For China and Russia, the crisis in Ukraine is part of a struggle to reduce American power and make the world safe for autocrats
The Western alliance has threatened the Kremlin with “massive” and “unprecedented” sanctions if Russia attacks Russia. Ukraine. But as the Ukrainian crisis reaches boiling point, Western efforts to isolate and punish Russia are likely to be undermined by the support of China, its giant neighbor. The Financial Times writes.
When Vladimir Putin travels to Beijing for the start of the Winter Olympics on February 4, the Russian president will meet the leader who has become his most important ally: China’s Xi Jinping. In a phone call between Putin and Xi in December, the Chinese leader backed Russia’s demand that Ukraine should never join NATO.
A decade ago, such a relationship seemed unlikely: China and Russia were as much rivals as they were partners. But after a period in which both countries have consistently fought with the United States, Xi’s support for Putin reflects a growing identity between the interests and worldviews of Moscow and Beijing. According to Chinese media, Xi told Putin that “some international forces are arbitrarily interfering in the internal affairs of China and Russia, under the pretext of democracy and human rights.”
As Xi’s remarks to Putin made clear, Russian and Chinese leaders are united by the belief that the United States is plotting to weaken and overthrow their governments. In the heyday of communism, Russia and China supported revolutionary forces around the world. But today Moscow and Beijing have embraced the rhetoric of the counterrevolution. When riots broke out in Kazakhstan recently, Putin accused the United States of attempting to sponsor a “color revolution” – a term given to protest movements seeking to change the government – in a country that borders both Russia and Russia. the China. Chinese senior ministers echoed these remarks. THE HIDDEN HAND OF WASHINGTON
For Russia and China, the uprising in Kazakhstan fit a pattern. The Kremlin has long argued that the US was the hidden hand behind Ukraine’s 2013-14 Maidan uprising, in which a pro-Russian leader was overthrown. China also insists that foreign forces – such as the United States – were behind the massive Hong Kong protests of 2019, which were ultimately cut short by a Beijing-ordered crackdown.
Both Putin and Xi have also made it clear that they believe America’s ultimate goal is to overthrow the Russian and Chinese governments and that local pro-democracy forces are America’s Trojan horse.
In 1917, US President Woodrow Wilson spoke of “making the world safe for democracy”. In 2022, Putin and Xi are determined to make the world safe for autocracy.
The ambitions of Russia and China, however, are far from being completely defensive. Both Putin and Xi believe that their vulnerability to “color revolutions” stems from fundamental flaws in the current world order – the combination of institutions, ideas and power structures that determine how global politics unfolds. Consequently, they share a determination to create a new world order that better accommodates the interests of Russia and China – as defined by their current leaders.
Two characteristics of the current world order that the Russians and Chinese often contest are “unipolarity” and “universality”. Put simply, they believe that the current agreements give America too much power – and they are intent on changing that.
“Unipolarity” means that, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world was left with only one superpower – the United States. Fyodor Lukyanov, a Russian foreign policy thinker close to Putin, believes that unipolarity “has given the United States the ability and the ability to do whatever it sees fit on the world stage.” He argues that the new era of American hegemony was ushered in by the 1991 Gulf War – in which the United States assembled a global coalition to oust Saddam Hussein’s Iraq from Kuwait.
The Gulf War was followed by a succession of US-led military interventions around the world – including Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s. NATO’s 1999 bombing of Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, has long been part of Russia’s argument that NATO is not a purely defensive alliance. The fact that the NATO bombs also hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was not forgotten in Beijing.
After the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, NATO invoked Article 5 – its mutual defense clause – and invaded Afghanistan. Once again, according to Lukyanov, America had demonstrated its willingness and ability to “forcefully transform the world”.
But America’s defeat in Afghanistan, symbolized by the chaotic withdrawal from Kabul in the summer of 2021, gave the Russians hope that the US-led world order is crumbling. Lukyanov argues that the fall of Kabul for the Taliban is “no less historic and symbolic than the fall of the Berlin Wall”.
Influential Chinese academics have a similar orientation. Yan Xuetong, dean of the school of international relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing (Xi’s alma mater), writes that “China believes that its rise to great power status entitles it to a new role in world affairs – a a role that cannot be reconciled with the undisputed domination of the USA ”.
Like Lukyanov, Yan believes that “the US-led world order is fading. A multipolar order will come in his place ”. President Xi himself said this even more clearly with his often repeated statement that “the east is rising and the west is declining”.
For Russia and China, creating a new world order is not simply a matter of raw power. It is also a battle of ideas. While the Western liberal tradition promotes the idea of universal human rights, Russian and Chinese thinkers argue that different cultural traditions and “civilizations” should be allowed to develop in different ways.
Vladislav Surkov, once an influential Putin adviser, denounced Russia’s “repeated unsuccessful efforts to become part of Western civilization.” Instead, according to Surkov, Russia should embrace the idea that it has “absorbed both east and west” and has a “hybrid mentality”. Similarly, pro-government thinkers in Beijing argue that a fusion of Confucianism and communism means that China will always be a country that emphasizes collective rather than individual rights. They argue that China’s success in containing Covid-19 reflects the superiority of the Chinese emphasis on collective action and group rights.
Beijing and Moscow argue that the current world order is characterized by the American attempt to impose Western ideas on democracy and human rights on other countries, if necessary through military intervention. The new world order that Russia and China are calling for would instead be based on distinct spheres of influence.
The crisis over Ukraine is a struggle over the future world order because it revolves precisely on these issues. For Putin, Ukraine is culturally and politically part of Russia’s sphere of influence. Russia’s security needs should give it the right to veto any Ukrainian desire to join NATO, the Western alliance. Moscow is also asking to act as protector of Russian speakers. For the United States, these demands violate some fundamental principles of the current world order – in particular, the right of an independent country to define its own foreign policy and strategic choices.
