Despite the focus of the mass media on (mostly theoretical) rivalry between the USA and China, and the rapport in recent years between China and Russia through a Central Asian axis, neither of these apparent geopolitical alignments are historically or organically based. They are superficial and in particular obscure the behind-the-scenes diplomacy that takes place above and beyond the public view. I have contended since the 1980s that there will be conflict between Russia and China, and that the USA will eventually adopt a de jure pro-China position, which has continued de facto despite the occasional posturing on the world stage.

Although there has been an ongoing relationship between Israel and China and between China and the USA, Russia, on the other hand, has been regarded as highly dubious by the USA, China, and Israel, regardless of what appears from public rostrums and treaties.

• The US foreign policy and international banking establishments together with the Zionists have been nervous about Russia for over a Century. They have regarded Russians as barbaric pogromists; Russia, the land of the Black Hundreds which has only relented during the brief interregnums of (a) The Bolsheviks up to the rise of Stalin;[1] (b) the regimes of Gorbachev[2] and Yeltsin. The conspicuous presence of Jews among the “oligarchs” targeted by Putin for corruption has served to multiply this nervousness towards Russia.

• If there was ever going to be an historically and organically based alliance between China and Russia, one would expect this to have been forged on the basis of “fraternal relations” when Russia was nominally “Communist.” Such was far from the case however. The foundation of Sino-Soviet relations was the cynically named 1950 “Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance,” which reduced China to a vassal state, and was ended by China in 1979 with the invasion of Vietnam as a symbolic gesture of the two-fingered kind.[3]

Causes of Future Conflict

In regard to the relationship that will emerge between Russia and China, it is a matter of “blood is thicker than water,” and for Russians the Chinese are racial enemies. However, in this instance, it is water that is likely to be the factor that will reinforce the bonds and the antagonisms of “blood.”

China’s domination of Tibet provides the probable key to future widespread conflict throughout South and Southeast Asia and extending to Russia. The control of the Himalayan headwaters that feed most of India and Southeast Asia means that China has the potential lever over life and death for tens of millions. Water resources, flooding, pollution, and drought are major, albeit rarely publicized, problems throughout Asia. China has plans that will enable it to turn off the water taps for Asia at will, and the Chinese will not hesitate to do so when they face water resource crises of their own. The plan is for a Great South-North Water Project which will be able to divert river waters from the Tibetan highlands, including the waters of the Brahmaputra which feed India, into the parched Yellow River.[4] With such crises against the background of historic tensions that have still not been resolved between China and India, Japan, and Vietnam, and Russia’s historically sound relations that endure with Vietnam and India, and the Chinese aim of hegemony over Central Asia, the much touted Shanghai Cooperation Organization established in 1996 as the “Shanghai Five,” will be no more enduring than the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Ironically, it was during the “Communist” era that China and the USSR came close to full-scale war, when China caused provocations along the border with Russia. During 1960-1963 there were over nine thousand disputes. The biggest clash in 1969 came when the Chinese killed 32 Russians in an ambush, with Russia responding by bombing China, causing about 800 Chinese deaths.[5]

Such was the adversity between Russia and China during the 1960s that veteran journalist Harrison E Salisbury wrote a book entitled The Coming War Between Russia and China, in which he referred to the historic enmity starting during the 13th Century.[6] It would be naïve to think that a “Shanghai Cooperation Organization” has fundamentally altered the broad outlines of Salisbury’s thesis.

USA & China

US opposition to Red China is one of the great myths of popular history. Nor was Mao particular antagonistic towards the USA other than when he wanted to posture as the rival leader of World Communism and the Third World against the “running dogs of US imperialism.” His opposition was very much that of a “paper tiger.”

