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PRO – GREAT POWER COMPETITION GOOD ....................................................................................................................3
CHINA ................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 4
China Threat ............................................................................................................................................................................................ 5
Deterrence Key to Prevent China’s Aggression ........................................................................................................................ 50
China is a Threat/Is Not Defensive ............................................................................................................................................... 57
China Tech Dominance ...................................................................................................................................................................... 63
Threat to Taiwan ................................................................................................................................................................................. 65
AT: Thucydides Trap---Turn ............................................................................................................................................................ 79
RUSSIA.............................................................................................................................................................................................................81

Russia Makes GPC Inevitable ................................................................................................................................................ 82

Russia Threat * .......................................................................................................................................................................... 90
War Impacts .......................................................................................................................................................................................... 91
Russian Revisionism ........................................................................................................................................................................... 94
Putin Revisionism ............................................................................................................................................................................. 104
Threat to Europe............................................................................................................................................................................... 107
Russia Grey Zone ............................................................................................................................................................................... 111
Need Hard Power to Stop Russia ................................................................................................................................................ 113
Threat to World ................................................................................................................................................................................ 126
Russisa/China Threat ..................................................................................................................................................................... 128
AT: NATO’s Fault ............................................................................................................................................................................... 133
AT: Retrenchment Solves ............................................................................................................................................................... 140
AT: Losing in Ukraine ...................................................................................................................................................................... 141
AT: Sanctions Solve .......................................................................................................................................................................... 144
AT: Can’t Fight NATO ...................................................................................................................................................................... 145
AT: Cooperation Solves ................................................................................................................................................................... 148
AT: Humiliation Turn ...................................................................................................................................................................... 151
Abandoning GPC Means Russia Invasion ................................................................................................................................ 155
Answers to: GPC Caused Ukraine Invasion ............................................................................................................................. 160
Cyber Threat ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 165
Cyber Threat to the US ................................................................................................................................................................... 179
Need More Cyber Defense .............................................................................................................................................................. 181
Need Offensive Cyber Operations ............................................................................................................................................... 185
NATO Good .......................................................................................................................................................................................... 187
RUSSIA/CHINA COMBINED ....................................................................................................................................................................... 206
2AC---AT: Spheres of Influence .................................................................................................................................................... 213
ALTERNATIVES FAIL .................................................................................................................................................................................. 214
Multipolarity Fails ............................................................................................................................................................................ 215
Multilateralism Fails ....................................................................................................................................................................... 218
US Not Overstretched ...................................................................................................................................................................... 229
A2: Offshore Balancing Solves ..................................................................................................................................................... 239
International Cooperation Fails ................................................................................................................................................. 256
Soft Power Answers ......................................................................................................................................................................... 260
A2: China Alternative ...................................................................................................................................................................... 263
HEGEMONY GOOD ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 274
CON -- GREAT POWER COMPETITION BAD ................................................................................................................ 285
DOMESTIC OVERSTRETCH......................................................................................................................................................................... 286
GLOBAL WAR .............................................................................................................................................................................................. 288
DISEASE SPREAD ........................................................................................................................................................................................ 289
RACISM/IMPERIALISM .............................................................................................................................................................................. 291
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RUSSIA.......................................................................................................................................................................................................... 295
GPC Means War with Russia ........................................................................................................................................................ 296
Russia Threat Defense .................................................................................................................................................................... 300
NATO Bad ............................................................................................................................................................................................ 316
European Military Independence Better ................................................................................................................................. 353
CHINA ........................................................................................................................................................................................................... 356
Security Dilemma ............................................................................................................................................................................. 357
GPC Against China Means War ................................................................................................................................................... 361
China Threat (General) Answers (Defense) ........................................................................................................................... 405
No China Revisionism ...................................................................................................................................................................... 421
No China war ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 429
Accidental War Answers ................................................................................................................................................................ 434
No Existential Threat ...................................................................................................................................................................... 437
China Won’t Replace US Hegemony .......................................................................................................................................... 439
AT: China Economic Downturn Means Lashout ................................................................................................................... 442
AT: China Has Lots of Missiles/Weapons ................................................................................................................................ 444
China Won’t Push the US Out of Asia ........................................................................................................................................ 445
China Does Not Threaten the US ................................................................................................................................................ 447
No Nuclear Escalation .................................................................................................................................................................... 450
Doshi and Pillsbury Indite ............................................................................................................................................................. 452
China Threat Inflation .................................................................................................................................................................... 454
Allies Turn ........................................................................................................................................................................................... 464
Taiwan Defense ................................................................................................................................................................................. 465
Taiwan War Offense ........................................................................................................................................................................ 469
China Threat (South China Sea) Answers ............................................................................................................................... 471
Alternative – Spheres of Influence ............................................................................................................................................. 473
US OVERSTRETCHED ................................................................................................................................................................................. 475
Heg Unsustainable ........................................................................................................................................................................... 476
US Decline Now ................................................................................................................................................................................. 490
GPC LEADS TO GPW................................................................................................................................................................................. 495
GPW LIKELY............................................................................................................................................................................................... 498
ALTERNATIVES ........................................................................................................................................................................................... 504
Multipolarity ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 505
Offshore Balancing Solves ............................................................................................................................................................. 507
Multipolarity is Peaceful ................................................................................................................................................................ 511
US GLOBAL LEADERSHIP GENERALLY BAD ........................................................................................................................................... 514
US LEADERSHIP NOT KEY TO GLOBAL PEACE ...................................................................................................................................... 545
OTHER CONTENTION ANSWERS .............................................................................................................................................................. 559
US Credibility Answers.................................................................................................................................................................... 560
Democracy Answers ........................................................................................................................................................................ 562
Global Order Answers ..................................................................................................................................................................... 564
Global Prolif Answers ...................................................................................................................................................................... 566
Reducing Commitments Not Bad | Prolif Answers .............................................................................................................. 567
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PRO – Great Power Competition Good
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China
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China Threat
China is revisionist – territorial expansion, 5-year plans, and anti-democratic
innovation on all fronts
Beckley 22 – Jeane Kirkpatrick Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, associate professor
at Tufts University (Michael, March/April 2022, "Enemies of My Enemy," Foreign Affairs,
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2021-02-14/china-new-world-order-enemies-my-enemy)//KH
ENTER THE DRAGON
There has never been any doubt about what China wants, because Chinese
leaders have declared the same objectives for
decades: to keep the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in power, reabsorb Taiwan, control the East China
and South China Seas, and return China to its rightful place as the dominant power in Asia and the most
powerful country in the world. For most of the past four decades, the country took a relatively patient and peaceful approach to achieving
these aims. Focused on economic growth and fearful of being shunned by the international community, China adopted a “peaceful rise”
strategy, relying primarily on economic clout to advance its interests and generally following a maxim of the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping:
“Hide your strength, bide your time.”
In recent years, however, China
has expanded aggressively on multiple fronts. “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy has
replaced friendship diplomacy. Perceived slights from foreigners, no matter how small, are met with
North Korean–style condemnation. A combative attitude has seeped into every part of China’s foreign policy, and it is confronting
many countries with their gravest threat in generations.
This threat is most apparent
in maritime East Asia, where China is moving aggressively to cement its vast
territorial claims. Beijing is churning out warships faster than any country has since World War II, and it
has flooded Asian sea-lanes with Chinese coast guard and fishing vessels. It has strung military outposts
across the South China Sea and dramatically increased its use of ship ramming and aerial interceptions to
shove neighbors out of disputed areas. In the Taiwan Strait, Chinese military patrols, some involving a dozen warships
and more than 50 combat aircraft, prowl the sea almost daily and simulate attacks on Taiwanese and
U.S. targets. Chinese officials have told Western analysts that calls for an invasion of Taiwan are
proliferating within the CCP. Pentagon officials worry that such an assault could be imminent.
China
has gone on the economic offensive, too. Its latest five-year plan calls for dominating what
Chinese officials call “chokepoints”—goods and services that other countries can’t live without—and then
using that dominance, plus the lure of China’s domestic market, to browbeat countries into concessions. Toward that end, China has
become the dominant dispenser of overseas loans, loading up more than 150 countries with over $1
trillion of debt. It has massively subsidized strategic industries to gain a monopoly on hundreds of vital
products, and it has installed the hardware for digital networks in dozens of countries. Armed with economic
leverage, it has used coercion against more than a dozen countries over the last few years. In many cases, the punishment has been
disproportionate to the supposed crime—for example, slapping tariffs on many of Australia’s exports after that country requested an
international investigation into the origins of COVID-19.
