities.
And a lot of those activities, especially in recent years have been in the waters and airspace around Japan. And Russia has also on its own, flown near Japanese territory many times, forcing Japan to scramble fighters to intercept them.
And so, when we look at that and also the fact that China and Russia have done joint naval exercises in the East China Sea, not too far from Taiwan and reportedly there were Russian ships in the area just in recent days when China was doing major military exercises near Taiwan.
So, if we look at all of that what are some scenarios that you see in which Russia might not directly intervene militarily in support of China, but might do certain things to create distractions, particularly with regard to Japan?
STONE
Sure, and so this is a case where a potential threat may actually be more potent than an actual realized threat, a potential threat you can keep in advance for a long time, and it gives you a lot of options over the longer term. Once you use a threat then that that threat is expended.
And so, the Russians, as you say, have been engaged regularly in probing of Japanese airspace. And they've been the same thing in US airspace, sending aircraft to the air around Alaska and down the West Coast and Russia can do that at relatively low cost and relatively low risk but, that requires diversion of time and attention and platforms that could be quite bothersome in the event of a protracted war in the Western Pacific.
In a protracted war, obviously, systems and platforms and human time are going to be at a premium. And if the Russians can draw down the time and effort and attention of the United States and its allies without actually entering the kinetic fight, that's absolutely something they could do to assist a Chinese partner without necessarily putting their own material and their own people at risk.
And you can see some of the thing in in the naval domain as I have been talking in terms of sort of air sorties probing Japanese airspace, for example. But the Russians have demonstrated a capability, and this has been covered pretty widely in mass media of sending naval task forces to the Central Pacific.
And any war in the Pacific is going to have enormous logistical demands on all sides and all parties. And so that means a lot of things and people coming from the West Coast of the United States to the theater, traversing sort of Hawaii and Guam and moving to the to the Western Pacific. And if there's a Russian task force sitting in middle of the Pacific, American military planners and their partners and allies will have to take that into account and think carefully about the implications of that, even if those Russian ships never fire a shot.
Even if they never relay targeting information to Chinese, for example, could a US Commander be certain that wasn't happening and so there's a real kind of constraint that Russian naval power projected into the Pacific could put on US and coalition operations again, at very low risk and relatively low expense to the Russians, so they don't have to join a kinetic fight to make it harder for the US-led coalition to wage war.
HOST
And could that even affect the calculations of US allies and partners in the region? For example, if Japan were considering intervening in support of Taiwan, could Russian activities possibly make Japan think twice about getting involved at all?
STONE
Certainly possible, that gets into questions of sort of Japanese policy making and Japanese risk calculations. I'm not an expert but, I could speculate, but I really just don't know enough to say, but certainly if I'm sitting in the Japanese Ministry of Defense, I have to be conscious of a number of axes of potential threats, and Russia would certainly be one of them.
HOST
OK. Then turning to economic warfare, the theme of the PLA conference back in October was protracted war and if a conflict between China and a US led coalition were to become protracted, what would that mean for that conflict? And David, as you argued in the panel, when a war becomes protracted, then the economic warfare aspects of it become especially prominent and so in this sense, Russia's possible support for China in the energy realm seems particularly relevant - China and Russia have a long-standing energy partnership.
There are oil and gas pipelines transporting Russian oil and gas to China and in the period since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, full scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, China has greatly increased its purchases of Russian oil and gas, and at the same time, there are reports that China is greatly increasing its storage capacity for oil, gas, and other commodities, leading some people to wonder whether those might be part of preparations for anticipated warfare in the future, including potential protracted warfare.
All of that said, if war were to break out and then become protracted, how much could Russia help China in the energy sphere after the war has gotten started? The US Navy might impose a blockade on China that could cut off seaborne oil and gas shipments to China and in that case, China might look to Russia for overland shipments that would be more secure, but in that case, what's Russia's capacity to help supply China's needs?
STONE
Sure, as I mentioned at the panel, when you and I were discussing this and presenting it. Often times you'll get a kind of a blanket statement that Russia can solve China's energy problems in the event that things go bad and there's a there's war in the Western Pacific. To my mind, that hand waves a little bit the question of how it actually gets there, the concrete details of how energy gets to China.
