Bush-Cheney Policies Help Revive Russo-Chinese Military Alliance
The implementation of Bush-Cheney Foreign Policy, 2001-2007, has succeeded in reviving strategic and tactical Russian-Chinese military ties for the first time since the Russo-Chinese Military Alliance split apart over three decades ago. US Foreign Policy from Nixon-Kissinger on tried to help make this split permanent, and to cultivate separate relationships between the US and China, and the US and Russia, on two separate tracks.
Now, thanks largely to Bush’s "Bring ‘em all on" approach to world diplomacy, and to the inept, misguided, and badly informed Bush-Cheney operators in the State Dept. (John Bolton & Co.), this military alliance has been revived. Through a series of strategic and tactical blunders, Bush-Cheney policies have helped revive a long-past Russo-Chinese alliance, now known as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which certainly is potentially not good news for the United States, in the short or the long term.
In fact, many analysts regard the new SCO Organization as a potential global challenge to NATO, which is now at least nominally in charge of our own military operations in Afghanistan.
PLA Troops Arrives in Russia for Joint Exercise
Member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), China, Russia, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan will be holding their first joint military exercise ‘Peace Mission 2007’ in August. The first train carrying PLA troops and equipment arrived at the China-Russia border on 27 July.
A total of 6,500 military personnel and 80 fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters will take part in the joint exercise, which will be held between 9th and 17th August in the Chebarkulsk training ground in the Privolzhsko-Uralskiy military district in Russia.
Russia will send 2,000 military personnel and 36 aircraft to participate the exercise, with an additional 2,700 personnel to provide logistic support. China will contribute 1,700 troops and 46 aircraft. Tajikistan and Kazakhstan will each send an airborne company, and Kyrgyzstan will send an airborne platoon. Uzbekistan will also send officers to take part in the exercise.
full article here
I had to look hard to find any detailed news or statements on this new SCO situation in Eurasia from "reliable" US sources, but I did finally manage to locate a fairly recent and relevant in-depth big-picture study, put out by a real specialist at the US National Defense University. It provides a lot of good background information.
The Russians and Chinese made some initial moves to work jointly back in 1996, but it wasn't until June 2001 that these efforts accelerated. Military relations began to develop more fully in 2005. Uzbekistan, which had become a part of Bush's "Coalition of the Willing" in 2001 after 9-11, was subsequently estranged, and now is an active partner in the new Russian-Chinese military alliance instead.
China, Russia and the Balance of Power in Central Asia
by Eugene B. Rumer, Senior Fellow at the Institute for National
Strategic Studies of the US National Defense University, Nov. 2006
--an article in PDF format you can download from here
Countries like India, Pakistan, and Iran have also already begun to establish permanent liaisons with the SCO. Some of them will have observers at the large-scale Russo-Chinese military exercises which start tomorrow. So, it might be really advisable if Secty. Rice considered rethinking the Bush policies which result in this kind of foreign policy fiasco, before things get any worse from the US perspective.