btw, that was no endorsement at all my part. I think that article is fundamentally flawed in a number of areas and has been written to appeal to the Chinese leadership who obviously want to write their own narrative about their own over-inflated place in the world order. Big countries. They all absolutely suck.
you mean made up big countries
well, all countries are made up. And if we are going to be making up stories, I prefer the one where we all treat each other with dignity and respect and a huge dose of humility.
Nearly three weeks have passed since Russian President Vladimir Putin began his invasion of Ukraine, but it still is not clear why he did so and what he hopes to achieve. Western analysts, commentators and government officials have put forward more than a dozen theories to explain Putin's actions, motives, and objectives.
Some analysts posit that Putin is motivated by a desire to rebuild the Russian Empire. Others say he is obsessed with bringing Ukraine back into Russia's sphere of influence. Some believe that Putin wants to control Ukraine's vast offshore energy resources. Still others speculate that Putin, an aging autocrat, is seeking to maintain his grip on power.
While some argue that Putin has a long-term proactive strategy aimed at establishing Russian primacy in Europe, others believe he is a short-term reactionary seeking to preserve what remains of Russia's diminishing position on the world stage.
Following is a compilation of eight differing but complementary theories that try to explain why Putin invaded Ukraine.
btw, that was no endorsement at all my part. I think that article is fundamentally flawed in a number of areas and has been written to appeal to the Chinese leadership who obviously want to write their own narrative about their own over-inflated place in the world order.
btw, that was no endorsement at all my part. I think that article is fundamentally flawed in a number of areas and has been written to appeal to the Chinese leadership who obviously want to write their own narrative about their own over-inflated place in the world order.
The full-blown war in Ukraine was both
the final eruption of a 30-year old feud between Russia and the United
States over NATO's expansion to the east and a landmark event in the
complete collapse of the world order since World War II. Overall, the
war in Ukraine has led the U.S. and the West to once again believe that
their main threat comes from Putin and Russia, rather than China, as
they have been alleging since the end of the Cold War. The geopolitical
battle in Europe triggered by the war in Ukraine will significantly slow
the shift of U.S. energies from Europe to the Indo-Pacific region. This
means that as long as we do not make subversive strategic mistakes of
our own, China's modernization process will not only not be interrupted,
but China will have the ability and will to play a more important role
in the construction of the new international order.
The collapse of the old international order
By
any measure, the post-World War II international order, with the United
Nations at its core, has faltered. The old order is rapidly
disintegrating, and strongman politics is becoming popular again among
the world powers, and countries are ambitiously looking for every
opportunity to build their own regional or even international order on
the ruins of the old order.
The result of the weak international
order encountering the great power politics led by the strong man is the
reorganization and collision of strategic forces. Of course, the
collapse of the old order does not mean the establishment of a new one.
Empirically, behind the collapse or re-establishment of all
international orders is blood and fire, violence and war.
Russia
has been trying to bring Belarus and eastern Ukraine together in every
way possible for many years. This time, Putin, in his search for
security, has fought back and expanded his sights on Ukraine as a whole,
and it is not impossible that a "mini-Soviet Union" will be born in the
future. This is, of course, inevitably related to NATO's expansion to
the east, which is strategically pushing Russia harder.
The United
States and the West have attributed this to Putin's own insecurity, but
this is a failure to understand and even demonize Putin and the Russian
nation. What NATO has created is the extreme insecurity of the entire
Russian nation. Veteran American diplomat George Kennan foresaw this war
long before NATO began its eastward expansion.
On May 2, 1998,
when the U.S. Senate officially approved the NATO expansion plan, New
York Times reporter Thomas Friedman called Kennan to interview him.
Kennan, the architect of America's successful policy to contain the
Soviet Union, began his career at the State Department in 1926, became
U.S. ambassador to Moscow in 1952, and is considered America's greatest
expert on Russia. 94-year-old Kennan, when asked what he thought of NATO
expansion, replied as follows.
"I see this as the beginning of a
new Cold War. Once NATO expands, Russia will gradually react in a way
that is quite detrimental to the United States. I think NATO expansion
is a sad mistake and there is no reason for it. Such an expansion would
leave our constitutional fathers in peace in their nine corners of the
earth.