So, if you'll indulge me, just for purposes of the podcast listeners, let me just give some figures that will help to illustrate the scope of the problem. So, take oil, modern economies depend on oil. China imports about 16,000,000 barrels per day of oil, sorry, it consumes about 16,000,000 barrels per day of, 11,000,000 barrels per day are imported, so roughly speaking, 2/3 of China's energy needs in oil are imported. Russia accounts for about 2,000,000 barrels of that 11,000,000 import.
Now, as you said, there's a lot of variables, a lot of things we don't know if it came to protracted war in the Indo Pacific. Would that involve a formal blockade? How close would that blockade be, and even if there is no blockade. I'm guessing that lots of ship owners and insurance agents wouldn't want to send their ships into war zones.
So, it would seem to be pretty clear that seaborne supplies to China would be disrupted. Could Russian landborne oil fix Chinas problems and the answer really is no. Russian pipeline oil is maybe 5 to 10% of Chinese imports and the nature of pipelines is that their capacity is their capacity you can't sort of surge oil through a pipeline. Most of the Russian oil that goes to China goes by sea, and so if seaborne oil is shut off most Russian oil to China shut off over the long term, you can build bigger pipelines, that is certainly something that you can do. Russia at the moment is really short on spare cash, the Ukraine war has meant that Russia does not have a lot of money to invest.
The nature of the geography here is that the distances are enormous, a lot of these pipelines would be built over areas of permafrost, which makes things a lot more complicated. So Russia could, conceivably, and China could conceivably build more pipelines capability but, that's going to take a long time and it's going to take a lot of investment and at least at the moment the Russians don't have that money to invest. So, that's oil, China can certainly stockpile oil and does but modern economies burn through an awful lot, and China's oil is overwhelmingly carried by sea. Russian land capability is only partially going to be able to make up for that. Let me turn to natural, that's the other big energy question in terms of imports, so China's total demand for natural gas is, roughly speaking, 35 to 40 billion cubic feet per day. Of that, under half of that is imported, that's still, let's say, 16 billion cubic feet per day of imported natural gas. Russian gas accounts for roughly speaking 1/6 of that, roughly 1/6 of Chinese imports. Like with oil, the over the majority of natural gas that gets to China comes by sea in the form of liquefied natural gas carried by sea. If there were an interruption to Seabourne supply, China, some of that Russian gas gets to China by sea, it would be cut off.
There is Russian pipeline gas that goes to China and there's quite a bit of Central Asian pipeline gas. But if you put those pipelines together, Central Asia and Russia, it's only maybe a third or 40% of Chinese imports and so can only cover a fraction of what China would need. Like with oil, you can build more gas pipelines, but that takes time and that takes a lot of money, and again, the geography here is important and it's a long way and the climatic conditions are not great, so Russia can alleviate Chinese problems of seaborne supply in the event of a war, but there's no way that Russia's going to be able to replace what China would be missing. So that, a long-winded answer, but I think the details are fairly important here just to get across the scale of the problem.
HOST
And going back for just a second, there was one other issue I wanted to discuss in the military realm and that is the possibility that Russia could provide arms and munitions to China after the outbreak of war, especially if it becomes protracted. China and Russia have a long-standing defense relationship and Russia has been China's main foreign arms supplier over the last 30 plus years.
And in recent years, Russia has provided certain systems to China that have been very significant. The S400 air defense system, SU-35 fighter jets, both of those systems improve China's ability to control airspace around Taiwan or the Senkaku Islands or other areas and could potentially complicate US efforts help defend those. But if war were to break out and become protracted, how much could Russia do to help China in this area in terms of providing additional systems or providing ammunition or help with repair and so forth?
STONE
So, two big questions there, one again as I have been saying over and over and I know I'm sounding like a broken record, but I think it's really vital is we are looking at the short term of the long term? In the short-term Russian capability is being spent almost as the Russians are expending almost as fast as they are making in the Ukraine war. There's been some good open-source reporting on this. Ukrainians have done analysis of serial numbers on Russian missiles and missiles basically, as soon as they come out of the factory, they're being sent Ukraine and so the Russians don't have a lot to spare while the current war is going on. When the current war is over, if Russia keeps building at the pace that it's been doing, then that would create pretty quickly a pool of equipment that the Chinese could potentially use. But couple things to say there, one is the Russians are going to want those for themselves they need to rebuild our stockpiles when the Ukraine War finally ends. The Russian economy is under a great deal of strain. The Russian interest rates are high, inflation is high, the Russians are very short on labor. They are straining a lot to maintain their current levels of production of military equipment, and it's not clear that once the war is over, that's going to be sustainable. So, you can't just take what Russia is producing right now and assume that will be the case five years from now, or 10 years from now, the Russians might or might not maintain that so there's a short-term, long-term issue. There's also the question of what exactly we're looking at in terms of things going bad in the Western Pacific.
