Sure. I'll say I saw the narrative about the China-Russia relationship as being either a strategic partnership or an axis of convenience. Those are nice academically ideal types that help frame the debate. I think neither of them is accurate.
I think the relationship is dynamic, complex and contingent. It's dynamic because it responds to things that happen in the world. What happened in Syria recently is one of those things. It's complex because they interact across what we call the instruments of power, which are diplomatic, informational, military and economic. It's contingent because these are great powers that have presence all over the world. It can be affected by things that happen on the ground that might be out of the control of either Beijing or Moscow.
As I said, our commitments to our NATO allies and the countries with which we—in this case, “we” is the U.S.—have binding security commitments to the Indo-Pacific are non-negotiable. They're legal commitments. Therefore, there's a requirement to deploy military force there to deter conflict or to prevail in conflict if deterrence fails.
Other parts of the world, like Africa and central Asia, which I mentioned as examples.... For this book project, I looked at Chinese-Russian interaction in Africa and central Asia. Places where the U.S. military footprint is lighter than in Europe and in the Indo-Pacific are places where Chinese-Russian interaction tends to be either compartmentalized, as I would call it—in Africa, each is doing its own thing and is vaguely aware of what the other is doing, but they're not co-operating or coordinating—or competitive. In central Asia, increasingly they're competitors, especially in the economic sphere.
My admonition to western policy-makers—and this applies to U.S. policy-makers, especially—because I hear from them a lot that we should try to drive a wedge between China and Russia is to not try to do that. That's my advice. Think about where we deploy military power. Be judicious in where we deploy military power and ensure that we deploy military power only where core or vital national interests are at stake. In places like central Asia, I think our strategy is fairly correct.
We talk about things like sovereignty, democratic resilience, civil society development, regional co-operation and economic development. Those are things western partners can make a contribution to in central Asia. They don't trigger fears in Russia and China of some sort of western military presence or intervention. They probably allow conditions for Chinese-Russian competition to emerge, whereas it otherwise wouldn't, especially if we were there in some sort of military sense.