Is triangular diplomacy re-enacted?

HONG KONG (JP): As Chinese President Jiang Zemin and U.S. President Bill Clinton held their brief summit meeting in New York, the old triangular diplomacy between Moscow, Beijing and Washington once again appeared to be in vogue.

Immediately prior to the Jiang summit, Clinton enjoyed a half- day summit with Russian leader Boris Yeltsin at Hyde Park in upstate New York, the ancestral home, and now memorial library, of former president Franklin D. Roosevelt.

This juxtaposition of the Russo-American and the Sino-American summits would be of little note, were it not for the fact that Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen made a point of visiting Moscow on his way to an extended recent diplomatic sortie in Europe and the United States. Then, both the Chinese and Russian leaders made a point of stressing the improvement in Russo- Chinese ties, rather as if they were trying to catch the eye of the Americans.

While in Moscow, Qian and his Russian hosts talked lavishly about ten or more Russo-Chinese agreements which are to be signed before the end of the year. The Russians voiced so much enthusiasm for a new political relationship to be agreed between the two Eurasian neighbors that Qian felt obliged to play things down a bit.

At a time when the Chinese military are anxious to purchase higher technology weapons without having to do the time-consuming research and development themselves, Russia is the one available market place where such commodities can be purchased at a reasonable price.

At a time when Russian arms manufacturers need export income from foreign markets to sustain their production and their research, China's craving for their wares is welcome news. The U.S. ban on weapons sales to China instituted after the 1989 Beijing Massacre remains in force.

The trouble -- and the fascination -- with triangular diplomacy is that those conducting it are seldom frank about their intentions.

Russian Ambassador to China Igor Rogachev illustrated this when a BBC interviewer recently asked him whether triangular diplomacy had staged a comeback. On the one hand, Rogachev, used to triangular plays as a leading Soviet expert on China, did not deny it. On the other, he gave the classic disclaimer of triangular intent -- that Russia would never seek developments in one relationship at the expense of another bilateral tie. So the real Rogachev answer to the question was -- "yes, but I am not going to admit it".

The exception to this triangular habit was former president Richard Nixon's opening to China in 1971 to 1972. Then both the U.S. and China made it indirectly plain that they were getting closer to each other because of their respective fears of the Soviet Union.

But because of deep Russian anxieties over the policies of China under Mao Zedong, Moscow responded to the development of Sino-American relations by itself trying to get closer to the United States.

It could be a different triangular pattern today, now that the Soviet Union has dissolved, and the United States is clearly the world's foremost military power.

It makes sense for Russia to try and get closer to China at a time when Beijing concentrates upon the return of its lost territories of Hong Kong and Taiwan, and does not reclaim the Russian Far East, and when Moscow's main geopolitical worry is the expansion of NATO towards Russia's western borders.

The Clinton Administration insists both that NATO should expand into the former Soviet sphere of influence and that any U.S. troops in future Bosnian peacekeeping operations must be under American NATO command. But the U.S. also insists that any Russian troops in that Bosnian operation must come under NATO command, too. The Russians want to send their troops in either under Russian command, or at least under United Nations' direction, rather than NATO's.

It makes sense for China to try and get closer to Russia at a time when Russia is clearly a diminished threat along the long Russo-Chinese border and China's geopolitical worry is its ability to modernize the forces of the People's Liberation Army, at a time when Sino-American relations are deteriorating and Sino-Japanese relations are problematical.

But the fact remains that Sino-American, and Sino-Japanese, trade and investment are soaring in China, while overall Russo- Chinese trade is actually declining. Russia gets far more badly- needed financial aid and assistance from the U.S. and Europe than it ever will attain from China. So it makes sense for Russia and China to try and improve their respective relations with the U.S. even as they get closer to each other -- with both Prime Minister Li Peng and President Jiang visiting Moscow in the last twelve months, and Russian Premier Viktor Chernomyrdin having visited Beijing.

Beneath all these comings and goings, it is not difficult to detect the "card" playing reflexes first manifest in the days of the old Sino-Soviet-American triangle.

Boris Yeltsin set out for the U.S., and the 50th anniversary of the foundation of the UN, threatening to sack his Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev for being "too pro-Western", and with reports appearing in the Russian press, from a mysterious unknown think-tank, identifying the U.S. as still being "the main foreign power potentially capable of creating threats to the Russian Federations's military security..."

Jiang Zemin set out for the U.S. trying to sound less bellicose towards Taiwan, and actually offering a summit to Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui, but his effort was somewhat spoilt when the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman revived talk of using force against Taiwan, if necessary. This in turn gave the U.S. State Department the opportunity to stress the U.S. view -- at long last, since it has been relatively silent on this crucial angle during the last few months -- that any resolution of the Taiwan dispute must be peaceful.

Whether signs of Russo-Chinese togetherness have any impact on the Clinton Administration's foreign policies remains uncertain, given its generally low level of strategic competence. Clinton certainly devoted more time to Yeltsin than he gave to Jiang, but that is probably because the Bosnia/NATO crisis is uppermost among Washington's worries, and the U.S. remains, as ever, Eurocentric in its basic outlook.

So whether Clinton meant to send the signal which he in fact transmitted must be in doubt. Yet it was abundantly obvious that while he enjoyed his meeting with Yeltsin which came replete with bear-hugs -- particularly Yeltsin's backhanded remark to the U.S. press, "you are the disaster" -- Clinton was much more uptight with Jiang. So the fact that Russo-American ties are, despite difficulties, much warmer than Sino-American ones was clearly illustrated. Yet neither summit appeared, at first sight, to yield any resolution of ongoing differences, whether over Bosnia or Taiwan.

Perhaps all that Clinton was signaling was that he found it more agreeable to deal with a similarly beleaguered democratic president than with the world's main communist leader, trying to assert himself. The main pressure on Clinton to improve ties with China and Russia comes from domestic political considerations -- he simply does not want a foreign policy failure to mar his re- election campaign.

But in view of the lack of lasting success at both summits, it will be an interesting test of revived triangular diplomacy to see how the current Russo-Chinese entente now develops.