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domingo, 6 de agosto de 2023
A desintegração da Iugoslávia: o último embaixador americano - Warren Zimmermann (Foreign Affairs)
segunda-feira, 24 de julho de 2023
The Illusion of Great-Power Competition - Jude Blanchette and Christopher Johnstone (Foreign Affairs)
Estamos de volta ao Great Game?
The Illusion of Great-Power Competition
Why Middle Powers—and Small Countries—Are Vital to U.S. Strategy
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/illusion-great-power-competition
It may be a confusing and unpredictable moment in global politics, but there is no shortage of frames and narratives that purport to explain or at least characterize the major developments. For many observers, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s increasingly aggressive saber rattling across the Indo-Pacific have divided the world into blocs, dragging the United States and its allies into a “new Cold War” pitting Washington against Beijing and Moscow. Others see this as an era of competition among great powers, in which the United States and China are the central protagonists in a global struggle. The latest U.S. National Security Strategy reflects this view, concluding that “a competition is underway between the major powers to shape what comes next.”
But these frames are oversimplified and outdated: they overemphasize the unilateral power of the United States and China, underappreciate both countries’ own dependencies, and overlook the vital importance of middle and small powers, as well as commercial entities and other nonstate actors. Although some aspects of the Cold War hold true today, such as the geopolitical rivalry between two powerful countries with dramatically different political systems and ideologies, the integration and interdependence that characterize the international system in this century places today’s policymakers on a vastly different landscape than the one their twentieth-century predecessors navigated.
The competition that confronts the United States is not simply a bilateral contest with another great power. Nor is it one that pits cleanly demarcated authoritarian and democratic blocs against one another. It is instead an ever-shifting competition of coalitions and of informal and often ad hoc groupings of partners that come together to address a specific issue or set of issues. As Hal Brands and Zack Cooper noted in 2020, these coalitions differ depending on the issue at hand; the partners involved in the geopolitical balancing of China’s growing military power in the western Pacific may be different from those that partner to safeguard and promote advanced technologies. Some groupings form naturally, consisting of willing and like-minded partners. Others bring together reluctant partners in relationships formed out of necessity or convenience.
In this world of ad hoc groupings and coalitions, Washington sometimes needs to work with actors who do not support—or are even outright hostile to—some U.S. interests or values. Occasionally, the United States will need to use inducements and even outright pressure to bring actors into alignment with U.S. goals. But if these coalitions, groupings, and individual relationships are managed adeptly and with a clear objective in mind, the United States can advance its own interests while helping build a resilient and stable international order that sustains prosperity for its allies and partners.
These new realities require a shift in U.S. tactics and strategy—and, perhaps most important, a new long-term mindset. For starters, an effective Indo-Pacific strategy will require Washington to pay increasing attention to medium and small powers—in Europe, in Southeast Asia, and across the African continent—which will play a crucial role in responding to Beijing’s advancing capabilities. More broadly, to prosecute a grand strategy in a world of not just close partners and allies but also expedient bilateral relationships and unstable ad hoc coalitions, the United States will need to be comfortable operating in the murky middle between interdependence and autonomy, between multipolarity and division into blocs, and with partners whose willingness to join Washington will shift from issue to issue.
A coalition-centered approach does not mean simply appealing to the lowest common denominator, but rather focusing on coordination and calibration with key partners to sustain a robust network of aligned actors focused on a set of clear objectives. The Biden administration has generally been an effective practitioner of this approach, but it is contested in today’s Washington, where some voices advocate for a more unilateralist, zero-sum competition with China that demands U.S. partners choose sides. That posture, however, would provide room for Beijing to navigate between and around U.S. partners, thus leaving the United States more isolated and ultimately less secure.
