What Russia and China learned from America after 9/11 — Journalists Mikhail Zygar and Cindy Yu explain how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan helped reshape Russia and China's ambitions.
This weekend's talks in Ukraine and Russia come on the eve of the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. At that intensely vulnerable moment, many world powers, including Russia and China, found common ground with the U.S., believing they shared some common interests like fighting global terrorism. We wanted to explore how relationships between those superpowers have changed since 9/11. So we called up British-Chinese journalist Cindy Yu and Russian author Mikhail Zygar.
MIKHAIL ZYGAR: I think that's very important to remember that that was almost the beginning of Putin's presidency. He became president in year 2000. So he was just learning how to become the head of state, and he was trying – really badly – to become a friend of George W. Bush, as well as to become an equal partner for his European leaders. He really wanted to, for example, to become a part of G8, to become a partner of the United States in the war against terror. He was trying to use it as the justification of his war in Chechnya.
He was not that person we have now. He didn't have plans to run Russia. So yes, he was mostly sincere, and he was pragmatic because he was trying to make a link between al-Qaida and Chechen warlords. But mostly, he was just a very young leader who was trying to mimic what Western leaders did. He didn't share the values – that's important. He didn't really think that Western-style democracy was OK for Russia. He was trying to sell Russian oil and gas to the West.
ROSE: So initially, the 9/11 attacks then brought the U.S. and Russia closer together. Cindy, let me turn to you. Was that also the case with the U.S. and China?
CINDY YU: Yes. There was a similar phenomenon with the U.S. and China. President Jiang Zemin was one of the first people to call President Bush, as well, to offer his condolences. China was the world's seventh largest exporter at the time – so nowhere near the economic giant it is today. And so you really needed America as an economic and diplomatic ally in order for Chinese economic growth to get to the next phase and to become what it has since become.
ROSE: How did that dynamic for each of those countries change after the U.S. began sending troops abroad – first into Afghanistan and then later to Iraq?
YU: Because of the situation in Xinjiang, which borders Afghanistan, China was quite happy for the Taliban to be removed. But it did mean that American troops were very close to the Chinese border, and that made it very uncomfortable. But then in 2003, when America unilaterally went into Iraq – or at least in China's views, unilaterally in a sense of not respecting the U.N. Security Council decision – that was, I think, for China, an even bigger deal. Because they thought, OK, here is America behaving in a way that is disrespectful to international law.
ROSE: And what about Russia? How does the dynamic change there?
ZYGAR: When the operation in Afghanistan started, Putin and Russia – Russian government was really happy about that because Afghanistan and Taliban, particularly, was seen as a threat to Russia's security. Russia had its own history of the war against Mujahideen in Afghanistan, but everything changed with Iraq. That, in a way, became a very important turning point in relationships between Russia and the West.
Because during so many years, when the United States were criticizing Russia for being nondemocratic, for violation of human rights and for the bloody invasion of Chechnya – and probably that's why, right now, we often hear in Russian propaganda that the current Russia's invasion of Ukraine is the answer to American invasion of Iraq. So violence is a privilege of the superpower. They say if America could invade Iraq, why Russia could not invade Ukraine?
ROSE: We've seen the 2008 financial crisis, the Arab Spring, and in more recent years, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. What lessons do you think Russia and China learned from the way the U.S. handled those moments?
YU: So I think when it comes to the first of those events, the 2008 financial crisis, Chinese economy recovered much quicker than the rest of the world, mainly because, at that stage, it still wasn't really interlinked with the global economy financially. For some people in China, certainly, especially the more liberal-minded economists, who thought, oh, the American system of capitalism does not have all the answers.
Then the Arab Spring comes, and that is a reminder to some figures in China that, actually, America is perhaps out there to foment democracy, as it were. Because the prevailing understanding of the Arab Spring in China is that it was a color revolution fomented by American forces such as the CIA.
And then when it comes to Afghanistan, China has had a very benign relationship with the Taliban since its return. But certainly, all of these events – what they tell China is that actually the American way of doing things is not necessarily the right thing to do, that America is not necessarily the model to emulate or your ally in all of this, that China has to kind of ford (ph) its own route, as it were.