544 { China’s Quest
Arabian agitation mixed in, the situation could become quite complex. It soon
became apparent to Beijing and Moscow that they faced common problems
in Central Asia and would benefit from cooperation in dealing with them.
Soon Chinese and Soviet intelligence services were exchanging information
on jihadist activity in Central Asia. Thus in 1996, Russia, China, Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan met in Shanghai (ergo, The Shanghai Five”) to
develop a common approach to these problems. This was the beginning of
what would ultimately become the Shanghai Cooperative Organization
(SCO) in 2006. Both Beijing and Moscow also recognized a common interest
in minimizing the US presence in post-Soviet Central Asia, although they
choose not to say so publicly.^37
By the mid-1990s, initial Russian enthusiasm for the West was turning to
resentment. Large-scale Western economic assistance, widely anticipated at
the end of the Soviet era, failed to arrive. Much US advice urging shock ther-
apy in restructuring the economy did not work well, or even backfired, and
was seen to have contributed to Russia’s economic regression; many Russians
wondered if this was by design. The United States and the West ignored
Russian interests over German unification, over entry of East European coun-
tries into NATO, over intervention in Yugoslavia, over missile defense, and so
on. Americans tended to think that they had “won the Cold War”; this seemed
obvious to them. The more common Russian point of view was that there had
been no winners and losers from the Cold War, and that the two sides had sim-
ply agreed to end it for their mutual benefit. These common American views
infuriated Russians and explained to their satisfaction why the Americans
were treating Russia like a defeated enemy, why Washington time and again
violated Russia’s interests. Russia was too weak to do much about US unipolar
arrogance. But it could align with the other power resentful about the position
of America in the world, the People’s Republic of China.
There is a strong similarity between the Russo-Chinese combination that
formed in the 1990s and the combination of Weimar Germany and Bolshevik
Russia that formed after the Versailles settlement of 1919. Defeated Germany,
reconstituted as an unstable democracy, then bore the opprobrium of war
guilt, heavy reparations, and demilitarization imposed by the Versailles
treaty. Bolshevik Russia was the target of intense hostility, military interven-
tion, a cordon sanitaire, and exclusion from diplomatic circles. In the decade
after Versailles, Germany and Russia, separated by a vast gulf in terms of
ideology, found a convenient partnership as two powers excluded by the
international dispensation set up by the victors in the recent Great War. That
Russo-German partnership was formalized by a treaty signed in the northern
Italian city of Rapallo in 1922. The Russo-Chinese partnership that emerged
in the 1990s was a similar league of countries unhappy with the dispensation
worked out by the victors in a recent epic conflict. Both Beijing and Moscow
felt the United States was using its vast, historically unprecedented position