AROUND THE WORLD
Nowhere is this need for a new mindset clearer than in Taiwan. To be able to better deter and ultimately defend the island from a possible Chinese assault, the U.S. military must look beyond Japan and South Korea, where U.S. bases lie uncomfortably within range of Chinese missiles. With the exception of Australia, where the U.S. military presence is expanding and defense cooperation deepening, the only other places where Washington can seek new opportunities are in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. Over the last decade, Singapore, a city-state with a population of five million, has quietly become an important partner in this regard. Although not a formal U.S. ally, today it anchors the U.S. military presence in Southeast Asia, supporting rotational deployments of littoral combat ships, surveillance aircraft—and, perhaps soon, drones. Singapore also serves as a logistics and refueling hub. Recent agreements to expand access, exercises, and training with the Philippines, and to deepen defense cooperation with Papua New Guinea, also reflect the necessary U.S. effort to diversify.
Economically, the complex supply chains and innovation ecosystems that underpin the development and production of advanced technologies are driving unprecedented cross-border integration, with small economies often playing critical roles in key industries. To develop more secure supply chains in the semiconductor industry, Washington is seeking deeper coordination with the Netherlands, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. And to reduce reliance on China for critical minerals, Australia and Indonesia—along with other potential U.S. partners in South America and Africa—are positioning themselves as key alternative sources of supply. Indeed, one of the reasons Beijing is working so hard to court Europe and the global South is that China understands how vital actors in this region are in shaping the larger strategic competition.
None of this diminishes the significant advantages and power that the United States still possesses. But the role of the small looms large in this twenty-first-century competition of coalitions. Consider the case of the Netherlands, which, with a population of less than 20 million, is home to a single firm, ASML, that is vital to global semiconductor production. ASML is the sole global provider of the latest generation of photolithography scanner equipment, critical to the manufacture of cutting-edge logic chips. That is why alignment with the Netherlands—along with Japan, another key supplier of semiconductor manufacturing equipment—was critical to the success of the sweeping export controls that the Biden administration imposed in October 2022, which limit the materials and technology available to China’s semiconductor industry. Washington’s pathbreaking effort to restrain China’s capabilities in a critical technology thus depended on support from the eighteenth-largest economy in the world and the compliance of a single private company.
Beijing, like Washington, is stuck in a world of tradeoffs.
Of course, long-standing treaty allies and the world’s major economies will continue to be a key pillar for U.S. strategy. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the G-7 forum has undergone a dramatic revitalization, and today it serves as the primary venue for coordinating policy on confronting Moscow and assisting Ukraine. On many issues related to strategic competition with China, coordination with the G-7 will continue to be a starting point for the United States; for example, when it comes to considering limits on investing in high-tech sectors in China. Such measures will be effective, and avoid losses for U.S. firms, only if other countries impose similar measures in the same sectors—and the coalition-building will start with the G-7. In defense, NATO and U.S. treaty alliances in Asia, which provide a solid legal framework for U.S. military presence and activities, will continue to be the foundation for U.S. strategy.
But the larger dynamic, in which the United States depends on states and commercial partners of all sizes and compositions to forge an effective and sustainable China policy and Indo-Pacific strategy, will play out again and again across the globe and across all critical domains of strategic competition. Whether the United States is trying to build influence in standard-setting bodies or ensuring an effective defense posture that deters Chinese aggression, success will depend on Washington’s ability to partner and align with a varied range of actors, including small and medium-sized players.
But a successful coalition building strategy will require navigating the functional and structural realities these partners face, and doing so with nuance and patience. Perhaps most important, members of any given coalition or grouping will likely also have deep economic and diplomatic ties with China, with little interest in joining an explicitly anti-China bloc—and little ability to do so, given domestic political realities. This is true of countries both large and small; even Japan, arguably the country in Asia most concerned about China’s growing power, is deeply dependent China’s economy for its own prosperity. The same goes for the countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, all of which have deep and growing economic links with China. Thus, in addition to its own interdependencies with China, the United States will be influenced and constrained in how far it can push against China by the interdependencies of its coalition partners. Though many countries in the region harbor deep concerns about China’s ambitions, none are willing to explicitly align against it, and most are even cautious about the extent to which they can directly inveigh against Beijing; these partners will continue to pursue hedging strategies that seek to balance engagement among external powers. A recent survey found that a majority of people across Asia believe that the consequences of U.S.-Chinese strategic competition will be negative; more than 60 percent think their country’s national security will be placed at risk. And for countries close to China, the prospect of conflict is existential. As the president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., said in a recent interview about U.S.-Chinese tensions over Taiwan: “I learned an African saying: When elephants fight, the only one that loses is the grass. We are the grass in this situation. We don’t want to get trampled.”