"We have signed agreements agreeing to protect a large
number of countries, even though we neither have the resources nor the
intention to do so in any serious way. (NATO expansion) is nothing more
than a foolish move by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign
affairs. It disturbs me that the entire Senate is so superficially
ignorant in its debate on this matter. I am particularly disturbed by
the characterization of Russia as a country that desperately wants to
attack Western Europe.
"Don't people understand? What we opposed
during the Cold War was the Soviet communist regime. And now we are
turning our backs on the very people who started the greatest bloodless
revolution in history and overthrew the Soviet regime. Moreover,
Russia's democracy is as advanced, if not more so, than those of the
countries we just signed an agreement to protect. Russia, of course,
will react badly to NATO expansion, and then (the advocates of NATO
expansion) will say, "We keep telling you, that's what the Russians do,
but it's really not true."
What's happening today is exactly what
Kennan foresaw. If NATO expansion was the decision of ignorant and
fearless politicians, then it is understandable that American
politicians today are "helpless" against Putin. They are, so to speak,
watching Russia invade Ukraine without being able to do anything about
it.
However, the situation in Ukraine today is not only the result
of the interaction between the two powers, the U.S. (NATO) and Russia,
but Ukraine itself also plays a role, even a key role. Historically,
both in the era of empires and in the era of sovereign states, small
countries had to survive in the cracks between major powers and
therefore had to have politicians with high political calculations and
high diplomatic skills. But all this is too far away from today's
Ukraine.
First, naive politicians fantasize about relying on the
power of the United States and NATO for their own security. Since
independence, Ukraine's insecurity is real, but Ukraine's security can
only come between Russia and NATO. Instead of doing so, Ukraine's
leaders have tried to "draw the wolf into the house" in order to achieve
security. But the problem is that once Ukraine "draws the wolf into the
house," then Russia will not feel safe. Once Russia, the great power,
feels insecure, Ukraine, the small power, will become a victim of its
own behavior. Such behavior of great powers was common in imperial
times. In recent times, the international system based on national
sovereign states was theoretically designed to protect small states.
However, this was only the ideal and did not appear in practice.
Second,
the utopianization of intellectuals. After the end of the Cold War,
there was a wave of "nation-building" in various countries. The
historian Anderson's "Imagining Community" became famous, and many
intellectuals fantasized about using some secular values, such as
"democracy," "freedom," and "human rights" to construct a "new nation.
"In the process, they often demonized the original nation to which they
belonged. The same is true for Ukrainian intellectuals. They have the
illusion that they will feel safe as long as they stand with the West,
which shares their values. But reality is cruel, and this moral courage
is hardly translated into reality.
Third, the disappearance of
astute politicians. For small countries, diplomacy is a matter of life
and death, not child's play. But in the era of populism, more and more
"political outsiders" have entered the political arena and assumed the
highest power. These people often lack both the domestic governance
skills and the diplomatic skills needed for the country to survive in
the cracks. They have nothing to offer except the ability to hold the
people hostage. As a result, they often lead countries to disaster.
In
any case, the crisis in Ukraine is just one of the symptoms of the
disintegration of the old international order. The pattern of NATO and
Russia's back-and-forth actions precisely reflects the logic of the
actions of countries in the anarchic state of the international
community, and their actions in turn, in effect, exacerbated the
collapse of the old international order and the formation of a new one.
In
retrospect, the moment of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991
signaled both the collapse of the world order based on the bipolar
pattern of the Cold War and the germination of the seeds of a new order.
It is also the last political system of mankind. On the one hand, this
theory was popular because it fit the needs of the mainstream Western
ideology, and on the other hand, it was popular because of the collapse
of communism in Soviet Eastern Europe.
After the Second World War,
the United States and Britain led the way in establishing the "free
world order". The immediate context for the formation of this order was
World War I and World War II between European countries, which dealt a
devastating blow to Europe and even to Western civilization. The primary
goal of the "free world order" was to ensure that the international
conditions that led to World War I and World War II would not arise
again. But absurdly, the problems and challenges facing this "free world
order" began with the "total victory" of this order, namely the
collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.
