Abstract

The Russo-Sino role reversal

The United States has a long and distressing record of miscalculating its friends and enemies. Washington is currently working out where China and Russia fit into the latest hierarchy of the good and the bad. Since 1989 Russia, with a highly imperfect democratic political structure but free elections, has tried with indifferent success to be counted as one of the industrial democracies. America's North Atlantic Treaty Organization expansion policy, despite conceding an advisory role to Russia, implicitly cuts it out of that company. Meanwhile, the U.S. Administration, lobbying to give China, which is not a democracy and, its leaders vow, will never become one-most favored nation trading status, makes large political concessions in order to bring it into the international system of the U.S.