For its part, China also faces a similarly complex geopolitical terrain. Even with all its economic and military heft, Beijing depends on key bilateral and commercial relationships to power its economy and modernize its military. China is a net energy importer, requires continued access to a U.S.-controlled global financial system, and is far behind Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the United States, and key European states in the design and manufacture of advanced semiconductors. For all of Beijing’s bravado about the superiority of its political system and its talk about self-sufficiency, the Chinese Communist Party faces critical dependences that will not disappear for the foreseeable future. That helps explain China’s awkward pursuit of good relations with European countries (which are some of its largest trade and technology partners) and Moscow (a key security and energy partner), despite the fact that its relationship with the latter threatens its relationship with the former. Beijing, like Washington, is stuck in a world of tradeoffs.
GET REAL
As the United States wrestles with a fluid international system, it should follow a few key principles. First, in a world in which few countries are willing to explicitly align against China, the United States will need to be careful when presenting partners with zero-sum choices, limiting those moments to cases where explicit alignment against China is absolutely necessary to protect vital U.S. interests. It must define narrowly those elements of the strategic competition with China that most require cooperation from others, and in those instances, it must bring the full weight of U.S. diplomacy and persuasion to bear. But otherwise, Washington must give partner governments the space to define their relationships with China in ways that comport with their interests and local realities. Here, the Biden administration’s stated approach to the technology competition—building a “high fence” around a “small yard” of advanced technologies with military applications—makes sense if vigorously applied. But Washington must resist pressure at home to ceaselessly expand the list of controlled technologies and other measures designed to impede China’s advance, for the simple reason that the higher the fence, the harder it will be to build and sustain a coalition. In some key technologies, such as semiconductors, it is worth putting significant pressure on partner countries and commercial actors to follow the U.S. lead, but there will be other technologies and actions—such as outbound investment screening—where Washington may prudently need to calibrate its approach to sustain the integrity and effectiveness of the larger coalition and avoid damaging the interests of U.S. commercial actors.
Similar care must be taken on issues related to Taiwan. Although countries are increasingly willing to speak out in support of peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait (as illustrated by the joint statement issued by Marcos and U.S. President Joe Biden in May), political or material support for Taiwan itself is another matter—even for a country such as Japan, which given its geographic proximity would be heavily impacted by a cross-strait conflict. Washington needs to continue to lead on this issue and bolster support for Taiwan in pushing back against Chinese coercion, expanding Taiwan’s international space, and increasing economic integration and resilience. But to expand the coalition of actors supportive of Taiwan’s prosperity and security, the United States must balance the need for resolute action in the face of Beijing’s belligerence with the understandable reluctance of many middle and small powers to be drawn into a conflict between Washington and Beijing over Taiwan. If Washington truly wants to deter Beijing, it will require a large, coherent, and credible coalition of partners who can—in their own way—signal to Beijing the significant diplomatic, economic, and military costs it would pay for carrying out a military assault in the Taiwan Strait. And, crucially, the more steady-handed and predictable Washington is in its approach to cross-Strait issues, the more it will give current and would-be coalition members the confidence and political space to align with U.S. efforts.