Although
the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc at its core had
its own internal complexities, from a Western perspective it was a
complete victory for the Western liberal order. The first manifestation
of this judgment, which has had a tremendous impact on the internal and
external behavior of the West, especially the United States, is the
over-expansion of the American empire. The expansion of the empire was
first of all in the geopolitical sense. After the collapse of the Soviet
bloc, the U.S. and the West quickly occupied the Soviet geopolitical
space, especially in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Russia's
insecurity was naturally the result of NATO's over-expansion.
The two main lines that birthed the new international order
In
other words, the dissolution of the old Cold War order was ostensibly a
comprehensive victory for the Western order, but in fact it was at that
moment that a new international order began to be nurtured. The new
international order unfolded along two main lines of history.
The
first is the extreme squeeze of Russia's strategic space by NATO's
expansion to the east and the resulting extreme insecurity of Russia.
NATO is a product of the Cold War. Putin, now 68, was active as a KGB
agent at the forefront of the Cold War, especially in East Germany.
Putin once lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union in 2004, saying,
"The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical disaster
of the 20th century, and it was a tragedy for the Russian people." NATO
did not die out with the dissolution of its rival, the Warsaw Pact,
after the end of the Cold War, but continued to expand.
For Putin,
NATO's eastward expansion runs counter to the promises Western leaders
made to Russia at the time of East-West German reunification and is a
historic betrayal of Russia. In academic and policy research circles, it
is often assumed that this "gentlemen's agreement," as Putin calls it,
is not in the official documents, and the controversy has become a
historical case of "public and private justification" between Russia and
the West. But even if it was in the official documents, it would not
constitute any effective check on the behavior of the major powers,
because the essence of the world order is what international relations
scholars call "anarchy".
NATO expanded for the first time in 1999,
and in 2004 it included the three Soviet republics in the Baltics
(Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia). With the wave of "color revolutions"
that followed the new millennium, the situation became increasingly
unfavorable for Russia. Both the "Rose Revolution" in Georgia (2003) and
the "Orange Revolution" in Ukraine (2004) ended in regime change, and
the pro-Western leaders who came to power spared no effort in demanding
NATO and EU membership, intensifying the conflict with Russia. The 2008
Russo-Georgian war was the result of the conflict that got out of hand.
At
the end of 2021, NATO reaffirmed its stated policy of 2008 and
Ukraine's eventual accession to NATO, which undoubtedly reignited
Russian anger based on fear and a sense of spatial oppression. For
Russia, Ukraine is much more important than Georgia, not only because of
its large population but also because of the Russian national sentiment
toward Ukraine. Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, was the birthplace of the
first Russian nation-state in history, and the writer Gogol and
political figures Trotsky and Brezhnev were all born in Ukraine.
Russians
consider themselves "of the same language and race" as Ukrainians, and
Putin and others still compare the division of Russia and Ukraine to "a
great common catastrophe" and a "wound wrapped in a wound". As long as
one understands Russian history and the extreme insecurity Russia faces
today, one will not be surprised by Putin's war in Ukraine, but only by
Putin's skillful and shrewd political calculations.
The second
thread is the rise of China and U.S. precautions against it. The
collapse of the Soviet Union has made the United States the sole hegemon
in the world, and the invasion of former Soviet territory in the name
of NATO is only one of the U.S. fronts; the other, more important U.S.
front is dealing with a rapidly rising China in Asia.
The Bush
administration formed a neoconservative policy toward China right after
it took office in 2001. The neoconservatism is mainly about the creation
of a "mini-NATO" in Asia to contain China. It was only after the
September 11 attacks by Osama bin Laden that the United States
temporarily abandoned this strategy and focused on the war on terror.
Obama
is the first post-Cold War president to shift the U.S. strategic focus
eastward to China, and the signature policy is the "return to Asia"
strategy. The security objective of "Back to Asia" is mainly to maintain
security and stability in the Pacific, but a series of U.S. actions
have increased tensions in the Asia-Pacific security situation. The
economic pillar of "Back to Asia" was the Trans-Pacific Partnership
(TPP), a "China-exclusive (trade and investment) club" that ultimately
failed due to middle-class opposition and the Trump administration's
withdrawal.
