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Ray · 04-25-2008, 05:03 AM

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CFE Treaty: Prospects for Asia reinvigoration, expansion

As concern about Russia-China relations grows, one possible mechanism to reduce conflict potential is a conventional arms limitation treaty, Eric Hundman writes for CDI.

By Eric Hundman for CDI (24/04/08)

Concern about the relationship between China and Russia is bound to increase - as China's military power expands apace with its economic growth, as Russia enjoys increasing influence due to rising energy prices, and as potentially dangerous nuclear technology spreads around the world, conflict between the two becomes ever more dangerous.

One possible mechanism to reduce the potential for conflict in the region is a conventional arms limitation treaty similar to the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty, which was created to reduce the potential for dangerous armed conflict in Europe during the Cold War. This analysis examines the prospects for a similar treaty in Asia, particularly along the Russian-Chinese border, using lessons from the CFE process in Europe combined with data on the current strategic situation in Asia.

Current status

Attempts to limit the deployment of military forces have a long history, but they had an unusual level of urgency in the Cold War as two nuclear-armed superpowers faced off. Negotiations on conventional force limits in Europe began in 1973 as the Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction Talks (MBFR) amongst members of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, with the US and USSR, respectively, at each alliance's helm. These talks did not result in a final agreement, but their goal was resurrected in talks held under the framework of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), beginning in 1986.

In March 1989, MBFR talks formally ended and CFE negotiations began. The CFE was signed 20 months later, on 19 November 1990, and entered into force on Nov. 9, 1992. The main objective of the CFE was to "reduce the possibility of a surprise armed attack and the triggering of major offensive operations in Europe" by limiting the number of several types of "major armaments."

Placements of battle tanks, armored combat vehicles, artillery pieces, combat aircraft, and attack helicopters were all generally limited in a series of concentric zones radiating outward from central Europe. Limits were also placed on each bloc's overall force levels, with distribution amongst individual countries to be decided within each alliance.

Personnel limits were addressed later, in the CFE-1A agreement. CFE-1A established military personnel limits but exempted sea-based naval forces, internal security forces, and forces under United Nations command. CFE-1A came into force on 9 November 1992, but was a political instrument and required no ratification.

By the time the CFE and CFE-1A were signed, however, it had become clear that the treaty needed revision, due to the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union and the emergence of potential new parties to the CFE (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovenia). The resulting agreement has been termed the Adapted CFE and was signed on 19 November 1999.

In contrast to the original CFE, the Adapted treaty uses a system of national and territorial ceilings for heavy armaments, rather than a system of zonal and alliance bloc limits. The equipment types that are limited remain the same. The Adapted CFE also does not address personnel limits, perhaps because they were shown to be so hard to address during the MBFR negotiations. In addition, by the time the CFE was signed, both parties recognized that any strategically significant treaty violation would be more likely to involve an increase in armaments than in personnel.

However, entry into force of the Adapted CFE treaty required ratification by all 30 states parties, and to date only Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine have done so. NATO members have refused to sign the Adapted CFE until Russia withdraws treaty-limited weapons and military forces from Moldova and Georgia. Russia has also consistently been in noncompliance with its "flank limits," but Moscow has remained within its overall treaty limits and this does not appear to be a sticking point for NATO. Despite the failure to ratify the Adapted CFE, the 2001 review conference affirmed that the original CFE would remain fully in effect. Notably, the CFE regime currently in force has no provision for expansion, though the Adapted CFE treaty does.

On 14 July 2007, though, Russia called the future of the CFE regime into question by announcing that it would "suspend" its participation in the treaty 150 days hence. Ostensibly Russia wants other treaty participants to ratify the Adapted CFE, as Moscow has. Russia is also generally concerned about NATO's eastward creep, including US plans to build military bases in Romania and Bulgaria and to site missile defense facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic. According to the Economist¸ "What Russia wants, most observers agree, is respect for the petro-dollar-fuelled power it has become: treaties signed when it was weaker are targets."

Russia has continued to participate in the treaty's governing body, the Joint Consultative Group, but it did not perform the usual year-end data exchange. CFE "inspection season" usually runs from March until December, with a short lull in January and February.

Prospects for expansion to Asia

Key lessons from the CFE experience in Europe

* The Organization for Security and Cooperation (OSCE) in Europe did not invent new methods; rather, it enacted principles already enshrined in the United Nations Charter. This gives reason to be hopeful that a similar process may be applicable in Asia, though the specific difficulties Europe had in moving forward warrant further investigation.
* The existence of two distinct alliances in Europe made the process much simpler, but neutral and non-aligned nations played a "crucial go-between role."
* A stable status quo was reached - on territorial boundaries, for instance - before the process that led to the CFE began. Russia and China resolved nearly all their border disputes by 1997 through a series of agreements and confidence building measures, but many other such disputes persist across the continent.
* The successful completion of CFE negotiations was informed by the "largely negative" experience of the MBFR talks and aided by the pursuit of military confidence-building measures from 1975 onwards. Such measures included, for instance, the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Agreement of 1987. Overall, the process that culminated in the CFE took over 20 years.
* The CFE process was also eased by the unique extent of existing institutional integration in Europe.
* Implementing the CFE has given the OSCE considerable experience in defining categories of equipment, addressing ambiguities in the treaty text, dealing with modernization, and other "technical solutions." This body of knowledge could potentially speed the process of negotiating a similar treaty in Asia, if the countries involved were willing to accept European involvement.