Although close relations with the United States remain a priority for most countries in the region, most also see significant material benefit in cooperation with Beijing. If China’s economy continues to slump, this picture may look different a decade from now. But for now, this is a reality the United States cannot avoid. Washington will thus need to incentivize participation in the coalitions that it leads, with positive inducements that advance the national interests of U.S. partners. In this area, U.S. policy has fallen short lately: although many countries in the region appreciate the renewed U.S. security focus on the Indo-Pacific—including strengthening alliances with Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea—the absence of a compelling regional economic agenda undermines U.S. influence. The U.S.-initiated Indo-Pacific Economic Framework is a poor competitor for the extensive investment and trade links that China offers. The promise of increased access to the U.S. market, through legally binding trade agreements, continues to be the most persuasive tool that Washington has at its disposal to incentivize cooperation and encourage partners to make decisions at home that they would otherwise avoid. A key element of U.S. strategy must include renewed commitments to the multilateral trading system and a willingness to negotiate meaningful market-access agreements. Of course, in the near term, this approach faces stiff domestic political headwinds, but the United States cannot make the case for its partners to sacrifice economic and commercial opportunities in China without offering tangible incentives of its own.
Washington also needs to show more awareness of the domestic political situations its partners face. The fact that some coalitions and individual partners say one thing in private and another in public is often less a demonstration of cowardice and more a reflection of political and economic realities constraining overtly anti-China actions. Privately, officials across the Indo-Pacific express deep anxiety over China’s intentions and its behavior and welcome efforts by the United States to counter Beijing’s malign effect on the regional order. But public expressions of these concerns invite political, diplomatic, and economic blowback from Beijing. Although the United States, an economic and military superpower, can withstand almost any type of pressure China can muster, most other countries can ill afford to act with such confidence. The United States must help build the resilience of coalition members who face Beijing’s economic coercion. But until such a toolkit is forged, it must remain sensitive to practical risks smaller economies face.
Washington can help aid the leaders of current and would-be coalition members by calibrating its own rhetoric and actions to reflect the domestic realities of its partners. Couching U.S. actions in the Indo-Pacific solely in terms of a strategic competition with China will make it harder, not easier, to build momentum in the region. A recent joint statement issued by the leaders of the countries that make up the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue—Australia, India, Japan, and the United States—represents an effective manifestation of this more calibrated approach. The text of around 3,000 words describes the Quad countries’ plans to deepen cooperation in the Indo-Pacific—and China is never mentioned. In a world where Washington must nimbly construct many different coalitions to push back on Chinese revisionism and support a free and open order, it will often be wise to not say the quiet part out loud.
sábado, 15 de julho de 2023
Book review: The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism, Sebastian Edwards - Richard Feinberg (Foreign Affairs)
Seria preciso especificar que o neoliberalismo da ditadura chilena só interveio depois de uma primeira fase de políticas autoritárias e dirigistas pelo próprio general Pinochet, um monstro humano e um ignorante em economia.
The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism
Reviewed by Richard Feinberg
At the height of the Cold War, the far-right economics department of the University of Chicago, with the support of the U.S. government, recruited students from then democratic Chile. When General Augusto Pinochet seized power in 1973, he hired these “Chicago boys” to apply their extreme free-market fundamentalism to the Chilean economy. Remarkably, the left-of-center democratic governments that succeeded Pinochet’s regime after 1990 maintained many of those market-friendly prescriptions. Edwards, a Chilean-born economist with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, narrates a fascinating insider intellectual history of the policies and personalities behind Chile’s economic development in recent decades. But he struggles to explain the unanticipated popular uprising in 2019 against this doctrinal “neoliberalism” with which he largely sympathizes. Although the economic model had generated strong growth, reduced extreme poverty, and expanded the middle class, Edwards now finds that many policymakers neglected stark, persistent inequalities; corporate collusion had eroded free-market competition; and public policy may have gone too far in interjecting market competition into education, health care, and retirement pensions. Looking forward, Edwards suggests that Chile may yet find a more sustainable middle road as a European-style social democracy, with less spectacular economic growth but greater social cohesion.
From Amazon.com:
How Chile became home to the world’s most radical free-market experiment―and what its downfall suggests about the fate of neoliberalism around the globe
In The Chile Project, Sebastian Edwards tells the remarkable story of how the neoliberal economic model―installed in Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship and deepened during three decades of left-of-center governments―came to an end in 2021, when Gabriel Boric, a young former student activist, was elected president, vowing that “If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it will also be its grave.” More than a story about one Latin American country, The Chile Project is a behind-the-scenes history of the spread and consequences of the free-market thinking that dominated economic policymaking around the world in the second half of the twentieth century―but is now on the retreat.