The Ukrainian crisis also affects “the world order” because it has clear global implications. The United States knows that if Russia attacks Ukraine and establishes its own “sphere of influence,” it will set a precedent for China. During the Xi era, China built military bases in all contested areas of the South China Sea. Beijing’s threats to invade Taiwan – a self-managed democratic island that China regards as a rebellious province – have also become more apparent and frequent. If Putin manages to invade Ukraine, the temptation for Xi to attack Taiwan will increase, as will internal pressure on the Chinese leader from nationalists, who perceive the end of the American era.
Russia and China have similar clear complaints about the current world order. There are also some important differences between the Moscow and Beijing approaches. Russia is currently more willing to take military risks than China. But its ultimate goals may be more limited. For the Russians, the use of military force in Syria, Ukraine and elsewhere is a way to repudiate former US President Barack Obama’s claim that Russia is no more than a regional power. Dmitri Trenin of the Carnegie Center in Moscow argues that “for the leaders of the country, Russia is nothing if not a great power”.
But while Russia aspires to be one of the world’s great powers, China appears to be contemplating replacing the United States as the world’s pre-eminent power. Elizabeth Economy, author of The World according to China, argues that Beijing is aiming for a “radically transformed international order” in which the United States is essentially pushed out of the Pacific and becomes just an Atlantic power. As the Indo-Pacific is now the core of the global economy, this would essentially leave China as “number one”. Rush Doshi, a Chinese scholar who works in the White House, addresses a similar topic in his book The Long Game. Citing various Chinese sources, Doshi argues that China is now clearly aiming for American-style global hegemony. AN OFFER FOR GLOBAL SUPREMATIA
The difference in the scale of China and Russia’s ambitions reflects the difference in their economic potential. Russia’s economy is now about the size of Italy. Moscow simply does not have the wealth to support a global supremacy bid. In contrast, China is now, by some measures, the largest economy in the world. It is also the largest producer and exporter in the world. Its population of 1.4 billion is about ten times that of Russia. Consequently, it is realistic that China aspires to be the most powerful country in the world.
But while differences in the economic potential of Russia and China ultimately make Xi more ambitious than Putin, they also make him more cautious in the short term. There is something of a gambler’s desperation in Putin’s willingness to use military force to try to change the balance of power in Europe. Trenin argues that, having seen NATO expand into much of what was once the Soviet bloc, Putin sees Ukraine as his “last support”.
In Beijing, on the other hand, there is a strong sense that time and history are on China’s side. The Chinese also have many economic tools to expand their influence that are simply not available to the Russians. A project from the Xi years and the Belt and Road Initiative, a vast international China-funded infrastructure program that spans Central Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas.
As America has become more protectionist, China has also used its trading power to expand its global influence. This month saw the launch of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a vast new free trade area in Asia-Pacific that includes China and several US strategic allies, such as Japan and Australia – in which the United States does not participate. Granting or denying access to the Chinese market gives Beijing an influence that is simply not available to Moscow.
But gradualism will work
OR Russia and China need some kind of dramatic moment to create the new world order they seek.
History suggests that the new systems of government of the world generally emerge after some kind of seismic political event, such as a great war.
Much of the security and institutional architecture of the current world order emerged as World War II was closing or in its aftermath, when the UN, the World Bank and the IMF were established and their headquarters were located in United States. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) came into effect in 1948. NATO was created in 1949. The US-Japan security treaty was signed in 1951. The European Coal and Steel Community, the forerunner of the EU, was founded in 1951. After the end of the Cold War, rival Soviet-backed institutions such as the Warsaw Pact collapsed and NATO and the EU expanded to Russia’s borders. China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, the evolution of the GATT.
The question now is whether Russia and China’s ambitions for a “new world order” will also need a war to materialize. A direct conflict with the United States is simply too dangerous in the nuclear age and won’t happen unless all parties miscalculate (which is always possible).
Russia and China may, however, assume that they will be able to realize their ambitions through proxy wars. An unchallenged Russian victory in Ukraine could signal that a new security order is emerging in Europe, with a de facto Russian “sphere of influence”. A successful Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be widely read as a sign that the era of American Pacific rule is over. At that point, many countries in the region that currently look to the United States for their security, such as Japan and South Korea, may choose to adapt to a new China-dominated order.
Alternatively, a new world order could emerge through Washington’s tacit acquiescence. This outcome doesn’t seem likely with the Biden administration in power, unless there are some dramatic last-minute US concessions on Ukraine. But Donald Trump may return to the White House in 2024.
The former US president has at times disparaged NATO and suggested that America’s allies in Asia are free-riders. His “America First” philosophy avoided traditional language about the American mission to support freedom in the world. At times, Trump has even been frank in expressing admiration for both Xi and Putin. And, as a self-proclaimed agreement builder, Trump is sympathetic to the ideas of spheres of influence.
Yet Russia and China don’t seem inclined to sit back and wait for Trump to return to the White House. They know that Trump’s Republican Party also includes many turncoats, intent on confronting both Russia and China. In any case, much can happen between now and the next presidential elections in November 2024.
Russia’s impatience is clear from Putin’s will to force a crisis on Ukraine. The prospects for a new world order more congenial to Russia may depend on whether his Ukrainian bet works. But even if Putin fails to achieve his goals in Ukraine, the threat to the US-led world order will not go away. A rising China, led by an ambitious President Xi, will be sure to make it happen.
(Extract from the foreign press review by eprcomunicazione)