The Trump administration has changed the basic
rhetoric of U.S. policy toward China, announcing that it has abandoned
its long-term engagement policy with China and that U.S.-China
competition has taken its place; the concept of "Indo-Pacific" has
replaced "Asia-Pacific" in strategy, and the first Indo-Pacific Strategy
Report was released. The main policy fulcrum for Asian security is the
U.S.-Japan-India-Australia Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD).
The
Trump administration's economic and science and technology policies
toward China are highly offensive, claiming that "China's industrial and
science and technology policies break the rules and undermine U.S.
global interests. Instead of sidelining China with multilateral
agreements, Trump has started a trade war with China directly. In terms
of competitive policies in the science and technology industry, the U.S.
policy toward China directly targets companies and technologies, using a
series of tools such as sanctions, financial decoupling, investment
reviews, technology embargoes, and diplomatic boycotts to suppress
Chinese technology companies and technological advances.
Much of
the Biden administration's national security team was inherited from the
Obama administration. Campbell was a key architect of the "return to
Asia" and is now organizing the "China strategy" and "Indo-Pacific
strategy" for the Biden administration. Biden and Obama's China strategy
is highly similar in its goals of "human rights" and "militarization of
the Indo-Pacific," with technology and the industrial chain being the
main focus of Biden's China strategy. Although Biden and Trump have been
"bitter enemies" on almost all issues (including Russia), Biden and the
Trump administration are very similar in their thinking on China, and
have become the refiners and faithful implementers of Trump's China
policy.
U.S. policy toward China today has moved beyond the
economic sphere to focus on what it calls "the strategic diplomatic and
geopolitical threat posed by China. The Biden administration issued the
"U.S. Strategic Approach to the People's Republic of China" in May 2020,
formalizing the competitive relationship between the United States and
China. A new version of the Indo-Pacific Strategy has recently been
introduced.
Operationally, the U.S. is building various so-called
alliances, including the U.S.-UK-Australia Core Alliance, the
U.S.-Japan-Australia-India "Quadrilateral Security Dialogue" and the
"Five Eyes Alliance. All of these have only one goal, which is to target
China, especially to hinder China's national reunification. The
militarization of Asia is accelerating around the issues of the South
China Sea and Taiwan. More and more strategists are worried that Asia is
becoming a "powder keg" for a new world war.
But now, Putin has
shocked Europe, the United States and the world with a full-scale war in
Ukraine. It is unlikely that the U.S. will engage in this war by
sending troops to Ukraine, but the U.S. truly recognizes its strategic
misjudgment and realizes that Putin and Russia are still not to be
underestimated. This will significantly slow down the shift of U.S.
strategic energies from Europe to the Indo-Pacific region.
Next,
Putin expects to have 15-20 years to further build and improve a
"mini-Soviet Union. For Americans, the assertion that "China is the
number one threat to the United States" has been questionable for years.
This means that as long as we do not make subversive strategic mistakes
ourselves, China's modernization process will not be interrupted by the
United States, but China can play an even more important role in the
process of building the New World Order.
China and the New World Order in the Making
The geopolitical scales are once again tilted in favor of China.
The
behavior of the U.S.-led NATO shows that the U.S. is no longer able to
maintain the original super-powerful world order, and that the new world
order is developing towards deep pluralism, i.e. "deep pluralism".
Today's world is dominated by not only Putin's Russia, but also Modi's
India, Erdogan's Turkey, France and Germany in the European Union, and
so on.
In the gestation period of the New World Order, each power
is constructing its own picture of the future world order, and their
expectations are often in conflict with each other, unable to reach
strategic consensus on fundamental interests, and even lacking the will
to make strategic compromises. The new international order in the making
is reflected in a more decentralized wealth, power and cultural
authority, with no superpowers, only great powers and regional powers.
Western liberal ideology will continue to exist, but will no longer
dominate the international order.
For China, the war in Ukraine
has further complicated the current unprecedented changes of the
century. The international situation is treacherous, and we need to
calmly analyze the new changes and trends in the interaction of major
powers and be more rational, without any emotion. But one thing is very
clear: what makes a great power a great power, or what makes it a great
power, is not its ability to challenge the old order, let alone its
ability to conduct war, but its responsibility and ability to promote
and maintain international peace.