In 1955, the U.S. State Department launched the “Chile Project” to train Chilean economists at the University of Chicago, home of the libertarian Milton Friedman. After General Augusto Pinochet overthrew socialist president Salvador Allende in 1973, Chile’s “Chicago Boys” implemented the purest neoliberal model in the world for the next seventeen years, undertaking a sweeping package of privatization and deregulation, creating a modern capitalist economy, and sparking talk of a “Chilean miracle.” But under the veneer of success, a profound dissatisfaction with the vast inequalities caused by neoliberalism was growing. In 2019, protests erupted throughout the country, and in 2022 Boric began his presidency with a clear mandate: to end neoliberalismo.
In telling the fascinating story of the Chicago Boys and Chile’s free-market revolution, The Chile Project provides an important new perspective on the history of neoliberalism and its global decline today.
domingo, 2 de julho de 2023
The Promise of Human Rights - Eleanor Roosevelt (Foreign Affairs, 1948)
Foreign Affairs, April 1st, 1948 Each Sunday this summer, we’re sharing an essay from the archives that provides a rare first-person account of history as it unfolded. This week, we’ve chosen a 1948 essay by Eleanor Roosevelt on the hard work of uniting the world behind a shared commitment to human rights. In 1945, when the United Nations was founded, the world was reeling from the devastation of World War II. There was strong public support for a new international institution that could help prevent countries from starting wars and foster global cooperation on the problems plaguing the world. Its name originated with Eleanor Roosevelt’s husband, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who used the term in 1942 to describe the 26 nations fighting the Axis Powers. FDR died in April 1945, and did not live to see the signing of the UN Charter in San Francisco in June of that year. Several days after her husband’s death, Eleanor Roosevelt told reporters, “The story is over.” But that was hardly the case. In December 1945, President Harry Truman asked if she would join the first U.S. delegation to the United Nations. At first, Roosevelt declined—but eventually she accepted, becoming the first woman to represent the United States at the UN. Her work there began as the international community struggled to make sense of the horrors of the Holocaust and the existential threat of the atomic bomb. She became a central player in the global human rights movement, chairing the UN commission tasked with drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In this 1948 essay, she describes the difficult, and often tedious, bureaucratic work of uniting the world behind a shared commitment to human security and dignity. The commission was made up of representatives from all over the world, with the aim of including diverse political and cultural points of view. “We mapped out our work very carefully,” she wrote, and “feeling ran high.” But the commission remained united by a common aspiration: “Many of us thought that lack of standards for human rights the world over was one of the greatest causes of friction among the nations, and that recognition of human rights might become one of the cornerstones on which peace could eventually be based.” The end result of this work—the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—was a milestone in global human rights, freedom, and equality. Adopted shortly after Roosevelt’s essay was published, it marked the first time that the world agreed on the rights and freedoms deserving of universal protection. It remains the most sweeping human rights statement ever to be endorsed on a global scale.
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domingo, 14 de maio de 2023
The Secret History and Unlearned Lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis - Sergey Radchenko and Vladislav Zubok (Foreign Affairs)
Chantagem nuclear não é nova, nem inédita...
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Historians, political scientists, and game theorists have “endlessly rehashed” the Cuban missile crisis since it occurred, in 1962—but hundreds of pages of newly released top-secret Soviet documents “shed new light on the most hair-raising of Cold War crises,” write Sergey Radchenko and Vladislav Zubok in a new essay for Foreign Affairs.
The true story of the crisis, and of why the Soviet Union’s massive operation to station ballistic nuclear missiles on Cuban soil failed so spectacularly, has chilling parallels with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nuclear saber rattling in Ukraine today, they write. “Russia, it seems, still has not learned the lesson of the Cuban missile crisis: that the whims of an autocratic ruler can lead his country into a geopolitical cul-de-sac—and the world to the edge of calamity.”