It's easy to imagine lots of bad scenarios and some of those bad scenarios would be very land heavy, let's say things go bad in the Korean Peninsula, that's a war that presumably could involve a lot of land power and land systems. If it's a conflict over, say, the Senkaku’s or over Taiwan, that would put a premium on air and sea systems. And the thing to note there is that Russia can and does produce very high-end sea and air systems and air and naval platforms, but their production is very slow. Russian military industry can produce some very high-end aircraft, ships and subs but, it does that very slowly.
It's very hard for the Russians to get serious serial production going so again there's a limit to how much they can pass off to the Chinese given the constraints on how fast they can build things. The Russians have been building some very impressive new Subs - ballistic missile subs and guided missile subs but, they don't have a lot and they're going to want those for themselves. Things like missiles and air cruise missiles or ballistic missiles, or air defense missiles are those things that are being used a lot in Ukraine, that the Russians are building up. Presumably they could pass those on to the Chinese if the Russians are willing to do that, and if they feel like they've built up their own stocks.
The other thing to think about, and this is going to be again hard to know until the Ukraine war finally ends. The Russians have been forced to rely on a lot of Chinese kind of intermediate goods. Given to some things that a public statements by the Secretary of Defense and the Department of Defense, the Department of Defense has not accused the Chinese of giving the Russians lethal aid, but they've come close to saying that it seems like generally the Chinese are giving components and selling components to the Russians if things go bad in the Western Pacific and China is fighting a war, the odds that it's going to be sending components to Russia rather than using it themselves seem to be pretty slim.
So, one of the big constraints on Russian production now is getting components from China. If those components from China stop coming, it's not clear what the Russians can build. So those are the kinds of variables that I think we need to be thinking about. How soon are we talking? Is the Ukraine war over? What kind of war is this – is it a land, is it primarily in the air and sea domains? And then can the Russians produce without Chinese intermediate goods? Those are all still I think kind of up in the air and undetermined.
HOST
Speaking of the support that China has provided to Russia since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and this can be kind of a transition into our concluding discussion about the long term trajectory of the relationship. But clearly China and Russia have gotten much closer over the course of the last 30 plus years, especially since 2014 and the Russian war in Ukraine since 2022, it seems to have accelerated this trend. Russia has become even more dependent on China, economically, diplomatically and potentially in in the military sphere as well. So, do you see a possibility and you mentioned earlier that Russia will act in its own interests, not in Chinese interests, but is there a possibility that Russia is becoming so dependent on China that for the sake of preserving that partnership it might go beyond what it would like to do in helping China and that China might, even under certain circumstances, be able to put pressure on Russia to do its bidding to help it in the event of a protracted war.
STONE
Yeah, so, the question you raise here gets at the much bigger question of the long-term potential for the Russia, China relationship. I think the Ukraine wars in some ways instructive, right before the Ukraine War, Xi Jinping and Putin pledged sort of like “full throated support”, there was for some particular type of language that was used. And what we've seen is certainly Chinese support but, it's hard to argue that that support has been everything that China could do. Looks as though by and large, China has refrained from providing lethal aid to Russia. Certainly, no Chinese troops. North Korean seems like, but not Chinese. The Chinese have not been a bulwark of the Russian war effort like the Russians might like.
And so I think that may signal that if things go bad in the Indo Pacific, what Russia might reasonably expect to get back to China if China is not working particularly hard to get a Russian victory, not sure that Russia would work particularly hard to get a Chinese victory but it certainly doesn't want China to lose a war; China is a valuable partner. And then this gets the question of also, what leverage would China have if again we're working in terms of a very bad scenario of a war in the Western Pacific that goes long. That would suggest China has plenty of stuff on its plate to handle. That's going to be a huge commitment of resources for everybody concerned and leaving aside the disruption of the world economy. Would China be in a position to spare time and energy to coerce Russia in the midst of a long war with the US and partners in the Western Pacific? I'm not sure, I’m not clear that that is the case. And the other thing I would say, and this will start to transition us to thinking about the long-term arc of Russia China relations.