(The author is the chairman of
the Academic Committee of the Institute of Public Policy of South China
University of Technology and the director of the Guangdong-Hong
Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area Research Institute in Guangzhou, from IPP
Review)
Officials in Washington claimed that after the invasion Russia asked China for economic and military assistance, which a Chinese official denounced on Monday as disinformation. In the end, China’s leadership has calculated that it must try to rise above what it considers a struggle between two tired powers and be seen as a pillar of stability in an increasingly turbulent world.“ This means that as long as we don’t commit terminal strategic blunders, China’s modernization will not be cut short, and on the contrary, China will have even greater ability and will to play a more important role in building a new international order,” Zheng Yongnian, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, who has advised senior officials, wrote after the invasion in a widely circulated article.
Translation of the article:
The full-blown war in Ukraine was both the final eruption of a 30-year old feud between Russia and the United States over NATO's expansion to the east and a landmark event in the complete collapse of the world order since World War II. Overall, the war in Ukraine has led the U.S. and the West to once again believe that their main threat comes from Putin and Russia, rather than China, as they have been alleging since the end of the Cold War. The geopolitical battle in Europe triggered by the war in Ukraine will significantly slow the shift of U.S. energies from Europe to the Indo-Pacific region. This means that as long as we do not make subversive strategic mistakes of our own, China's modernization process will not only not be interrupted, but China will have the ability and will to play a more important role in the construction of the new international order.
The collapse of the old international order
By any measure, the post-World War II international order, with the United Nations at its core, has faltered. The old order is rapidly disintegrating, and strongman politics is becoming popular again among the world powers, and countries are ambitiously looking for every opportunity to build their own regional or even international order on the ruins of the old order.
The result of the weak international order encountering the great power politics led by the strong man is the reorganization and collision of strategic forces. Of course, the collapse of the old order does not mean the establishment of a new one. Empirically, behind the collapse or re-establishment of all international orders is blood and fire, violence and war.
Russia has been trying to bring Belarus and eastern Ukraine together in every way possible for many years. This time, Putin, in his search for security, has fought back and expanded his sights on Ukraine as a whole, and it is not impossible that a "mini-Soviet Union" will be born in the future. This is, of course, inevitably related to NATO's expansion to the east, which is strategically pushing Russia harder.
The United States and the West have attributed this to Putin's own insecurity, but this is a failure to understand and even demonize Putin and the Russian nation. What NATO has created is the extreme insecurity of the entire Russian nation. Veteran American diplomat George Kennan foresaw this war long before NATO began its eastward expansion.
On May 2, 1998, when the U.S. Senate officially approved the NATO expansion plan, New York Times reporter Thomas Friedman called Kennan to interview him. Kennan, the architect of America's successful policy to contain the Soviet Union, began his career at the State Department in 1926, became U.S. ambassador to Moscow in 1952, and is considered America's greatest expert on Russia. 94-year-old Kennan, when asked what he thought of NATO expansion, replied as follows.
"I see this as the beginning of a new Cold War. Once NATO expands, Russia will gradually react in a way that is quite detrimental to the United States. I think NATO expansion is a sad mistake and there is no reason for it. Such an expansion would leave our constitutional fathers in peace in their nine corners of the earth.
"We have signed agreements agreeing to protect a large number of countries, even though we neither have the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. (NATO expansion) is nothing more than a foolish move by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs. It disturbs me that the entire Senate is so superficially ignorant in its debate on this matter. I am particularly disturbed by the characterization of Russia as a country that desperately wants to attack Western Europe.
"Don't people understand? What we opposed during the Cold War was the Soviet communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who started the greatest bloodless revolution in history and overthrew the Soviet regime. Moreover, Russia's democracy is as advanced, if not more so, than those of the countries we just signed an agreement to protect. Russia, of course, will react badly to NATO expansion, and then (the advocates of NATO expansion) will say, "We keep telling you, that's what the Russians do, but it's really not true."
What's happening today is exactly what Kennan foresaw. If NATO expansion was the decision of ignorant and fearless politicians, then it is understandable that American politicians today are "helpless" against Putin. They are, so to speak, watching Russia invade Ukraine without being able to do anything about it.