China has also become a potent antidemocratic force, selling advanced tools of tyranny around the
world. By combining surveillance cameras with social media monitoring, artificial intelligence,
biometrics, and speech and facial recognition technologies, the Chinese government has pioneered a system that allows
dictators to watch citizens constantly and punish them instantly by blocking their access to finance, education, employment,
telecommunications, or travel. The apparatus is a despot’s dream, and Chinese companies are already selling and operating aspects of it in
more than 80 countries.
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Western encirclement, aging populations, and attempted expansion prove China is a
volatile revisionist power on the verge of lash-out
Beckley and Brands 21– *Jeane Kirkpatrick Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute,
associate professor at Tufts University; **resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Henry A.
Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International
Studies. (*Michael and **Hal, January 1, 2021, “Into the Danger Zone - Coming Crisis in US-China
Relations," American Enterprise Institute, Targeted News Service, ProQuest via UMich Libraries,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep27632?seq=1)//KH
Red Flags
Most debate on America's China policy focuses on the dangers of a rising and confident China.3 But the
United States actually faces a more complex and volatile threat: an already powerful but increasingly
insecure China beset by internal problems and a brewing international backlash.
China already has the money and muscle to challenge the United States in key areas. Thanks to decades of rapid
growth, China boasts the world's largest economy (measured by purchasing power parity), manufacturing output,
trade surplus, financial reserves, navy by number of ships, and conventional missile force. Chinese
nationals lead four of the 15 United Nations specialized agencies.4 Chinese investments and loans span
the globe, and Beijing is pushing for primacy in key technologies such as 5G telecommunications and
artificial intelligence (AI).5 Add in that the American-led world order has experienced four years of geopolitical disarray under President
Donald Trump and that much of the world has suffered through many months of a crippling COVID-19 pandemic, and it is hardly
surprising that Beijing is testing the status quo everywhere from the South China Sea to the border with
China.
But China's
geopolitical window of opportunity may be closing as fast as it opened. Since 2007, China's
annual economic growth rate has dropped by more than half, and productivity has declined by nearly 10
percent, meaning that China is spending more to produce less.6 Meanwhile, debt has ballooned eightfold and is on
pace to total 335 percent of gross domestic product by the end of 2020.7 No country has racked up so much debt so fast in peacetime.
China has little hope of reversing these trends, because it is about to suffer the worst aging crisis in
history. Over the next 30 years, China will lose 200 million working-age adults and gain 300 million senior
citizens./8 Any country that has aged, accu-mulated debt, or lost productivity at anything close to China's current pace has lost at least one
decade to near-zero economic growth. And as economic growth falls, the dangers of social and political unrest
rise./9 China's leaders are well aware of these trends./10 President Xi Jinping has given multiple internal
speeches warning party members of the potential for a Soviet-style collapse./11 China's gov-ernment
has outlawed negative economic news, and Chinese elites are moving their money and children out of
the country en masse./12
Meanwhile, China
faces a rising wave of foreign hostility. According to leaked Chinese government reports
and independent Western analyses, nega-tive views of China have soared to highs not seen since the
Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989./13 This surge of anti-China sentiment is a response to Beijing's internal
repression and external assertiveness, and it is now manifesting in ways that threaten to crush China's
geopolitical ambitions. Nearly a dozen countries have suspended or canceled their participation in Belt
and Road Initiative projects./14 Another 16 countries, including eight of the world's 10 largest economies, have
banned or severely restricted use of Huawei products in their 5G networks./15 India has been turning hard
against China, since a clash between the two countries killed 20 soldiers in June. Japan has ramped up military spending,
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turned amphibious ships into aircraft carriers, and strung missile launchers along the Ryukyu Islands near Taiwan, where a
record number of citizens now identify solely as Taiwanese, not Chinese./16 The European Union has labeled China a
"systemic rival," and Europe's three great powers--France, Germany, and the United Kingdom--are
sending naval patrols to counter Beijing's expansion in the South China Sea and Indian Ocean./17
These intensifying
headwinds will make China a less competitive long-term rival to the United States but a
more explosive near-term threat. Simply put, it is hard to see how a country facing so many severe
challenges can ultimately outpace America and its many allies. Yet whereas a rising China could afford to
shelve disputes and deescalate crises--confident that its wealth, power, and status were growing and that the Chinese Communist
Party's (CCP) legitimacy was secure--a slowing and increasingly encircled China will be eager to score geopolitical
wins while it still can. There is no mystery about what China's ambitions are, because the CCP has enshrined them in
national law: to make the Chinese nation whole again; reunite Taiwan with the mainland; control the
East and South China Seas, thereby turning the western Pacific into a Chinese lake; and restore China's status as
a great power. The looming danger is that China will act more aggressively to achieve them as its future prospects
dim.
History Rhymes
If China goes down this ugly path, it wouldn't be the first great power to do so. We
tend to think that rising revisionists pose
the greatest danger to the existing order. "It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this inspired in
Sparta that made war inevitable," Thucydides wrote. But historically, the most desperate dashes have often come from dissatisfied
powers that had been on the ascent but grew worried that their time was running short./18
World War I is the classic example. The growing German challenge to the United Kingdom provided the strategic background to that conflict.
Yet in the foreground in the run-up to 1914 were nagging German fears of decline. The growth of Russian military power and strategic mobility
was menacing the eastern flank. New French conscription laws were changing the balance in the west. A tightening Franco-Russian-British
entente was leaving Germany surrounded. If Berlin did not act quickly, its military strategy--based on fighting a two-front war--would collapse,
its dreams of world power and geopolitical greatness would vanish, and the internal strains caused by intensifying political clashes might
become unmanageable. This was a principal reason Berlin acted so recklessly during the July crisis--by issuing its "blank check" to AustriaHungary and then enacting its plan for a rapid, two-front war--despite the obvious peril, as Chief of General Staff Helmut von Moltke
acknowledged, of a continental war that might "annihilate the civilization of almost the whole of Europe for decades to come."/19
The same decision-making dynamics were present in other cases. Imperial Japan made its fatal gamble in 1941, after the US oil embargo and
naval rearma-ment made it clear that Tokyo's window to dominate the Asia-Pacific was closing fast./20 In the 1970s, Soviet global expansion
peaked as Moscow's military buildup matured and the slowing of the Soviet economy created an impetus to lock in geopolitical gains sooner
than later. Even the United States once fit this pattern. The flurry of American expansion and the buildup of US naval power in the 1890s came
after an economic slump that exacerbated internal tensions and amid a global upsurge of imperial aggran-dizement that left some US
strategists concerned that Washington would be left behind by emerging European mega-empires.
In some of these instances, it
was economic dis-tress following a long period of growth that stoked anxious
aggression. In others, it was the onset of strategic encirclement, often self-provoked, by rival powers. In
all cases, an upsurge in a revisionist state's power gave it the means to challenge the status quo, but an
apparent downturn in its future prospects gave it the motive to do so boldly, even violently. Given that
China is currently facing both a grim economic forecast and tightening strategic encirclement, the next
few years may prove partic-ularly turbulent./21
Failing to effectively counter China causes war — we’re on the brink.
Colby 22 — Elbridge Colby, Co-Founder and Principal of The Marathon Institute—a policy initiative
focused on developing strategies to prepare the United States for an era of sustained great power
competition, Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, former Director of the Defense Program at
the Center for a New American Security, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and
Force Development at the U.S. Department of Defense, Recipient of the Distinguished and Exceptional
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Public Service Awards from the U.S. Department of Defense and of the Superior and Meritorious Honor
Awards from the U.S. Department of State, holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, 2022 (“China, Not Russia,
Still Poses the Greatest Challenge to U.S. Security,” The National Interest, July 1st, Available Online at
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/china-not-russia-still-poses-greatest-challenge-us-security-203228,
Accessed 07-12-2022)
American foreign policy after—indeed, during—the Russo-Ukrainian War should promptly head to the
world’s most decisive region: Asia. This will require that American foreign and defense policy genuinely
put Asia first—in our military investments, in our allocation of political capital and resources, and in
our leaders’ attention.
Nothing that has happened since Russia’s abominable invasion of Ukraine has changed a set of facts:
Asia is the world’s largest market area, and it is growing in global share. Located in the middle of Asia is
China which, alongside the United States, is one of the world’s two superpowers. China’s behavior has
become increasingly aggressive and domineering and appears oriented toward establishing Beijing’s
hegemony over Asia. If Beijing achieves this goal, the resulting consequences for American life will be
dire.