Stalin was never well disposed towards Mao, whereas the USA was. The USA was insistent that Chiang deal with the Communists, while Stalin insisted that the Communists deal with Chiang. It was Chiang whom Stalin recognized as the leader of China, and regarded Mao as a “Trotskyite.”[7] When the Russians prepared to evacuate Manchuria in 1945 they stayed until 1946 to allow Chiang in ahead of Mao. The Soviet Ambassador was only withdrawn from Chiang’s entourage the day before Mao’s announcement of his government in Peking in October 1949. Mao never forgave this. Mao’s attempts to ingratiate himself with the USSR were never successful, and he endured humiliation.[8]

Conversely to the anti-Communist policy pursued by Stalin, the USA did whatever it could to back Mao. Gen. George C Marshall warned that US support for Chiang would end if he did not stop pursuing the Red Army into northern Manchuria at a time when Mao could have been defeated. As Chang and Halliday point out in their definitive biography on Mao, in a chapter aptly entitled “Saved by Washington,” this US betrayal of Chiang was decisive.[9] However, Mao, as the budding co-equal to Stalin as leader of World Communism, was obliged to direct his alliance towards the USSR rather than the USA, a decision that cost China dearly under the terms of the colonialistic “Sino-Soviet Treaty.” Moreover, Mao was never accepted as the leader of World Communism other than by the Communist Party of New Zealand and by Albania.[10] His only option for recognition as a world statesman was to return to the USA, resulting in the Nixon visit of 1972.

However, despite the self-imposed isolation of Mao in his ill-considered attempt to align with the USSR rather than the USA, the US foreign policy establishment and plutocratic interests had never disowned their pro-Mao attitude. These centred on the Rockefeller cabal and more latterly that of George Soros. Despite US recognition for China not being achieved until 1975, the policy that was pursued by the Nixon Administration towards China since 1970 had been formulated a decade previously by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Peter Grose explained this in the official history of the CFR, which he calls America’s “foreign policy establishment”:

The Council turned in earnest to the problem of communist China early in the 1960s. Various Council publications had started developing the idea of a ‘two-China’ policy—recognition of both the Nationalist government of Taiwan and the communist government on the mainland. This, Council authors suggested, might be the least bad policy direction. Professor A. Doak Barnett published a trail-blazing book for the Council in 1960, Communist China and Asia. A major Council study of relations between the United States and China commenced in 1964, the year China exploded its first nuclear bomb; the group met systematically for the next four years. ‘Contentment with the present stalemate in relations with the Chinese is not statesmanship,’ declared Robert Blum of the Asia Society[11], the first director of the project. ‘American impatience and the strong currents of political emotion often make it impossible to plan ahead to manage our policy in a persevering but flexible way.’”[12]

Like the recognition of Bolshevik Russian desired by the international bankers at the earliest stages of the regime, recognition of Red China presented a problem, especially since the USA had given guarantees to Taiwan. A typically duplicitous strategy was therefore required. The USA used the “two-China policy” to secure Red China’s entry into the United Nations, and to sideline Taiwan. The CFR approach was one of gradual promotion of the Mao regime, decrying the so-called “strong currents of emotion” that were holding back the globalist relationship with Red China. Grose explains:

This seemed just the sort of political stalemate that the Council on Foreign Relations, free of electoral and partisan constraints, was endowed to repair. Midway through the project, the Council published an analysis of public opinion called The American People and China by A. T. Steele, who reached the unexpected conclusion that Americans were more willing than many of their elected officeholders to forge new relations with China. This study argued that it was only a steady diet of hostile public statements that had made Americans “disposed to believe the worst of communist China and they [the Chinese] the worst of us.”[13]

It is from this milieu that Rockefeller protégé Henry Kissinger[14] emerged as the public architect of the US policy towards China. Grose states of Kissinger and Cyrus Vance:

Kissinger, acting as Nixon’s national security adviser, embarked on a secret mission to Beijing in 1971[15], to make official, exploratory contact with the communist regime. Nixon himself followed in 1972. The delicate process of normalizing diplomatic relations between the United States and China was completed in 1978 by Kissinger’s successor as secretary of state, Cyrus R. Vance, a leading Council officer before and after his government service.[16]