However, the situation in Ukraine today is not only the result of the interaction between the two powers, the U.S. (NATO) and Russia, but Ukraine itself also plays a role, even a key role. Historically, both in the era of empires and in the era of sovereign states, small countries had to survive in the cracks between major powers and therefore had to have politicians with high political calculations and high diplomatic skills. But all this is too far away from today's Ukraine.
First, naive politicians fantasize about relying on the power of the United States and NATO for their own security. Since independence, Ukraine's insecurity is real, but Ukraine's security can only come between Russia and NATO. Instead of doing so, Ukraine's leaders have tried to "draw the wolf into the house" in order to achieve security. But the problem is that once Ukraine "draws the wolf into the house," then Russia will not feel safe. Once Russia, the great power, feels insecure, Ukraine, the small power, will become a victim of its own behavior. Such behavior of great powers was common in imperial times. In recent times, the international system based on national sovereign states was theoretically designed to protect small states. However, this was only the ideal and did not appear in practice.
Second, the utopianization of intellectuals. After the end of the Cold War, there was a wave of "nation-building" in various countries. The historian Anderson's "Imagining Community" became famous, and many intellectuals fantasized about using some secular values, such as "democracy," "freedom," and "human rights" to construct a "new nation. "In the process, they often demonized the original nation to which they belonged. The same is true for Ukrainian intellectuals. They have the illusion that they will feel safe as long as they stand with the West, which shares their values. But reality is cruel, and this moral courage is hardly translated into reality.
Third, the disappearance of astute politicians. For small countries, diplomacy is a matter of life and death, not child's play. But in the era of populism, more and more "political outsiders" have entered the political arena and assumed the highest power. These people often lack both the domestic governance skills and the diplomatic skills needed for the country to survive in the cracks. They have nothing to offer except the ability to hold the people hostage. As a result, they often lead countries to disaster.
In any case, the crisis in Ukraine is just one of the symptoms of the disintegration of the old international order. The pattern of NATO and Russia's back-and-forth actions precisely reflects the logic of the actions of countries in the anarchic state of the international community, and their actions in turn, in effect, exacerbated the collapse of the old international order and the formation of a new one.
In retrospect, the moment of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 signaled both the collapse of the world order based on the bipolar pattern of the Cold War and the germination of the seeds of a new order. It is also the last political system of mankind. On the one hand, this theory was popular because it fit the needs of the mainstream Western ideology, and on the other hand, it was popular because of the collapse of communism in Soviet Eastern Europe.
After the Second World War, the United States and Britain led the way in establishing the "free world order". The immediate context for the formation of this order was World War I and World War II between European countries, which dealt a devastating blow to Europe and even to Western civilization. The primary goal of the "free world order" was to ensure that the international conditions that led to World War I and World War II would not arise again. But absurdly, the problems and challenges facing this "free world order" began with the "total victory" of this order, namely the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.
Although the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc at its core had its own internal complexities, from a Western perspective it was a complete victory for the Western liberal order. The first manifestation of this judgment, which has had a tremendous impact on the internal and external behavior of the West, especially the United States, is the over-expansion of the American empire. The expansion of the empire was first of all in the geopolitical sense. After the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the U.S. and the West quickly occupied the Soviet geopolitical space, especially in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Russia's insecurity was naturally the result of NATO's over-expansion.
The two main lines that birthed the new international order
In other words, the dissolution of the old Cold War order was ostensibly a comprehensive victory for the Western order, but in fact it was at that moment that a new international order began to be nurtured. The new international order unfolded along two main lines of history.
The first is the extreme squeeze of Russia's strategic space by NATO's expansion to the east and the resulting extreme insecurity of Russia. NATO is a product of the Cold War. Putin, now 68, was active as a KGB agent at the forefront of the Cold War, especially in East Germany. Putin once lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union in 2004, saying, "The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century, and it was a tragedy for the Russian people." NATO did not die out with the dissolution of its rival, the Warsaw Pact, after the end of the Cold War, but continued to expand.