Read more from Foreign Affairs on great-power competition and the risks of nuclear conflict:
“The New Nuclear Age” by Andrew F. Krepinevich “How Russia Decides to Go Nuclear” by Kristin Ven Bruusgaard “Playing With Fire in Ukraine” by John J. Mearsheimer “The Persistence of Great-Power Politics” by Emma Ashford “Competition Without Catastrophe” by Kurt M. Campbell and Jake Sullivan “What the War in Ukraine Has Revealed About Nuclear Weapons” by Nina Tannenwald |
quarta-feira, 26 de abril de 2023
How China Could Save Putin’s War in Ukraine - Liana Fix and Michael Kimmage (Foreign Affairs)
How China Could Save Putin’s War in Ukraine
The Logic—and Consequences—of Chinese Military Support for Russia
Foreign Affairs, April 26, 2023
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/how-china-could-save-putins-war-ukraine
Over the past year, China has made the best of Russia’s war against Ukraine, emerging as one of the conflict’s few beneficiaries. It has styled itself as a measured peacemaker while gaining substantial leverage over Russia. Beijing has been Moscow’s most conspicuous and consequential backer in the war, pledging a “no limits” partnership with Russia shortly before the February 2022 invasion and helping keep Russia’s wartime economy afloat. Moscow’s growing reliance on China has been lucrative and useful for Beijing—and this economic dependence will likely continue and deepen. China’s rhetorical commitment to “multipolarity” in geopolitics has encouraged many countries in the global South to remain aloof from the war, unwilling to rally to Ukraine’s cause. After crowing about its reconciliation of Iran and Saudi Arabia, China is now promoting its “peace plan” for Ukraine, an entirely unrealistic proposal that caters almost exclusively to Russia’s interests. (Notably, the plan includes no requirement for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine.) Whatever the flaws of this plan, it has still allowed Chinese leader Xi Jinping to present himself as a diplomatic mediator and to position China to play a part in Ukraine’s eventual reconstruction.
And yet for all it has gained as a putative bystander, China may not be willing to stay on the sidelines indefinitely. A defeated Russia is not in China’s interest. The Kremlin is Beijing’s most important partner in its opposition to the U.S.-led international order. Despite their many differences, China and Russia have joined forces to advance an alternative order with its own rules of war and peace, its own financial centers, and its own multilateral institutions. “Change is coming that hasn’t happened in 100 years,” Xi declared in April, at the end of a visit to Moscow. “And we are driving this change together.” A Russian humiliation in Ukraine would undermine this narrative, giving the United States greater latitude to focus its energies and resources on competing with China.
To prevent this outcome, China could opt to throw Russia a lifeline beyond economic and moral support and supply its partner with lethal military aid. It could do so to prolong the war, to stave off a Russian defeat, or to speed some kind of Russian victory. Chinese aid could be covert—designed, that is, not to be discovered by U.S. intelligence. Indeed, China’s delivery to Russia of goods such as so-called hunting rifles, which have both civilian and military uses, arguably already constitutes such support. Or Beijing’s involvement could be overt. The public announcement of weapons deliveries would signal a formal alliance with Russia, and China’s entry into the war would open a new chapter in international affairs, turning the conflict in Ukraine into a truly global one and inaugurating a far more adversarial relationship between China and the West.
The United States, which is accustomed to watching China closely, has described the provisioning of lethal aid to Russia as a redline. Washington has threatened severe repercussions (probably in the form of significant economic sanctions) should Beijing cross this line. U.S. officials should be firm and consistent in warning their Chinese counterparts against such a dangerous course of action. But they should also recognize that China will not be easily cowed by words or by the threat of further U.S. sanctions.
