Russia and China aligned in the 1990s to counter Western power.

Evidence

In the immediate post-Cold War period, Russian-Chinese relations became significantly more cooperative. Border disputes were resolved; military forces on both sides of the border were reduced; trade expanded; each stopped targeting the other with nuclear missiles; and their foreign ministers explored their common interests in combating fundamentalist Islam. Most importantly, Russia found in China an eager and substantial customer for military equipment and technology, including tanks, fighter aircraft, long-range bombers, and surface-to-air missiles. From the Russian viewpoint, this warming of relations represented both a conscious decision to work with China as its Asian “partner,” given the stagnant coolness of its relations with Japan, and a reaction to its conflicts with the West over NATO expansion, economic reform, arms control, economic assistance, and membership in Western international institutions. For its part, China was able to demonstrate to the West that it was not alone in the world and could acquire the military capabilities necessary to implement its power projection regional strategy. For both countries, a Russian-Chinese connection is, like the Confucian-Islamic connection, a means of countering Western power and universalism. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 672

Categorization

• XREF: Contemporary echoes: the present-day Sino-Russian axis and its arms trade reverses these 1990s dynamics; useful contrast for writing on the current configuration.
• SEED: Angle: how the 1994-1998 Sino-Russian military-commercial axis that Huntington describes prefigured today’s asymmetric Chinese dependence on Russian energy and Russian dependence on Chinese technology.