For Putin, NATO's eastward expansion runs counter to the promises Western leaders made to Russia at the time of East-West German reunification and is a historic betrayal of Russia. In academic and policy research circles, it is often assumed that this "gentlemen's agreement," as Putin calls it, is not in the official documents, and the controversy has become a historical case of "public and private justification" between Russia and the West. But even if it was in the official documents, it would not constitute any effective check on the behavior of the major powers, because the essence of the world order is what international relations scholars call "anarchy".
NATO expanded for the first time in 1999, and in 2004 it included the three Soviet republics in the Baltics (Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia). With the wave of "color revolutions" that followed the new millennium, the situation became increasingly unfavorable for Russia. Both the "Rose Revolution" in Georgia (2003) and the "Orange Revolution" in Ukraine (2004) ended in regime change, and the pro-Western leaders who came to power spared no effort in demanding NATO and EU membership, intensifying the conflict with Russia. The 2008 Russo-Georgian war was the result of the conflict that got out of hand.
At the end of 2021, NATO reaffirmed its stated policy of 2008 and Ukraine's eventual accession to NATO, which undoubtedly reignited Russian anger based on fear and a sense of spatial oppression. For Russia, Ukraine is much more important than Georgia, not only because of its large population but also because of the Russian national sentiment toward Ukraine. Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, was the birthplace of the first Russian nation-state in history, and the writer Gogol and political figures Trotsky and Brezhnev were all born in Ukraine.
Russians consider themselves "of the same language and race" as Ukrainians, and Putin and others still compare the division of Russia and Ukraine to "a great common catastrophe" and a "wound wrapped in a wound". As long as one understands Russian history and the extreme insecurity Russia faces today, one will not be surprised by Putin's war in Ukraine, but only by Putin's skillful and shrewd political calculations.
The second thread is the rise of China and U.S. precautions against it. The collapse of the Soviet Union has made the United States the sole hegemon in the world, and the invasion of former Soviet territory in the name of NATO is only one of the U.S. fronts; the other, more important U.S. front is dealing with a rapidly rising China in Asia.
The Bush administration formed a neoconservative policy toward China right after it took office in 2001. The neoconservatism is mainly about the creation of a "mini-NATO" in Asia to contain China. It was only after the September 11 attacks by Osama bin Laden that the United States temporarily abandoned this strategy and focused on the war on terror.
Obama is the first post-Cold War president to shift the U.S. strategic focus eastward to China, and the signature policy is the "return to Asia" strategy. The security objective of "Back to Asia" is mainly to maintain security and stability in the Pacific, but a series of U.S. actions have increased tensions in the Asia-Pacific security situation. The economic pillar of "Back to Asia" was the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a "China-exclusive (trade and investment) club" that ultimately failed due to middle-class opposition and the Trump administration's withdrawal.
The Trump administration has changed the basic rhetoric of U.S. policy toward China, announcing that it has abandoned its long-term engagement policy with China and that U.S.-China competition has taken its place; the concept of "Indo-Pacific" has replaced "Asia-Pacific" in strategy, and the first Indo-Pacific Strategy Report was released. The main policy fulcrum for Asian security is the U.S.-Japan-India-Australia Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD).
The Trump administration's economic and science and technology policies toward China are highly offensive, claiming that "China's industrial and science and technology policies break the rules and undermine U.S. global interests. Instead of sidelining China with multilateral agreements, Trump has started a trade war with China directly. In terms of competitive policies in the science and technology industry, the U.S. policy toward China directly targets companies and technologies, using a series of tools such as sanctions, financial decoupling, investment reviews, technology embargoes, and diplomatic boycotts to suppress Chinese technology companies and technological advances.
Much of the Biden administration's national security team was inherited from the Obama administration. Campbell was a key architect of the "return to Asia" and is now organizing the "China strategy" and "Indo-Pacific strategy" for the Biden administration. Biden and Obama's China strategy is highly similar in its goals of "human rights" and "militarization of the Indo-Pacific," with technology and the industrial chain being the main focus of Biden's China strategy. Although Biden and Trump have been "bitter enemies" on almost all issues (including Russia), Biden and the Trump administration are very similar in their thinking on China, and have become the refiners and faithful implementers of Trump's China policy.