Reasons to be optimistic

* Strengthening partnership and cooperation between Russia and China

Russia and China have enjoyed steadily improving relations ever since the late 1980s, when Gorbachev took a series of crucial steps to repair the Sino-Soviet relationship. Chinese trepidation about a possible Russian tilt towards the West in the early 1990s gave way to cooperation on common interests: domestic stability, arms sales, economic growth, and limiting US influence in the region. Cooperation between the two sides has included special committees on defense cooperation, atomic energy, economic issues, and borders, while also including nearly 100 joint scientific and technical projects.

Even residents of the Russian Far East have developed a more favorable attitude towards China. Previously a huge demographic imbalance, the presence of many useful resources, and a collapsing economy led to anti-Chinese sentiment and concerns about a de facto annexation-by-immigration. Such fears persist in the region, but seem to be lessening, and recent polls have found that only 4 percent of all Russians fear a clash with China in the near future (in contrast, 24 percent fear a clash with the United States).
* Precedents for conventional arms limitation

In addition to cooperating on economic and political issues, Russia and China have already begun to limit conventional force levels along their borders. The Shanghai process, which has morphed into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), led to three agreements: the 1990 agreement on mutual reductions and confidence building on the Chinese-Soviet border; the 1996 agreement on military confidence building in the border area; and the 1997 Agreement on Mutual Reduction of Armed Forces in Border Areas.

The first agreement limited military forces deployed in the border area to defensive troops. The 1996 and 1997 agreements went into significantly more detail, requiring, for instance, information exchanges, limits on the frequency of military exercises and notification of military activities near the border. They also addressed seven categories of military equipment: the five limited by the CFE treaty, plus tactical rocket launchers and electronic combat and reconnaissance aircraft. The actual reductions were probably negligible, since agreed limits were probably not very different from force levels already in the limited zones, but implementing the agreements has probably served to build confidence.

Reportedly, implementation of the agreements "has advanced relatively smoothly despite a number of problems, such as disagreements…and varying interpretations of technical standards." As such problems continue to arise and be resolved, future agreements of a similar nature will likely become easier to implement.
* Significant, though tentative, growth of multilateral instruments in the region

The SCO, which was established in 2001 by Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, grew out of an immediate need to resolve border, territorial, and security issues following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Today it still focuses primarily on security, providing an institutional basis for increasingly concrete security cooperation. The SCO Anti-Terrorism Center was opened in January 2004, and the SCO held its first joint military exercises in 2003. The SCO is currently debating "an expanded future membership and an enhanced future role," perhaps to include economic issues - Russia prefers to enhance the security role of the organization, while China seems to prefer a greater economic role.

Other regional multilateral groupings include the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), and the Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEc). All these organizations have varying levels of practical impact (some with very little indeed), but together they may indicate a growing openness in the region towards multilateral initiatives like the CFE.
* Current Russian and Chinese strategic concerns favor conventional arms limitation on their shared borders

China's primary strategic focus lies in its littoral areas, especially Taiwan and the Korean peninsula, while Russia appears to be focusing on maintaining the former Soviet sphere of influence and slowing the eastward expansion of NATO. To the extent that either country focuses on Central Asia and their common border regions, they appear to have similar goals: maintaining stability, securing energy resources, and especially preventing the rise of extremism or separatism that might encourage internal uprising. Generally, both countries would therefore benefit from any agreement that allowed them to draw down forces and attention from their shared borders in order to focus on more urgent matters.
* Favorable military balance between China and Russia

The military and strategic balance between Russia and China is changing rapidly, but currently appears to favor a mutual conventional force reduction treaty. According to Dmitri Trenin of the Carnegie Moscow Center, "Russian strategic planners believe that China will not present a major strategic threat to Russia at least for the next 15-20 years. By 2020-30, Russia hopes to have fully recovered, sufficiently developed its eastern provinces, and modernized its military, providing it with effective deterrence capabilities." China is modernizing quickly, but probably still lags behind in military technology - though Russia's only area of undisputed superiority is in nuclear weapons.

With neither side confident of its ability to prevail against the other and most border/territorial issues settled, Russia and China would probably prefer to focus elsewhere. This might indicate that the timing is good for a CFE-like agreement - if either side were militarily dominant, there would be far less incentive to agree to such limitations. This picture of an atmosphere generally conducive to cooperation is supported further by evidence of growing bilateral defense cooperation (in addition to multilateral cooperation through the SCO, for instance), including joint training of both countries' interior and police forces. The 2007 Strategic Survey also notes that "Among China's neighbors, dealings with Russia are outwardly the most comfortable."

