OPINION:
Russian leader Vladimir Putin was just reelected in a sham election, adding six more years to his 25-year reign — from 1999 to 2024 — of power.
There was no independent media coverage of or meaningful opposition to Mr. Putin, with the recent death of Alexei Navalny in an Arctic penal colony. This comes as the war in Ukraine enters its third year, as Mr. Putin, comparing himself to Peter the Great, pursues his goal of recreating the Russian Empire.
In 1979, an expansionist Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the beginning of a bloody 10-year war with enormous casualties. In November 1986, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev decided to withdraw all Soviet combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 1988, publicly stating that Afghanistan had become “a bleeding wound.” And by February 1989, all Soviet troops had been withdrawn from Afghanistan, followed by the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989.
What followed was a failed coup against Gorbachev in August 1991, with Ukraine and Belarus declaring their independence and Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Finland seeking international recognition as sovereign states. On Dec. 25, 1991, Gorbachev resigned as president of the Soviet Union, with Boris Yeltsin taking over as president of a Russian state that was no longer a communist monolith.
That was the end of the Cold War. In 1999, Yeltsin resigned and passed the torch to Mr. Putin, who told the nation in 2005 that the collapse of the Soviet empire “was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
The defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan was welcomed by many in China who remembered the summer of 1969 when the Soviet Union had 42 divisions — over 1 million troops — on the border with China, threatening a nuclear strike against Chinese nuclear sites. Indeed, that March, Chinese and Soviet forces clashed on Zhenbao Island on the Ussuri River, with both sides taking casualties. The conflict ended in two weeks, averting an escalation of hostilities with the potential use of nuclear weapons.
What followed was the speed with which China and the U.S. normalized relations. Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong approached the U.S., convinced that enlisting a faraway enemy against a nearby enemy was the best strategy for dealing with the Soviet Union. Mao invited President Richard Nixon, who also distrusted the Soviet Union, to China. In February 1972, during Nixon’s visit to China, China and the U.S. agreed to a Shanghai Communique that committed the U.S. and China to work toward the normalization of relations.
On Jan. 1, 1979, formal diplomatic relations were established, with Deng Xiaoping, who had replaced Mao as China’s paramount leader in 1978, agreeing to expand cooperation with the U.S. in collecting and sharing intelligence on the Soviet Union. CIA Director Stansfield Turner visited China in July 1981 to further discuss the Soviets’ December 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. William Casey replaced Turner as CIA director and, working with Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and William Clark, President Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser, collaborated to defeat the Soviet Union in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan.
And they were successful. Much of the success in Afghanistan in defeating the invading Soviet forces was because of China’s participation. Starting in 1982, China cooperated with the U.S. to provide weapons to the mujahedeen and training in China for their resistance fighters. The amount and quality of arms and ammunition China provided increased exponentially from 1985 to 1988 to nearly $1.5 billion, contributing significantly to the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
China’s distrust of the Soviet Union and its partnership with the U.S. to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan — a prelude to the demise of the Soviet empire and end of the Cold War — is in sharp relief to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s embrace of a revanchist Russian Federation and its dictator, Vladimir Putin.
During the Winter Olympics in China in 2022, Mr. Xi spoke of a “no limits” partnership with Mr. Putin days before Russia invaded Ukraine, a sovereign nation that Russia had provided security assurances to in 1994, in the Budapest Memorandum, also signed by the U.S. and the United Kingdom.
This “no limits” partnership must be of concern to many in China who continue to view Russia with suspicion and are concerned that China’s aligning with a revanchist Russia will affect China’s international credibility, not only with the U.S. and the European Union but also with the Global South and others who view Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as a blatant war of aggression.
• Joseph R. DeTrani served as special envoy for the Six-Party Talks with North Korea from 2003 to 2006 and as director of the National Counterproliferation Center. The views expressed here are the author’s and not those of any government agency or department.
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