U.S. policy toward China today has moved beyond the economic sphere to focus on what it calls "the strategic diplomatic and geopolitical threat posed by China. The Biden administration issued the "U.S. Strategic Approach to the People's Republic of China" in May 2020, formalizing the competitive relationship between the United States and China. A new version of the Indo-Pacific Strategy has recently been introduced.
Operationally, the U.S. is building various so-called alliances, including the U.S.-UK-Australia Core Alliance, the U.S.-Japan-Australia-India "Quadrilateral Security Dialogue" and the "Five Eyes Alliance. All of these have only one goal, which is to target China, especially to hinder China's national reunification. The militarization of Asia is accelerating around the issues of the South China Sea and Taiwan. More and more strategists are worried that Asia is becoming a "powder keg" for a new world war.
But now, Putin has shocked Europe, the United States and the world with a full-scale war in Ukraine. It is unlikely that the U.S. will engage in this war by sending troops to Ukraine, but the U.S. truly recognizes its strategic misjudgment and realizes that Putin and Russia are still not to be underestimated. This will significantly slow down the shift of U.S. strategic energies from Europe to the Indo-Pacific region.
Next, Putin expects to have 15-20 years to further build and improve a "mini-Soviet Union. For Americans, the assertion that "China is the number one threat to the United States" has been questionable for years. This means that as long as we do not make subversive strategic mistakes ourselves, China's modernization process will not be interrupted by the United States, but China can play an even more important role in the process of building the New World Order.
China and the New World Order in the Making
The geopolitical scales are once again tilted in favor of China.
The behavior of the U.S.-led NATO shows that the U.S. is no longer able to maintain the original super-powerful world order, and that the new world order is developing towards deep pluralism, i.e. "deep pluralism". Today's world is dominated by not only Putin's Russia, but also Modi's India, Erdogan's Turkey, France and Germany in the European Union, and so on.
In the gestation period of the New World Order, each power is constructing its own picture of the future world order, and their expectations are often in conflict with each other, unable to reach strategic consensus on fundamental interests, and even lacking the will to make strategic compromises. The new international order in the making is reflected in a more decentralized wealth, power and cultural authority, with no superpowers, only great powers and regional powers. Western liberal ideology will continue to exist, but will no longer dominate the international order.
For China, the war in Ukraine has further complicated the current unprecedented changes of the century. The international situation is treacherous, and we need to calmly analyze the new changes and trends in the interaction of major powers and be more rational, without any emotion. But one thing is very clear: what makes a great power a great power, or what makes it a great power, is not its ability to challenge the old order, let alone its ability to conduct war, but its responsibility and ability to promote and maintain international peace.
(The author is the chairman of the Academic Committee of the Institute of Public Policy of South China University of Technology and the director of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area Research Institute in Guangzhou, from IPP Review)
âWe have been very clear both privately with Beijing and publicly with Beijing that there would be consequences for such support,â Ned Price, the State Department spokesman, said at a press briefing in Washington, in response to questions about the Rome meeting.
The meeting took place in part âto precisely make clear our concerns,â he said, adding, âWe will ensure that no country is able to get away with such a thing.â
Officials in Washington claimed that after the invasion Russia asked China for economic and military assistance, which a Chinese official denounced on Monday as disinformation.
In the end, Chinaâs leadership has calculated that it must try to rise above what it considers a struggle between two tired powers and be seen as a pillar of stability in an increasingly turbulent world.â
This means that as long as we donât commit terminal strategic blunders, Chinaâs modernization will not be cut short, and on the contrary, China will have even greater ability and will to play a more important role in building a new international order,â Zheng Yongnian, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, who has advised senior officials, wrote after the invasion in a widely circulated article.
Make Russia hobbled by refusing them aid and who comes out on top in the "never get in a land war in Asia" scenario?
Pretty sure they want to keep Putin in power as they have him under control. A free democratic Russia is the last thing China wants on its northern border. But if they support him with arms, how will the RoW react? These are interesting times.
Apparently the Russian military is running out of some supplies and has asked China. This will be the true turning point of this drama. Which way is China going to turn? They must be in a real quandry. Pissing off the rest of the world with almost certain implications for its trade or shoring up Putin and having him in their pocket. I bet they'll try to shore up Putin without pissing off the rest of the world, but how?