Preventing China from establishing this hegemony over Asia must therefore be the priority of U.S.
foreign policy—even in the face of what is happening in Europe. The simple fact is that Asia is more
important than Europe, and China is a much greater threat than Russia. By way of comparison, Asia’s
economy is roughly twice as large as Europe’s today—but within twenty years it will likely be multiple
times greater. China, in the meantime, has a GDP roughly an order of magnitude larger than Russia’s.
If current trends continue, China appears on a trajectory to achieve its hegemonic ambitions. Beijing
has been building a military distinctly not limited to territorial defense. Rather, it will be capable of
enabling Beijing’s pursuit of much larger and ambitious goals—first by ingesting Taiwan, but not ending
there. Indeed, amidst the furor over the war in Ukraine, Beijing announced yet again that it would
increase its defense spending by 7 percent this year. Meanwhile, despite much talk, the United States
has neglected its military position in Asia, while many of its allies—especially Japan and Taiwan—have
been laggard in maintaining their defenses. As a result, the military balance in Asia has continued to shift
markedly against the United States and our allies. In blunt terms, we are now rapidly approaching, if not
already in, the window of opportunity where China might well decide to attack Taiwan—and we might
lose.
Avoiding this outcome must be the top, overriding priority for U.S. policy. This does not mean Europe is
unimportant or that we should neglect or abandon it. We should actively support Ukraine with weapons
and other forms of support while remaining firmly committed to NATO, albeit with our contributions
being more focused and narrow in scale. But it does mean Asia must be our priority, and genuinely so,
not just rhetorically as has so often been the case in the past.
Because of these factors, shifting our focus to Asia would make sense regardless of how Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine fared. But, if anything, the war in Ukraine and the reaction to it has made it even
more palatable for the United States to turn to Asia. Moscow, while still menacing and dangerous, has
vividly demonstrated that its power is less formidable than many of us had feared. Russia is very likely to
try to recover its strength, but the losses of war and the impact of sanctions are likely to make that
process slow and difficult. At the same time, Europe has stood up, announcing major increases in
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defense spending, supporting Ukraine’s own self-defense, and demonstrating an unprecedented degree
of cohesion in applying sanctions and other forms of pressure on Russia.
The result is that Moscow appears less of a threat than many of us had supposed, while Europeans are
doing more to shoulder their own defense. If anything, this should make the United States more, not
less, ready to focus on Asia. Indeed, in these circumstances, it is actually hard to understand the logic of
increasing America’s focus on Europe. Why would we double down in Europe at the expense of Asia
when there is less of a threat from Russia and more European self-help—all while the danger in the
primary theater only increases?
Yet many in the foreign policy and political elite seem to view the Russo-Ukrainian War as an
opportunity precisely to double down in Europe. Even more, for some, it is a chance to try to turn the
foreign policy clock back to the globe-spanning liberal imperialism of two decades ago.
Washington must resist this temptation like the plague. The breathtakingly hubristic foreign policies of
the 2000s were unwise even in the period of unipolarity, as we have found to our chagrin. As American
leaders sermonized on an end to evil, China rose at our expense; our military expeditions in the Middle
East ended in frustration, when not failure; and we lost our military edge and many of our economic
advantages. But such policies would be even more extraordinarily ill-advised when we are now locked in
a strategic rivalry with a superpower China that is far more powerful than the USSR, Germany, or Japan
ever were. We simply do not have the preponderance of power to waste our resources anymore.
Time, then, to focus on the region and the contest that really matters: the effort to deny China’s
dominance of Asia. We are already well behind in that struggle, and every day we neglect to increase
our focus further increases the chances of crisis, war, and defeat—with grievous consequences for all
Americans.
China is rising – domestic and international infrastructure and agricultural exports
outpace any other nation
McCoy 22 – Alfred McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of WisconsinMadison (Alfred, 2-25-2022, "Will the Fight for Hegemony Survive Climate Change?," Nation,
https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-china-usa-beijing/)//KH
THE RISE OF CHINESE GLOBAL HEGEMONY
China’s rise to world power could be considered not just the result of its own initiative but also of
American inattention. While Washington was mired in endless wars in the Greater Middle East in the decade
following the September 2001 terrorist attacks, Beijing began using a trillion dollars of its swelling dollar
reserves to build a tricontinental economic infrastructure it called the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that
would shake the foundations of Washington’s world order. Not only has this scheme already gone a long way
toward incorporating much of Africa and Asia into Beijing’s version of the world economy, but it has
simultaneously lifted many millions out of poverty.
During the early years of the Cold War, Washington funded the reconstruction of a ravaged Europe and the development of 100 new nations
emerging from colonial rule. But as the Cold War ended in 1991, more than a third
of humanity was still living in extreme
poverty, abandoned by Washington’s then-reigning neoliberal ideology that consigned social change to
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the whims of the free market. By 2018, nearly half the world’s population, or about 3.4 billion people, were
simply struggling to survive on the equivalent of five dollars a day, creating a vast global constituency for
Beijing’s economic leadership.
For China, social change began at home. Starting in the 1980s, the Communist Party
presided over the transformation of
an impoverished agricultural society into an urban industrial powerhouse. Propelled by the greatest mass migration
in history, as millions moved from country to city, its economy grew nearly 10 percent annually for 40 years and lifted
800 million people out of poverty—the fastest sustained rate ever recorded by any country. Meanwhile,
between 2006 and 2016 alone, its industrial output increased from $1.2 trillion to $3.2 trillion, leaving
the United States in the dust at $2.2 trillion and making China the workshop of the world.
By the time Washington awoke to China’s challenge and tried to respond with what President Barack Obama called a
“strategic pivot” to Asia, it was too late. With foreign reserves already at $4 trillion in 2014, Beijing launched its Belt and Road
Initiative, while establishing an Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, with 56 member nations and an impressive
$100 billion in capital. When a Belt and Road Forum of 29 world leaders convened in Beijing in May 2017, President Xi Jinping hailed the
initiative as the “project of the century,” aimed both at promoting growth and improving “people’s wellbeing” through “poverty alleviation.” Indeed, two years later a World Bank study found that BRI transportation projects
had already increased the gross domestic product in 55 recipient nations by a solid 3.4 percent.
Amid this flurry of flying dirt and flowing concrete, Beijing
seems to have an underlying design for transcending the
vast distances that have historically separated Asia from Europe. Its goal: to forge a unitary market that will
soon cover the vast Eurasian land mass. This scheme will consolidate China’s control over a continent that is home to 70 percent
of the world’s population and productivity. In the end, it could also break the US geopolitical grip over a region that has
long been the core of, and key to, its global power. The foundation for such an ambitious transnational
scheme is a monumental construction effort that in just two decades has already covered China and much
of Central Asia with a massive triad of energy pipelines, high-speed rail lines, and highways.
To break that down, start with this: Beijing
is building a transcontinental network of natural gas and oil pipelines
that will, in alliance with Russia, extend for 6,000 miles from the North Atlantic Ocean to the South
China Sea.
For the second arm in that triad, Beijing
has built the world’s largest high-speed rail system, with more than
15,000 miles already operational in 2018 and plans for a network of nearly 24,000 miles by 2025. All this, in
turn, is just a partial step toward what’s expected to be a full-scale transcontinental rail system that
started with the “Eurasian Land Bridge” track running from China through Kazakhstan to Europe. In addition to its
transcontinental trunk lines, Beijing plans branch-lines heading due south toward Singapore, southwest through
Pakistan, and then from Pakistan through Iran to Turkey.
To complete its transport triad, China
has also constructed an impressive set of highways, representing (like those
pipelines) a problematic continuation of Washington’s current petrol-powered world order. In 1990, that
country lacked a single expressway. By 2017, it had built 87,000 miles of highways, nearly double the
size of the US interstate system. Even that breathtaking number can’t begin to capture the extraordinary engineering feats
necessary—the tunneling through steep mountains, the spanning of wide rivers, the crossing of deep gorges on towering pillars, and the
spinning of concrete webs around massive cities.