The Russians have thought about that possibility, and they use to in the not so recent past exercise what it would look like if China tried to sort of strong-arm Russia. The Russian military exercises work on a cycle. Basically, they rotate on a four-year cycle around the country. And so, you can look and enter time which Russian neighbors going to freak out every four years when the exercises roll around again and a stock or east in Russia, the eastern exercises come every four years, and Russia and Vostok exercises in 2010 and 2014 and those exercises were characterized by the Russians preparing to fight a big Continental Army and the rhetorical question would be how many big Continental armies are there on Russia's eastern borders? There's only one and it's China. Now it is absolutely the case that more recent versions of the Vostok exercises have not looked like preparing for potential war with China. But nonetheless, 2014 is not that long ago. So, I think there's some Russian concern about the long-term prospects of the Russia-China relationship, certainly right now Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have this kind of bromance, they actually seem to actually like each other. Putin does not appear to have many friends and maybe Xi Jinping is one of them. And they both see themselves as working in opposition to an undermining a US led kind of Western centered world order. But that's a kind of transactional relationship, and that's a relationship that depends on particular circumstances. And the question of how long that lasts, and how much, it depends on the two particular people involved, Putin and Xi Jinping, those are questions that may not speak to the long-term health of that relationship. There's optimists and pessimists on the question of where the China-Russia relationship is going. But certainly, there are reasons to think it might not last again. This will set up, I think, some other things we may want to discuss.
So, to sort of summarize the current relationship, they have not formed a formal military alliance, the 2001 treaty that they signed envisions certain scenarios in which either country would perceive a threat to its security and under those scenarios the treaty obligates them to consult with each other to try to remove the threat but no mutual defense guarantee the defining characteristic, as they're usually defined of military alliance.
HOST
And as you mentioned, not long before the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, about 3 weeks before that, Putin was in Beijing and he and Xi Jinping issued a joint declaration in which they declared that their friendship had no limits and there were no forbidden zones of cooperation. But as we've seen in the period since then, although China has assisted Russia in many ways in the course of that war in Ukraine, there are in fact limits on how closely they have cooperated. And so that's sort of the current situation and I think you covered several of the key issues here. China and Russia want to work together to weaken US power and to weaken US leadership of the world order. They have a close personal, they have a shared desire to uphold regime security, they believe that that's constantly under threat from the West and from the United States. And so that seems to provide a pretty durable relationship basis for the relationship, at least for the near-term future, at least as long as Putin and Xi are around and maybe longer, depending on how their successors and their regimes look like.
But you in the course of this podcast have described many of the limitations on the relationship, you've described limitations on what Russia could do to support China in a protracted war, and also the limitations that we've seen on what China has been able to support Russia, on ways that China has been able to support Russia in its war in Ukraine. Looking forward, do you see certain factors that could not only lead to a stagnation of the relationship, but over the long term, could even drive them apart, as you say, it wasn't long ago that Russia was doing military exercises, envisioning a possible Chinese invasion and Russia has long term concerns about the underpopulated and underdeveloped, Russian Far East and Siberian regions, which are bordering China and what China's long term intentions might be for those regions, do you see the possibility, maybe not in the immediate coming period, but over the slightly longer term that China and Russia could actually diverge and that this close relationship could come apart.
STONE
Yeah, I do think there are potential wedges between them, and I've been talking about short term versus long term and in the short term, I really don't see those as operating because both countries, see too much of a shared interest in trying to undermine a kind of Western world order. And when I say Western, I recognize Western world order includes South Korea and Japan and countries that you wouldn't describe geographically or culturally as Western.
Over the longer term, though, you've alluded to many of the things that that are problematic in that relationship. Demographics is one of them. China is in desperate need of resources and arable land for a large population. One of the things I like to do for students is show them, just go to Google Maps and satellite view and do a look at the border between Russia and China and Manchuria and what you see, and it leaps out, is that on the Chinese side of the border, there are towns and cities and plowed fields and on the Russian side of the border Manchuria there's nothing. So, you have a very large population right next to a chunk of Russia that’s empty and that's a long-term problem that Russia has been aware of for a very long time.