Potential challenges

* China's (and, to a lesser extend, India's) increasing preponderance in the region

Such a favorable strategic balance between Russia and China may not persist for long, however, and ambivalence in the region about China's rise may hinder expansion of any CFE-like regime to the rest of Asia. India and Japan are particularly averse to the possibility of "a China that is strategically preponderant in Asia." In addition, Trenin believes that Russia and China "remain ambivalent about the nature of the Sino-Russian relationship over the long term."

China's rapidly growing power also poses challenges in light of the lessons from the CFE experience in Europe - a stable status quo was helpful then, as was the existence of two discrete, relatively equal power blocs. In a discussion at UNIDIR in 1998 on "Trust and Confidence-Building Measures in South Asia," no agreement could be reached on the "implications for China" of multilateral agreements on confidence building. According to the 2007 SIPRI Yearbook, security cooperation in the regions around China and India "ha[s] run into problems…because of one over-large state that has an antagonistic or hegemonic intent towards at least some of its neighbors."
* General misgivings in the region about a conventional arms control treaty

In a study exploring the possibility of a CFE-like agreement on the Korean peninsula, one researcher found a general "reluctance to the prospect of a conventional arms control treaty, either on the Peninsula or in the region." The same study also noted the predominance and complexity of bilateral relationships in the region, noting that "most people prefer bilateral mechanisms, and they will remain the predominant vehicle for addressing security issues in Northeast Asia as well on the Korean Peninsula. Fewer welcome the idea of multilateralism, and those that do note that such multilateral efforts must remain subordinate to current bilateral efforts." Specifically, Russia also "has a persistent tendency to relapse into bilateralism when handing either friends (e.g. Belarus) or particularly tough opponents."
* Existing complex security challenges and grudges

Existing tensions that may hinder a conventional arms control process abound in Asia – the fear of Japanese re-militarization, Taiwanese separatism, Jammu and Kashmir, the Korean peninsula, and numerous border disputes all have the potential to completely derail any CFE-like negotiations. Reducing tensions in some, if not all, of these conflicts may in fact be a prerequisite to any broad arms control negotiations in the region.
* Basing and other geographical issues

An additional arms control regime in Asia may prove particularly challenging in Russia, the only potential party to a CFE which has concerns in both Europe and Asia. While the CFE mandated that armaments beyond treaty limits be destroyed, this only applied to Russian forces west of the Urals. Russia therefore retained many of its forces by moving them east before the treaty was actually signed, in order to comply with the letter of the agreement. Assuming Russia decides to continue participating in the CFE, Russia may balk at usefully low force limitations during similar negotiations in Asia. As a CFE-like regime eventually expanded to the rest of Asia, such a concern might affect the Chinese negotiating position as well.

In addition, the current force limitation agreements between Russia and China have been limited by the "high density" of sensitive Russian military infrastructure, including nuclear facilities, along the border in the Russian Far East. In order for Chinese deployments to actually be altered by reductions in the 1996 and 1997 Sino-Russian force limitation agreements, the zone of implementation would have had to be increased from 100 to 300 kilometers away from the border (China had only border defenses within 100km). Russian forces were concentrated within 25km of the border, so 100km was chosen as the "least unacceptable" compromise. A more comprehensive CFE-like agreement would therefore likely be even more onerous for Russia and possibly for China as well.
* Tendency towards secrecy and limited efficacy in current groupings

As noted above, existing arms control agreements between Russian and China exchange data in complete confidentiality, which may prove problematic if the long-term goal is to create a CFE-like regime acceptable across Asia. In addition, regional organizations involving the former Soviet bloc, for instance, suffer from a "syndrome of a high declaratory stance combined with limited and fragile practical underpinning." The limitations of Asian regional organizations may be due to China's hesitancy about establishing a true multilateral security regime in East Asia - a factor likely to complicate any negotiations for a CFE-like treaty applicable to all of Asia.
Conclusion

Based on this analysis, there are many reasons to be optimistic about the possibility of a CFE-like agreement between Russia and China in the near term, but any extension to all of Asia would necessarily be a longer-term goal due to the complexity of existing conflicts, current bilateral agreements, and strategic considerations. Nevertheless, a conventional arms limitation treaty in Asia may be worth pursuing in an attempt to head off dangerous, potentially nuclear conflict in the region.

This article originally appeared on the Center for Defense Information (CDI) website. The CDI is a division of the World Security Institute (WSI), a 501(c)(3) public charity.

ISN Security Watch - CFE Treaty: Prospects for Asia reinvigoration, expansion

There is no doubt that there has to be some mechanism in place that makes the world a little less dangerous than what is moving to become.

While the US, Russia and Europe are old hands at this game and know each other's capability well and can come to some understanding, is it feasible for China to show the same maturity, inspite of her professed peace loving intentions and her not wanting to interfere in the internal affairs of any country!

China is slowly realising her potential militarily, economically and political in the global scenario. It is euphoric since they keep harping of years of humiliation. This self pity disguises the real intent - revenge! And to keep all off guard, she laces peace and piety with her proclaimers!

Chinese history indicates the cold ruthlessness in pursuing her ideals. We may not appreciate it with our moral standards, but seen from the Chinese standpoint, they are justified in the steps they took in history.

Therefore, can there ever be a China that will willingly hand over her tryst with meeting their tormentors evenly so meekly?