China is revisionist --- Deterrence key
Rogan 19 --- Tom Rogan, BA War Studies from King's College London; MSc Middle Eastern Politics from
The School of Oriental and African Studies; GDL from The College of Law senior fellow with the
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Steamboat Institute, "Signaling a harder edge for 2019, China threatens US carriers, an invasion of
Taiwan, and nuclear war" Jan 3rd 2019, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/signaling-aharder-edge-for-2019-china-threatens-us-carriers-an-invasion-of-taiwan-and-nuclear-war
In a highly aggressive editorial on Thursday, Chinese state media taunted the U.S. with nuclear weapons,
threatened U.S. aircraft carriers, and called for preparations to invade Taiwan. The editorial reflects
growing Chinese nationalist fury in the face of Trump administration pressure. Offered up by the Global
Times newspaper, a mouthpiece for the hard nationalists, the editorial didn't pull any punches. To
consider what it means for the U.S., let's consider each element in turn. First up, the nuclear taunt: The
year 2019 marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. We look
forward to seeing the public debut of Chinese deterrence's trump card, the Dongfeng-41
intercontinental ballistic missile. This is a not-so-subtle signal that the Dongfeng-41 will be shown in
public at a military parade later this year. But note the "trump card" language. A personal rebuke of
President Trump, it's a sign of Beijing's growing frustration that the president won't accept an easy deal
to end the current U.S.-China trade war. But back to the nuclear weapon issue. While the Dongfeng-41 is
an impressive nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile platform, it will not fundamentally alter the
nuclear balance of power against the U.S. Instead, the mobile system is designed to strengthen China's
ability to threaten the U.S. up the escalation curve. In tandem with other capabilities in cyberspace, in
space, and with conventional long-range missiles, China is showing it intends to pose a growing threat
across the spectrum of warfare. The U.S. must pursue and posture greater capability to deter China.
Next up is the Global Times' aircraft carrier threat. China should carry out more maritime combat
exercises with live ammunition, especially training to strike aircraft carriers. There is no need to worry
that doing so would make Washington unhappy. Making them concerned is the whole point of the
exercise. This is not terribly surprising. China has a powerful conventional ballistic missile capability
across short, medium, and long ranges. It is also developing hypersonic missiles of the kind recently
mastered by Russia. The import of these threats is in restricting where and how the U.S. Navy can
operate aircraft carriers. But what's most interesting here is the specific Chinese focus on "making
[Washington]" upset." This reflects a Chinese nudge into the ongoing U.S. debate over whether it would
ever attempt to destroy a U.S. aircraft carrier in battle. Some believe that China would not do so in fear
of meeting a massive U.S. response. I'm less sure about that. That leaves us with the threat to Taiwan.
To promote peaceful reunification, the People's Liberation Army should also carry out more
preparations to respond to a military crisis across the Taiwan Straits, formulate various plans such as a
military blockade around the island, destroying military facilities there and preventing external military
interventions, which can be disclosed to the outside world appropriately when necessary. Note the
absurd Orwellian-language here: "[T]o promote peaceful reunification," carry out attack preparations. It
sums up the nature of Chinese President Xi Jinping's regime. Still, Xi views the subjugation of Taiwan to
Chinese rule as of paramount importance to his legacy. And the Chinese president is certainly making
increased references to what he says is Taiwan's inevitable return to Beijing. Yet, in the context of next
year's 70th anniversary of China's capture of Hainan Island from the nationalists, and Taiwan's upcoming
2020 general election, China's military threats to Taiwan must take on more attention. Ultimately, this
editorial is another warning for the U.S. — a warning that challenging China's island imperialism and its
feudal economic strategy is only going to become more complicated. And while growing allied support
for U.S. actions in the Indo-Pacific are positive, in the end, China will only be deterred by America. We
must seek a more constructive relationship and resist China's defining challenge.
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Deterrence solves
Greenert July 20 --- Jonathan W. Greenert, holds the John M. Shalikashvili Chair in National Security
Studies at the National Bureau of Asian Research (United States), Tetsuo Kotani Tomohisa Takei John P.
Niemeyer Kristine Schenck, “Navigating Contested Waters: U.S.-Japan Alliance Coordination in the East
China Sea”, asia policy, volume 15, number 3 (july 2020), 1–57, https://www.nbr.org/wpcontent/uploads/pdfs/publications/ap15-3_eastchinasea_rt_july2020.pdf
Thus, the question is whether Beijing intends to occupy the Senkaku Islands through either paramilitary
or military means. So far, Beijing has not indicated that the islands are part of its national rejuvenation,
despite the fact that it claims them as part of Taiwan. Although China could outnumber the JGC and
occupy the islands by paramilitary means, this could escalate into an armed conflict and invite U.S.
intervention, which is still too costly. Therefore, it is less likely that China will seek to physically seize the
Senkaku Islands in the near future. With the CCG’s daily presence in the vicinity of the islands as well as
occasional intrusions into Japan’s territorial waters, Beijing ably demonstrates its opposition to Japanese
control of the Senkaku Islands, which appeals to the Chinese people. However, should Taiwan eventually
be reunified through either peaceful or coercive means, the Senkaku Islands would remain a “lost
territory.” Furthermore, reunification would shift the military balance in the East China Sea dramatically
in favor China. In such a scenario, armed conflict over the Senkaku Islands would become more likely.
Facing China’s assertive attempts to establish a new normal in the East China Sea, Japan has reinforced
its law-enforcement capabilities to deal with paramilitary challenges and bolstered both its own selfdefense force and its alliance with the United States to deal with the PLA’s counter-intervention
capabilities. The ideal scenario is that Beijing will accept peaceful dispute resolution and the rule of law
in the East China Sea, but such a scenario is unlikely as long as Beijing sticks to its nationalist ambitions.
Even if time is on China’s side, Japan and the United States need to maintain a military balance to make
an armed conflict over Taiwan and the Senkaku Islands too costly to Beijing
China represents a revisionist challenge to the military and economic order—weak American responses
embolden Chinese aggression and prompt global wars. Effective balancing preserves stability.
Choi 18—Ji Young Choi, associate professor in the Department of Politics and Government and affiliated
professor in the International Studies Program and East Asian Studies Program at Ohio Wesleyan
University (“Historical and Theoretical Perspectives on the Rise of China: Long Cycles, Power Transitions,
and China's Ascent,” Asian Perspective, Vol. 42, Issue 1, January-March 2018, pages 61-84, Available
through ProQuest)
I have explored in light of historical and theoretical perspectives whether China is a candidate to
become a global hegemonic power. The next question I will address is whether the ascent of China will
lead to a hegemonic war or not. As mentioned previously, historical and theoretical lessons reveal that a
rising great power tends to challenge a system leader when the former's economic and other major
capabilities come too close to those of the latter and the former is dissatisfied with the latter's
leadership and the international rules it created. This means that the rise of China could produce intense
hegemonic competition and even a global hegemonic war. The preventive motivation by an old
declining power can cause a major war with a newly emerging power when it is combined with other
variables (Levy 1987). While a preventive war by a system leader is historically rare, a newly emerging
yet even relatively weak rising power at times challenges a much more powerful system leader, as in the
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case of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 (Schweller 1999). A historical lesson is that "incomplete
catch-ups are inherently conflict-prone" (Thompson 2006, 19). This implies that even though it falls
short of surpassing the system leader, the rise of a new great power can produce significant instability in
the interstate system when it develops into a revisionist power. Moreover, the United States and China
are deeply involved in major security issues in East Asia (including the North Korean nuclear crisis, the
Taiwan issue, and the South China Sea disputes), and we cannot rule out the possibility that one of these
regional conflicts will develop into a much bigger global war in which the two superpowers are
entangled. According to Allison (2017), who studied sixteen historical cases in which a rising power
confronted an existing power, a war between the United States and China is not unavoidable, but
escaping it will require enormous efforts by both sides. Some Chinese scholars (Jia 2009; Wang and Zhu
2015), who emphasize the transformation of China's domestic politics and the pragmatism of Beijing's
diplomacy, have a more or less optimistic view of the future of US-China relations. Yet my reading of the
situation is that since 2009 there has been an increasing gap between this optimistic view and what has
really happened. It is premature to conclude that China is a revisionist state, but in what follows I will
suggest some important signs that show China has revisionist aims at least in the Asia Pacific and could
develop into a revisionist power in the future. Beijing has concentrated on economic modernization
since the start of pro-market reforms in the late 1970s and made efforts to keep a low profile in
international security issues for several decades. It followed Deng Xiaoping's doctrine: "hide one's
capabilities, bide one's time, and seek the right opportunity." Since 2003, China's motto has been
"Peaceful Rise" or "Peaceful Development," and Chinese leadership has emphasized that the rise of
China would not threaten any other countries. Recently, however, Beijing has adopted increasingly
assertive or even aggressive foreign policies in international security affairs. In particular, China has been
adamant about territorial issues in the East and South China Seas and is increasingly considered as a
severe threat by other nations in the Asia Pacific region. Since 2009, for example, Beijing has increased
naval activities on a large scale in the area of the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea. In 2010,
Beijing announced that just like Tibet and Taiwan, the South China Sea is considered a core national
interest. We can identify drastic rhetorical changes as well. In 2010, China's foreign minister publicly
stated, "China is a big country . . . and other countries are small countries and that is just a fact"
(Economist 2012). In October 2013, Chinese leader Xi Jinping also used the words "struggle and achieve
results," emphasizing the importance of China's territorial integrity (Waldron 2014, 166-167).