In addition to the U.S. response, Europe has an important role to play in deterring a more concerted Chinese intervention in the war. Despite the optics of French President Emmanuel Macron’s deferential visit to Beijing in April, China’s desire for access to the European economy remains a major source of leverage for EU states. Even if China is convinced that it cannot repair relations with a hostile United States, it knows that it has a lot to lose in Europe. To succeed, Europeans will have to make clear to China that any military support for Russia will incur a severe and united response from Europe. The United States and Europe should remind China that its participation in the war will not decrease Western support for Ukraine. Far from it, a Chinese entry will only spur further aid from the West, raising the costs and the stakes for all.
THE CHINESE CALCULUS
China has three broad interests regarding the war in Ukraine. The first is preventing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s downfall. Russia with Putin at the helm is a valuable asset for China. It figures in China’s Cold War–style rivalry with the United States. It provides cheap energy and sizable markets for China. Beijing does not want Putin to be replaced by a less friendly leader, nor does it want to see domestic instability in Russia induced by a lost war in Ukraine. The worst-case scenario, the fragmentation of the Russian state, could bring chaos to China’s borders, impeding China’s ability to trade with Central Asia, the South Caucasus, and Europe. Although Putin and Xi probably do not agree on how the war in Ukraine should end, they do agree that a clear Russian defeat would be intolerable.
China also understands that the war in Ukraine has ramifications for international order. Were the war to conclude on Western terms with a clear Ukrainian victory, the United States would define the war as a triumph for its international order, its rules, its power, and its diplomatic acumen. This would deal a blow to China’s aspirations for a new global order with Chinese (or Chinese-Russian) characteristics. But if, by contrast, the war were to drag on and continue to contribute to inflation and food insecurity around the world, China could frame the conflict as evidence of the failings of the preexisting U.S.-led international order. Thirty years of American hegemony have led us to this impasse, China could argue, while casting itself as a responsible stakeholder in its own alternative international order. More prosaically, China is happy for the war to carry on in so far as it keeps U.S. attention and resources pinned to Europe, far away from the Indo-Pacific.
China’s third interest, which may not be completely compatible with its second interest, is to have a meaningful stake in the aftermath of the war in Ukraine. Beijing is largely content to let Russia, Ukraine, and the West exhaust themselves in the fighting, but it wants to have a say in the eventual peace process and the postwar economic landscape of Ukraine. China had a growing economic relationship with Ukraine before the war, and it will doubtless play an extensive role in Ukraine’s postwar reconstruction. Although Kyiv insists that its supporters in the war should be the main beneficiaries of the opportunities that will come with the country’s revitalization, Ukraine may eventually turn to Beijing to help shoulder the enormity of its reconstruction needs. The peace plan Xi recently proposed to Putin in Moscow, however lopsided, is a sign that China wishes to be both a mediator and an economic player in Ukraine; it wants to be at the table so that whenever the war ends, it can act on its economic interests. China will do what it can to win the peace.
PROPPING UP PUTIN
The magnitude of these interests in the war ensures that China will not passively allow events in Ukraine to unfold however they will. Put negatively, China will go to considerable lengths to prevent the United States from succeeding in Ukraine. If the war continues to go badly for Russia, China will prop up Putin. Put positively, China will try to fit the war into its vision for regional and international order. It will, on the one hand, seek to expand commercial ties with Ukraine and Ukraine’s neighbors and, on the other hand, broaden the scope of action available to powers such as Russia that have flung off the rules written in Washington.
China could anchor itself in the war by making the risky decision to furnish Russia with lethal military assistance. Such support could be provided covertly. If this assistance went undetected or if it were not conclusively detected, China could still wear the mantle of peacemaker in Ukraine. So attired, it could drive a wedge between Europe and the United States—if Washington condemned Beijing for equipping the Russian war effort and took punitive measures but Europe refused to follow suit. European countries, fearing Chinese economic retaliation, could end up leaving Washington high and dry, fracturing the transatlantic alliance in the process.