You know we talk in this country about the yellow peril, this storied idea of the danger of this enormous Asian population overwhelming Europe and the Western white races. It's very like 19th century, but you don't have to look very hard in Russia to find elements of that that are still around. Because of the populations, because eastern Russia is so sparsely populated, and China simply is not. So that's going to be a long-term issue. The Russian military thinks in those terms. I've heard it's speculated and it's hard to say for sure, but one of the reasons why the Russians are so eager to maintain tactical nuclear weapons is because part of Russian military thinking is if we have to fight a massive Chinese army, we don't have the manpower to do it, we would need to go with tactical nuclear weapons. That is speculation I have seen, but I don't know that for a fact, but there's a kind of logic to that and that kind of long-term issue is a problem for the relationship.
Central Asia is another interesting one, certainly the Russians have historical connections to Central Asia that were the five countries of Central Asia were part of the Soviet Union; many of the elites are still Russian speaking, Central Asian elites will still go to Russia for university. The security structures often look to Moscow, but China is certainly seeing Central Asia as part of its natural, legitimate sphere and there's an incipient tension there, I think. Often what is happening is that Russia tends to have a more dominant role in security spheres in Central Asia. China is increasingly asserting an economic role, whether that's selling consumer goods or buying energy or building infrastructure and I think there's a long-term potential for a clash there between those two interests with Russian interest deteriorating over time and Chinese growing overtime. Whether Russia's going to be comfortable with that is I think an open question and something that over the long term might cause some issues.
There's also, interestingly, some questions about Arctic that are fairly subtle, but I'll just go into them briefly here. Though as a result of global warming and climate change, passage through the Arctic along the northern edge of Russia is much more practical and viable than it had been. And the Russians think a lot about this, this Northern Sea route across the top of Eurasia presents opportunities, but also dangers from the Russian point of view, this is a frontier that they didn't really need to worry much defending and now they do. Now they need infrastructure in the far north to deal with this. But the Russians always talk about that as Russian territory, these are Russian waters, this is a Russian question that the Russians will decide. When China talks about interest in the Arctic, China always phrases this in terms of that the Arctic is a global common and a global resource for global partners to exploit and use on a global basis. And you've actually had times in places where Russian scholars will point out that the Chinese are making very expansive claims about territory that's Russian. This is a very low priority at the moment, but overtime I think it's an issue that has real potential to cause some kinds of concern over the Arctic. What is resources are going to be used? How it's going to be used as Commons and how those Commons are going to be governed by either territorial states that have territorial claims or by some more kind of multilateral framework.
HOST
Well, thank you, you've mentioned several sources of possible tension in the China Russia relationship, you also mentioned the Vostok 2010 exercises and the issue of tactical nuclear weapons and there were reports that in those exercises, Russia actually simulated the use of tactical nuclear weapons against the invading army and as you say, that wasn't that long ago, so I think it's correct based on my experience in Russia as well and people I've talked to that, that those fears about China's long term rise and intentions are there, although in the short to medium term, Russia has set aside those concerns, perceiving that they can use the partnership with China to help advance their mutual interest in trying to weaken the US-led international order.
So, I'll just conclude by asking if you care to make any kind of prediction about how long the trends that we see now are likely to continue, the trend of a close China Russia relationship and close cooperation, and when might we expect these the tensions that you described to become more prominent and potentially cause strain on the relationship?
STONE
So, Brian, that is a great question. And as an historian, I know that historians are terrible at predicting the future and again, this is fresh in my mind because as we're taping this the Assad regime just fell. A conflict that it seemed frozen for a decade, all of a sudden became unfrozen and things looked very different. And we simply don't know how the Ukraine world will finish. How that will end and on what terms and that's going to have an enormous effect on Russian policy going forward.
A Russian victory of some kind in Ukraine would have a very specific effect on that regime. A Russian loss would look very different as well so, it's extremely hard to say, so I'll fall back on my short term, long term in the short term, I don't see anything shaking the Russia China relationship in the long term I do think there are a number of trends that are going to push them apart but, how soon that operates, you know a large of it will depend on how long Vladimir Putin is in power and how long Xi Jinping is in power and there's no way to know the answer to those questions.
Well, thank you very much David, for joining me for this podcast, I've very much enjoyed this conversation, and I hope our listeners do as well. And for the information of listeners, a conference volume is coming based on the PLA conference that was held back in October. And our papers will be in that volume, which we hope to have published by the late spring sometime so, you can look for that. So, thank you very much for joining us. This has been classic dialogues, land power in the Indo Pacific, a China land power studies production. For more. War College Podcast check out conversations on strategy SSI live and a better peace.
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