Furthermore, China has constructed man-made islands in the South China Sea to seek "de facto control
over the resource-rich waters and islets" claimed as well by its neighboring countries (Los Angeles Times
2015). As of now, China's strategy is to delay a direct military conflict with the United States as long as
possible and use its economic and political prowess to pressure smaller neighbors to give up their
territorial claims (Doran 2012). These new developments and rhetorical signals reflect significant
changes in China's foreign policies and signify that China's peaceful rise seems to be over. A rising great
power's consistent and determined policies to increase military buildups can be read as one of the
significant signs of the rising power's dissatisfaction with the existing order and its willingness to do
battle if it is really necessary. In the words of Rapkin and Thompson (2003, 318), "arms buildups and
arms races . . . reflect substantial dissatisfaction on the part of the challenger and an attempt to
accelerate the pace of military catchup and the development of a relative power advantage." Werner
and Kugler (1996) also posit that if an emerging challenger's military expenditures are increasing faster
than those of a system leader, parity can be very dangerous to the international political order. China's
GDP is currently around 60 percent of that of the United States, so parity has not been reached yet.
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China's military budget, however, has grown enormously for the past two decades (double-digit growth
nearly every year), which is creating concerns among neighboring nations and a system leader, the
United States. In addition to its air force, China's strengthening navy or sea power has been one of the
main goals in its military modernization program. Beijing has invested large financial resources in
constructing new naval vessels, submarines, and aircraft carriers (Economist 2012). Furthermore, in its
new defense white paper in 2015, Beijing made clear a vision to expand the global role for its military,
particularly its naval force, to protect its overseas economic and strategic interests (Tiezzi 2015). Sea
power has special importance for an emerging great power. As Mahan (1987 [1890]) explained cogently
in one of his classic books on naval strategy, Great Britain was able to emerge as a new hegemonic
power because of the superiority of its naval capacity and technology and its effective control of main
international sealanes. Naval power has a special significance for China, a newly emerging power, as well
as for both economic and strategic reasons. First, its economy's rapid growth requires external
expansion to ensure raw materials and the foreign markets to sell its products. Therefore, naval power
becomes crucial in protecting its overseas business interests and activities. Second, securing major sealanes becomes increasingly important as they will be crucial lifelines for the supply of energy, raw
materials, and other essential goods should China become involved in a hegemonic war or any other
major military conflict (Friedberg 2011). In light of this, it is understandable why China is so stubborn
over territorial issues in the South China and East China Seas. In fact, history tells us that many rising
powers invested in sea power to expand their global influence, and indeed all the global hegemons
including Great Britain and the United States were predominant naval powers. Another important
aspect is that Beijing is beginning to voice its dissatisfaction with the existing international economic
order and take actions that could potentially change this order. The Chinese economy has overall
benefited from the post-World War II international liberal order, but the Bretton Woods institutions like
the IMF and the World Bank have been dominated by the United States and its allies and China does not
have much power or voice in these institutions. Both institutions are based in Washington, DC, and the
United States has enjoyed the largest voting shares with its veto power. Along with other emerging
economies, China has called for significant reforms, especially in the governing system of the IMF, but
reform plans to give more power to China and other emerging economies have been delayed by the
opposition of the US Congress (Choi 2013). In response to this, Beijing recently took the initiative to
create new international financial institutions including the AIIB. At this moment, it is premature to say
that these new institutions would be able to replace the Bretton Woods institutions. Nonetheless, this
new development can be read as a starting point for significant changes in global economic and financial
governance that has been dominated by the United States since the end of World War II (Subacchi
2015). China's historical legacies reinforce the view that China has a willingness to become a global
hegemon. From the Ming dynasty in the late fourteenth century to the start of the first Opium War in
1839, China enjoyed its undisputed hegemonic position in East Asia. "Sino-centrism" that is related to
this historical reality has long governed the mentality of Chinese people. According to this hierarchical
world view, China, as the most advanced civilization, is at the center of East Asia and the world, and all
China's neighbors are vassal states (Kang 2010). This mentality was openly revealed by the Chinese
foreign minister's recent public statement that I quoted previously: "China is a big country . . . and other
countries are small countries and that is just a fact" (Economist 2012). This view is related to Chinese
people's ancient superiority complex that developed from the long history and rich cultural heritage of
Chinese civilization (Jacques 2012). In a sense, China has always been a superpower regardless of its
economic standing at least in most Chinese people's mind-set. The strong national or civilizational pride
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of Chinese people, however, was severely damaged by "the Century of Humiliation," a period between
the first Opium War (1839) and the end of the Chinese Civil War (1949). During this period, China was
encroached on by the West and invaded by Japan, experienced prolonged civil conflicts, and finally
became a semicolony of Great Britain while its northern territory was occupied by Japan. China's
economic modernization is viewed as a national project to lay an economic foundation to overcome this
bitter experience of subjugation and shame and recover its traditional position and old glory (Choi
2015). Viewed from this perspective, economic modernization or the accumulation of wealth is not an
ultimate objective of China. Rather, its final goal is to return to its traditional status by expanding its
global political and military as well as economic influence. What it ultimately desires is recognition
(Anerkennung), respect (Respekt), and status (Stellung). These are important concepts for
constructivists who see ideational motives as the main driving forces behind interstate conflicts (Lebow
2008). This reveals that constructivist elements can be combined with long cycle and power transition
theories in explaining the rise and fall of great powers, although further systematic studies on it are
needed.Considering all this, China has always been a territorial power rather than a trading state. China
does not seem to be satisfied only with the global expansion of international trade and the conquest of
foreign markets. It also wants to broaden its (particularly maritime) territories and spheres of influence
to recover its traditional political status as the Middle Kingdom. As emphasized previously, the type or
nature and goals or ideologies of a rising power matter. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan (territorial
powers) experienced rapid economic expansion and sought to expand their territories and influence in
the first half of the twentieth century. For example, during this period Japan's goal was to create the
Japanese empire in East Asia under the motto of the East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere. On the other
hand, democratized Germany and Japan (trading powers) that enjoyed a second economic expansion
did not pursue the expansion of their territories and spheres of influence in the post-World War II era.
Twentiethcentury history suggests that political regimes predicated upon nondemocratic or nonliberal
values and cultures (for instance, Nazism in Germany and militarism in Japan before the mid-twentieth
century, and communism in the Soviet Union during the Cold War) can pose significant challenges to
democratic and liberal regimes. The empirical studies of Lemke and Reed (1996) show that the
democratic peace thesis can be used as a subset of power transition theory. According to their studies,
states organized similarly to the dominant powers politically and economically (liberal democracy) are
generally satisfied with the existing international rules and order and they tend to be status quo states.
Another historical lesson is that economic interdependence alone cannot prevent a war for hegemony.
Germany was one of the main trade partners of Great Britain before World War I (Friedberg 2011), and
Japan was the number three importer of American products before its attack on Pearl Harbor (Keylor
2011). A relatively peaceful relationship or transition is possible when economic interdependence is
supported by a solid democratic alliance between a rising great power and an existing or declining one.
Some scholars such as Ikenberry (2008) emphasize nuclear deterrence and the high costs of a nuclear
war. Power transition theorists agree that the high costs of a nuclear war can constrain a war among
great powers but do not view them as "a perfect deterrent" to war (Kugler and Zagare 1990; Tammen et
al. 2000). The idea of nuclear deterrence is based upon the assumption of the rationality of actors
(states): as long as the costs of a (nuclear) war are higher than its benefits, an actor (state) will not
initiate the war. However, even some rationalists admit that certain actors (such as exceedingly
ambitious risk-taking states) do not behave rationally and engage in unexpected military actions or
pursue military overexpansion beyond its capacity (Glaser 2010). The state's behaviors are driven by its
values, perceptions, and political ambitions as well as its rational calculations of costs and benefits.