Whatever covert support China delivered to Russia—including drones, artillery shells, and ammunition—would not bring Russia victory for the simple reason that Russia has no coherent path to victory in Ukraine. Chinese aid cannot fix the failures of Russia’s military leadership, the low morale among Russian troops, and the Kremlin’s impoverished strategic thinking. Yet material help from China could do a lot to prolong the war, to give Russia tactical advantages on the ground, and to convince a nervous Russian elite that Russia can continue fighting. Chinese assistance would increase Russia’s willingness to wage a long war, protecting Putin from the political vulnerabilities produced by his disastrous invasion.
China will not passively allow events in Ukraine to unfold however they will.
Suppose China went a step further and overtly entered the war on Russia’s side, making no attempt to conceal its weapons deliveries to Russia. Such a drastic move would represent China throwing down the gauntlet to the United States and Europe, brushing aside as trifling any Western threats of economic punishment. Chinese participation in the war would raise the stakes immeasurably for the United States and Europe. A Russian victory or partial victory with known Chinese support would make China a player in the broader landscape of European security. China’s joining up with Russia would demand greater military commitments to Ukraine from the United States and European countries already struggling with the demands of maintaining the Ukrainian war effort.
Overt support for Russia would fly in the face of public statements made by Chinese leaders since Putin launched his invasion, but there could be a strategic logic to such a bold move. China’s entry in the war would make the most sense as a preliminary distraction prior to a planned invasion of Taiwan months or years later. The resources that Western powers are forced to expend in Ukraine are resources they cannot immediately direct to Taiwan’s defense. Chinese participation in the Russian war effort would draw attention away from Taiwan and from the Indo-Pacific. In this scenario, the battlefield configurations in Ukraine might not matter that much to Beijing. China would simply hope that its involvement imposed costs on the West. It would not have to send a single soldier to Ukraine to do so. (The West has already proved that the course of the war can be affected without having to involve its uniformed soldiers.) Beijing’s announcement of direct and long-term military support to Russia would itself be transformative.
But it could also be disastrous for China. Russia might still lose the war. So far its military campaign has gone from failure to failure, and at every turn Ukraine has outperformed expectations. With Chinese fingerprints all over the war, a defeat for Russia would rebound on its backer. Indeed, this concern seems to have motivated China to stay on the sidelines, officials having come to the conclusion that Putin’s folly and ineptitude may not merit more than symbolic and situational support. China’s ambassador to the EU, Fu Cong, recently explained that China’s “no limit” friendship with Russia was “nothing but rhetoric.”
China could also stand to lose the very thing it has gained from the war, a privileged global position. By giving Russia its military support, China would join the ranks of pariah states such as Iran and North Korea. It would worsen its already adversarial relationship with the West, for which it would pay a substantial economic price. And China would be less able to paint itself as a benign international presence in a world spinning out of control. China’s aid would not just signal tacit approval of Russia’s many attacks on civilians but also enable such war crimes. By helping wage war against a country that has done nothing to provoke China and with which China once had decent relations, Xi would set an ugly precedent and instill fear in countries farther afield from Ukraine. In seeking to undermine the West, he would make a Chinese-led international order that much harder to construct.
EUROPE’S TRUMP CARD
Whatever the risks of China’s joining the war might be, Xi will not be persuaded of anything he does not already believe about Russia and Ukraine. Western rhetoric will not deflect China from its three core interests in the war, and Xi is well aware that he will face sanctions should he cross Western redlines by giving Russia lethal aid. U.S. and European officials still need to drive this message in tandem, emphasizing that the United States and Europe will forge a comprehensive Western response to any Chinese entry into the war. Together with like-minded partners in the Indo-Pacific, they will present a united front.
The Europeans in particular must communicate to China that their rejection of any Chinese deliveries of lethal weapons to Russia is a fundamentally European position and not merely the rhetoric of governments taking their cues from the United States. It should be stated repeatedly that the war in Ukraine is existential for Europeans, and impeding Chinese intervention is a fundamental European interest. By wading into the conflict, China would lose Europe. For their part, U.S. officials must impress on Beijing the United States’ patience and steely resolve in supporting the Ukrainian war effort. Demonstrating this fortitude and commitment to Ukraine’s cause should help Beijing see more starkly the risks of widening the war.