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Especially, national pride, historical memories, and territorial disputes can make states behave
emotionally. The possibility of a war between a democratic nation and a nondemocratic regime
increases because they do not share the same values and beliefs and, therefore, the level of mistrust
between them tends to be very high. China and the United States have enhanced their cooperation to
address various global issues like global warming, international terrorism, energy issues, and global
economic stability. But these issues are not strong enough to bring them together to overcome their
mistrust that stems from their different values, beliefs, and perceptions (Friedberg 2011). What is more
important is whether they can set mutually agreeable international rules on traditional security issues
including territorial disputes.
US-China entente is impossible—strategic competition is driven by bipolar balancing and ideological
divergence between two incompatible visions of the global order.
Friedberg 18—Aaron L. Friedberg, Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University,
PhD in Government from Harvard, deputy assistant for national-security affairs and director of policy
planning in the office of the Vice President from 2003-2005 (“Competing with China,” Survival: Global
Politics and Strategy, Vol. 60, No. 3, June-July 2018, pages 7-64, Taylor & Francis Online)
If there is a single theme that unifies much of what follows, it is the often underestimated importance of
political beliefs and ideology. America's post-Cold War strategy for dealing with China was rooted in
prevailing liberal ideas about the linkages between trade, economic growth and democracy, and a faith
in the presumed universality and irresistible power of the human desire for freedom. The strategy
pursued by China's leaders, on the other hand, was, and still is, motivated first and foremost by their
commitment to preserving the Chinese Communist Party's monopoly on domestic political power. The
CCP's use of militant nationalism, its cultivation of historic claims and grievances against foreign powers,
and its rejection of the idea that there are, in fact, universal human values are essential pieces of its
programme for mobilising popular support and bolstering regime legitimacy. It is impossible to make
sense of the ambitions, fears, strategy and tactics of China's present regime without reference to its
authoritarian, illiberal character and distinctive, Leninist roots.
The intensifying competition between the United States and China is thus driven not only by the
traditional dynamics of power politics – that is, by the narrowing gap between a preponderant hegemon
and a fast-rising challenger – but also by a wide and deep divergence in values between their respective
regimes. The resulting rivalry is more intense, the stakes are higher, and the likelihood of a lasting
entente is lower than would otherwise be the case. The two powers are separated not only by divergent
interests, some of which could conceivably be reconciled, but by incompatible visions for the future of
Asia and the world. China's current rulers may not be trying actively to spread their own unique blend of
repressive politics and semimarket economics, but as they have become richer and stronger they have
begun to act in ways that inspire and strengthen other authoritarian regimes, while potentially
weakening the institutions of young and developing democracies. Beijing is also using its new-found
clout to reach out into the world, including into the societies, economies and political systems of the
advanced industrial democracies, to try to influence the perceptions and policies of their people and
governments, and to suppress information and discourage the expression of opinions seen as
threatening to the CCP.
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If they wish to respond effectively to these new realities, American and allied policymakers cannot
afford to downplay the ideological dimension in their own strategy. Beijing's obsessive desire to squelch
dissent, block the inward flow of unfavourable news and discredit ‘so-called universal values’ bespeaks
an insecurity that is, in itself, a form of strategic vulnerability. China's rulers clearly believe the
ideological realm to be a crucially important domain of competition, one that they would be only too
happy to see the United States and the other Western nations ignore or abandon.
Deterrence is key to co-existence --- try-or-die
Osnos 20 --- Evan Osnos, joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008 and covers politics and foreign
affairs, Previously, Osnos worked as Beijing bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune, where he was part of a
team that won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize, “The Future of America’s Contest with China”, New Yorker, Jan
6th 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/13/the-future-of-americas-contest-withchina
The most dangerous frontier between Chinese and American power today is the contested terrain of the
Western Pacific: Taiwan, the South China Sea, and a series of shoals and islands that are unfamiliar to
the American public. In the South China Sea, the U.S. protests China’s claims by deploying warships and
jets close to the artificial islands, while Chinese vessels and planes try to scare them off, a game of
chicken that has produced, by the Pentagon’s count, at least eighteen unsafe encounters since 2016—
near-collisions at sea or in the air that could have killed troops. Adding to the risk, the U.S. and Chinese
militaries have abandoned some lines of communication, and failed to agree on sufficient rules of
conduct at sea, the kinds of measures that prevented minor incidents from escalating into catastrophe
during the Cold War.
Johnson, the former C.I.A. analyst, said the United States must make realistic decisions about where it is
prepared to deter China’s expansion and where it is not. “If we think we can maintain the same
dominance we have had since 1945, well, that train has left the station,” he told me. “We should start
by racking and stacking China’s global ambitions and determining what we can’t accommodate and what
we can, then communicate that to the Chinese at the highest levels, and operationalize them through
red lines we will enforce. We’re not doing that. Instead, what we’re doing are things that masquerade as
a strategy but, in fact, amount to just kicking them in the balls.”
By the end of 2019, nearly two years into the new era of confrontation, China and America were moving
steadily toward a separation that is less economic than political and psychological. Each side had
embraced a form of “fight fight, talk talk,” steeling for a “peace that is no peace,” as Orwell had it.
But Henry Kissinger considers America’s contest with China to be both less dire and more complex than
the Soviet struggle. “We were dealing with a bipolar world,” he told me. “Now we’re dealing with a
multipolar world. The components of an international system are so much more varied, and the lineups
are much more difficult to control.”
For that reason, Kissinger says, the more relevant and disturbing analogy is to the First World War. In
that view, the trade war is an ominous signal; economic polarization, of the kind that pitted Britain
against Germany before 1914, has often been a prelude to real war. “If it freezes into a permanent
conflict, and you have two big blocs confronting each other, then the danger of a pre-World War I
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situation is huge,” Kissinger said. “Look at history: none of the leaders that started World War I would
have done so if they had known what the world would look like at the end. That is the situation we must
avoid.” Westad agrees. “The pre-1914 parallel is, of course, not just the growth in German power,” he
said. “What we, I think, need to focus on is what actually led to war. What led to war was the German
fear of being in a position where their power would not strengthen in the future, where they were, as
they put it in the summer of 1914, at the maximum moment.”
On each side, the greatest risk is blindness born of ignorance, hubris, or ideology. If the Trump
Administration were to gamble on national security the way that Navarro did with his botched
predictions on trade, the consequences would be grave; if Xi embraces a caricature of America
determined to exclude China from prosperity, he could misperceive this as his “maximum moment.”
The most viable path ahead is an uneasy coexistence, founded on a mutual desire to “struggle but not
smash” the relationship. Coexistence is neither decoupling nor appeasement; it requires, above all,
deterrence and candor—a constant reckoning with what kind of change America will, and will not,
accept. Success hinges not on abstract historical momentum but on hard, specific day-to-day decisions—
what the political scientist Richard Rosecrance, in his study of the First World War, called the “tyranny of
small things.”
To avoid catastrophe, both sides will have to accept truths that so far they have not: China must
acknowledge the outrage caused by its overreaching bids for control, and America must adjust to
China’s presence, without selling honor for profit. The ascendant view in Washington holds that the
competition is us-or-them; in fact, the reality of this century will be us-and-them. It is naïve to imagine
wrestling China back to the past. The project, now, is to contest its moral vision of the future.
A2: Containment Fails
Perceptions of containment lead to moderation, not lash out.
Christensen 15 (Thomas, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs,
Professor of World Politics and director of the China and the World Program at Princeton. “Epilogue: The
China Challenge” in The China Challenge: Shaping the Choices of a Rising Power, 2015. W. W. Norton &
Co. ISBN 978-0-393-08113-8, pp. 292-293)
Although the United States should not feed Chinese fears about U.S. hostility, Chinese anxiety about a
U.S. containment effort could carry some benefits for the United States: the potential for future
encirclement may encourage Chinese strategists to be more accommodating. Under conditions in which
Chinese analysts believe in the possibility of containment, even the most pessimistic realpolitik thinkers
might join their more optimistic colleagues, in prescribing moderate policies. Chinese strategists
sometimes recognize that more coercive Chinese policies toward neighbors increase both the
willingness and the ability of Washington to encircle and constrain China. Just as many American experts
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understand that any attempt by the United States to contain China’s rise now would likely weaken the
United States, many Chinese observers think bullying by Beijing will create a tighter and more expansive
set of U.S.-led security relationships in the region.
Deterrence SOLVES crises instability
Matthew Kroenig, an associate professor of government at Georgetown University and a senior fellow
of the Atlantic Council, served in the administration of George W. Bush. “The Logic of American Nuclear
Strategy” Ebook, 2018
Use ’em or lose ’em enjoys a certain superficial plausibility, but, upon closer inspection, there are two
fundamental reasons why the logic simply does not hold up. First, it ignores the fact that the superior
state retains a healthy ability to retaliate. So, even if the inferior state is worried about having its nuclear
weapons eliminated in a first strike, the decision to launch its nuclear weapons first as a coping
mechanism would be a decision to intentionally launch a nuclear war against a state with at least a
secure, second-strike capability. This means that even if the inferior state launches its nuclear weapons
first, it will be virtually guaranteed to suffer devastating nuclear retaliation. Moreover, given that it is in
a situation of extreme inferiority (so extreme that it might even be vulnerable to a preemptive nuclear
strike), this would mean intentionally launching a devastating nuclear war that will likely turn out much
worse for itself then for its opponent. It would simply be irrational for a state to intentionally launch a
nuclear war against a state with an assured retaliatory capability. Let us consider a concrete example.
The United States maintains nuclear superiority over China, as we have seen in previous chapters.
Strategic stability theorists want us to believe that if the United States takes additional steps to further
enhance its superiority, then China would face even greater temptations to launch a nuclear first strike
against the US homeland in the event of a serious crisis. In other words, strategic stability theorists hold
that China would be so worried about losing a devastating nuclear war against United States that it
would intentionally choose to start a devastating nuclear war against the United States. The argument
does not make sense. But academic deterrence theorists and other critics of American nuclear strategy
try to have it both ways. They attempt to argue that a second-strike capability is sufficient to deter any
nuclear-armed state from launching a nuclear attack. Therefore, they advocate that the United States
need not build a nuclear force that goes beyond this requirement because a second-strike capability is
more than enough. But, then they warn that if Washington strengthens its nuclear forces too much,
other countries will be tempted to launch a nuclear attack against a United States armed with a secondstrike capability. So, which is it? Does a second-strike capability reliably deter intentional nuclear attack,
or not? If not, then they cannot maintain that a second-strike capability is more than enough for
deterrence. If so, they cannot claim that a second-strike capability-plus will provoke a nuclear attack.
China represents a revisionist challenge to the military and economic order—weak American responses
embolden Chinese aggression and prompt global wars. Effective balancing preserves stability.
Choi 18—Ji Young Choi, associate professor in the Department of Politics and Government and affiliated
professor in the International Studies Program and East Asian Studies Program at Ohio Wesleyan
University (“Historical and Theoretical Perspectives on the Rise of China: Long Cycles, Power Transitions,
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and China's Ascent,” Asian Perspective, Vol. 42, Issue 1, January-March 2018, pages 61-84, Available
through ProQuest)
I have explored in light of historical and theoretical perspectives whether China is a candidate to
become a global hegemonic power. The next question I will address is whether the ascent of China will
lead to a hegemonic war or not. As mentioned previously, historical and theoretical lessons reveal that a
rising great power tends to challenge a system leader when the former's economic and other major
capabilities come too close to those of the latter and the former is dissatisfied with the latter's
leadership and the international rules it created. This means that the rise of China could produce intense
hegemonic competition and even a global hegemonic war. The preventive motivation by an old
declining power can cause a major war with a newly emerging power when it is combined with other
variables (Levy 1987). While a preventive war by a system leader is historically rare, a newly emerging
yet even relatively weak rising power at times challenges a much more powerful system leader, as in the
case of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 (Schweller 1999). A historical lesson is that "incomplete
catch-ups are inherently conflict-prone" (Thompson 2006, 19). This implies that even though it falls
short of surpassing the system leader, the rise of a new great power can produce significant instability in
the interstate system when it develops into a revisionist power. Moreover, the United States and China
are deeply involved in major security issues in East Asia (including the North Korean nuclear crisis, the
Taiwan issue, and the South China Sea disputes), and we cannot rule out the possibility that one of these
regional conflicts will develop into a much bigger global war in which the two superpowers are
entangled. According to Allison (2017), who studied sixteen historical cases in which a rising power
confronted an existing power, a war between the United States and China is not unavoidable, but
escaping it will require enormous efforts by both sides. Some Chinese scholars (Jia 2009; Wang and Zhu
2015), who emphasize the transformation of China's domestic politics and the pragmatism of Beijing's
diplomacy, have a more or less optimistic view of the future of US-China relations. Yet my reading of the
situation is that since 2009 there has been an increasing gap between this optimistic view and what has
really happened. It is premature to conclude that China is a revisionist state, but in what follows I will
suggest some important signs that show China has revisionist aims at least in the Asia Pacific and could
develop into a revisionist power in the future. Beijing has concentrated on economic modernization
since the start of pro-market reforms in the late 1970s and made efforts to keep a low profile in
international security issues for several decades. It followed Deng Xiaoping's doctrine: "hide one's
capabilities, bide one's time, and seek the right opportunity." Since 2003, China's motto has been
"Peaceful Rise" or "Peaceful Development," and Chinese leadership has emphasized that the rise of
China would not threaten any other countries. Recently, however, Beijing has adopted increasingly
assertive or even aggressive foreign policies in international security affairs. In particular, China has been
adamant about territorial issues in the East and South China Seas and is increasingly considered as a
severe threat by other nations in the Asia Pacific region. Since 2009, for example, Beijing has increased
naval activities on a large scale in the area of the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea. In 2010,
Beijing announced that just like Tibet and Taiwan, the South China Sea is considered a core national
interest. We can identify drastic rhetorical changes as well. In 2010, China's foreign minister publicly
stated, "China is a big country . . . and other countries are small countries and that is just a fact"
(Economist 2012). In October 2013, Chinese leader Xi Jinping also used the words "struggle and achieve
results," emphasizing the importance of China's territorial integrity (Waldron 2014, 166-167).
Furthermore, China has constructed man-made islands in the South China Sea to seek "de facto control
over the resource-rich waters and islets" claimed as well by its neighboring countries (Los Angeles Times
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21
2015). As of now, China's strategy is to delay a direct military conflict with the United States as long as
possible and use its economic and political prowess to pressure smaller neighbors to give up their
territorial claims (Doran 2012). These new developments and rhetorical signals reflect significant
changes in China's foreign policies and signify that China's peaceful rise seems to be over. A rising great
power's consistent and determined policies to increase military buildups can be read as one of the
significant signs of the rising power's dissatisfaction with the existing order and its willingness to do
battle if it is really necessary. In the words of Rapkin and Thompson (2003, 318), "arms buildups and
arms races . . . reflect substantial dissatisfaction on the part of the challenger and an attempt to
accelerate the pace of military catchup and the development of a relative power advantage." Werner
and Kugler (1996) also posit that if an emerging challenger's military expenditures are increasing faster
than those of a system leader, parity can be very dangerous to the international political order. China's
GDP is currently around 60 percent of that of the United States, so parity has not been reached yet.
China's military budget, however, has grown enormously for the past two decades (double-digit growth
nearly every year), which is creating concerns among neighboring nations and a system leader, the
United States. In addition to its air force, China's strengthening navy or sea power has been one of the
main goals in its military modernization program. Beijing has invested large financial resources in
constructing new naval vessels, submarines, and aircraft carriers (Economist 2012). Furthermore, in its
new defense white paper in 2015, Beijing made clear a vision to expand the global role for its military,
particularly its naval force, to protect its overseas economic and strategic interests (Tiezzi 2015). Sea
power has special importance for an emerging great power. As Mahan (1987 [1890]) explained cogently
in one of his classic books on naval strategy, Great Britain was able to emerge as a new hegemonic
power because of the superiority of its naval capacity and technology and its effective control of main
international sealanes. Naval power has a special significance for China, a newly emerging power, as well
as for both economic and strategic reasons. First, its economy's rapid growth requires external
expansion to ensure raw materials and the foreign markets to sell its products. Therefore, naval power
becomes crucial in protecting its overseas business interests and activities. Second, securing major sealanes becomes increasingly important as they will be crucial lifelines for the supply of energy, raw
materials, and other essential goods should China become involved in a hegemonic war or any other
major military conflict (Friedberg 2011). In light of this, it is understandable why China is so stubborn
over territorial issues in the South China and East China Seas. In fact, history tells us that many rising
powers invested in sea power to expand their global influence, and indeed all the global hegemons
including Great Britain and the United States were predominant naval powers. Another important
aspect is that Beijing is beginning to voice its dissatisfaction with the existing international economic
order and take actions that could potentially change this order. The Chinese economy has overall
benefited from the post-World War II international liberal order, but the Bretton Woods institutions like
the IMF and the World Bank have been dominated by the United States and its allies and China does not
have much power or voice in these institutions. Both institutions are based in Washington, DC, and the
United States has enjoyed the largest voting shares with its veto power. Along with other emerging
economies, China has called for significant reforms, especially in the governing system of the IMF, but
reform plans to give more power to China and other emerging economies have been delayed by the
opposition of the US Congress (Choi 2013). In response to this, Beijing recently took the initiative to
create new international financial institutions including the AIIB. At this moment, it is premature to say
that these new institutions would be able to replace the Bretton Woods institutions. Nonetheless, this
new development can be read as a starting point for significant changes in global economic and financial
DebateUS!
Release 10-1-22
22
governance that has been dominated by the United States since the end of World War II (Subacchi
2015). China's historical legacies reinforce the view that China has a willingness to become a global
hegemon. From the Ming dynasty in the late fourteenth century to the start of the first Opium War in
1839, China enjoyed its undisputed hegemonic position in East Asia. "Sino-centrism" that is related to
this historical reality has long governed the mentality of Chinese people. According to this hierarchical
world view, China, as the most advanced civilization, is at the center of East Asia and the world, and all
China's neighbors are vassal states (Kang 2010). This mentality was openly revealed by the Chinese
foreign minister's recent public statement that I quoted previously: "China is a big country . . . and other
countries are small countries and that is just a fact" (Economist 2012). This view is related to Chinese
people's ancient superiority complex that developed from the long history and rich cultural heritage of
Chinese civilization (Jacques 2012). In a sense, China has always been a superpower regardless of its
economic standing at least in most Chinese people's mind-set. The strong national or civilizational pride
of Chinese people, however, was severely damaged by "the Century of Humiliation," a period between
the first Opium War (1839) and the end of the Chinese Civil War (1949). During this period, China was
encroached on by the West and invaded by Japan, experienced prolonged civil conflicts, and finally
became a semicolony of Great Britain while its northern territory was occupied by Japan. China's
economic modernization is viewed as a national project to lay an economic foundation to overcome this
bitter experience of subjugation and shame and recover its traditional position and old glory (Choi
2015). Viewed from this perspective, economic modernization or the accumulation of wealth is not an
ultimate objective of China. Rather, its final goal is to return to its traditional status by expanding its
global political and military as well as economic influence. What it ultimately desires is recognition
(Anerkennung), respect (Respekt), and status (Stellung). These are important concepts for
constructivists who see ideational motives as the main driving forces behind interstate conflicts (Lebow
2008). This reveals that constructivist elements can be combined with long cycle and power transition
theories in explaining the rise and fall of great powers, although further systematic studies on it are
needed.Considering all this, China has always been a territorial power rather than a trading state. China
does not seem to be satisfied only with the global expansion of international trade and the conquest of
foreign markets. It also wants to broaden its (particularly maritime) territories and spheres of influence
to recover its traditional political status as the Middle Kingdom. As emphasized previously, the type or
nature and goals or ideologies of a rising power matter. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan (territorial
powers) experienced rapid economic expansion and sought to expand their territories and influence in
the first half of the twentieth century. For example, during this period Japan's goal was to create the
Japanese empire in East Asia under the motto of the East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere. On the other
hand, democratized Germany and Japan (trading powers) that enjoyed a second economic expansion
did not pursue the expansion of their territories and spheres of influence in the post-World War II era.
Twentiethcentury history suggests that political regimes predicated upon nondemocratic or nonliberal
values and cultures (for instance, Nazism in Germany and militarism in Japan before the mid-twentieth
century, and communism in the Soviet Union during the Cold War) can pose significant challenges to
democratic and liberal regimes. The empirical studies of Lemke and Reed (1996) show that the
democratic peace thesis can be used as a subset of power transition theory. According to their studies,
states organized similarly to the dominant powers politically and economically (liberal democracy) are
generally satisfied with the existing international rules and order and they tend to be status quo states.
Another historical lesson is that economic interdependence alone cannot prevent a war for hegemony.
Germany was one of the main trade partners of Great Britain before World War I (Friedberg 2011), and
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Japan was the number three importer of American products before its attack on Pearl Harbor (Keylor
2011). A relatively peaceful relationship or transition is possible when economic interdependence is
supported by a solid democratic alliance between a rising great power and an existing or declining one.
Some scholars such as Ikenberry (2008) emphasize nuclear deterrence and the high costs of a nuclear
war. Power transition theorists agree that the high costs of a nuclear war can constrain a war among
great powers but do not view them as "a perfect deterrent" to war (Kugler and Zagare 1990; Tammen et
al. 2000). The idea of nuclear deterrence is based upon the assumption of the rationality of actors
(states): as long as the costs of a (nuclear) war are higher than its benefits, an actor (state) will not
initiate the war. However, even some rationalists admit that certain actors (such as exceedingly
ambitious risk-taking states) do not behave rationally and engage in unexpected military actions or
pursue military overexpansion beyond its capacity (Glaser 2010). The state's behaviors are driven by its
values, perceptions, and political ambitions as well as its rational calculations of costs and benefits.
Especially, national pride, historical memories, and territorial disputes can make states behave
emotionally. The possibility of a war between a democratic nation and a nondemocratic regime
increases because they do not share the same values and beliefs and, therefore, the level of mistrust
between them tends to be very high. China and the United States have enhanced their cooperation to
address various global issues like global warming, international terrorism, energy issues, and global
economic stability. But these issues are not strong enough to bring them together to overcome their
mistrust that stems from their different values, beliefs, and perceptions (Friedberg 2011). What is more
important is whether they can set mutually agreeable international rules on traditional security issues
including territorial disputes.
Revisionism
China represents a revisionist challenge to the military and economic order—weak
American responses embolden Chinese aggression and prompt global wars. Effective
balancing preserves stability.
Choi 18—Ji Young Choi, associate professor in the Department of Politics and Government and affiliated
professor in the International Studies Program and East Asian Studies Program at Ohio Wesleyan
University (“Historical and Theoretical Perspectives on the Rise of China: Long Cycles, Power Transitions,
and China's Ascent,” Asian Perspective, Vol. 42, Issue 1, January-March 2018, pages 61-84, Available
through ProQuest)
I have explored in light of historical and theoretical perspectives whether China is a candidate to
become a global hegemonic power. The next question I will address is whether the ascent of China will
lead to a hegemonic war or not. As mentioned previously, historical and theoretical lessons reveal that a
rising great power tends to challenge a system leader when the former's economic and other major
capabilities come too close to those of the latter and the former is dissatisfied with the latter's
leadership and the international rules it created. This means that the rise of China could produce intense
hegemonic competition and even a global hegemonic war. The preventive motivation by an old
declining power can cause a major war with a newly emerging power when it is combined with other
variables (Levy 1987). While a preventive war by a system leader is historically rare, a newly emerging
yet even relatively weak rising power at times challenges a much more powerful system leader, as in the
case of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 (Schweller 1999). A historical lesson is that "incomplete
catch-ups are inherently conflict-prone" (Thompson 2006, 19). This implies that even though it falls
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short of surpassing the system leader, the rise of a new great power can produce significant instability in
the interstate system when it develops into a revisionist power. Moreover, the United States and China
are deeply involved in major security issues in East Asia (including the North Korean nuclear crisis, the
Taiwan issue, and the South China Sea disputes), and we cannot rule out the possibility that one of these
regional conflicts will develop into a much bigger global war in which the two superpowers are
entangled. According to Allison (2017), who studied sixteen historical cases in which a rising power
confronted an existing power, a war between the United States and China is not unavoidable, but
escaping it will require enormous efforts by both sides. Some Chinese scholars (Jia 2009; Wang and Zhu
2015), who emphasize the transformation of China's domestic politics and the pragmatism of Beijing's
diplomacy, have a more or less optimistic view of the future of US-China relations. Yet my reading of the
situation is that since 2009 there has been an increasing gap between this optimistic view and what has
really happened. It is premature to conclude that China is a revisionist state, but in what follows I will
suggest some important signs that show China has revisionist aims at least in the Asia Pacific and could
develop into a revisionist power in the future. Beijing has concentrated on economic modernization
since the start of pro-market reforms in the late 1970s and made efforts to keep a low profile in
international security issues for several decades. It followed Deng Xiaoping's doctrine: "hide one's
capabilities, bide one's time, and seek the right opportunity." Since 2003, China's motto has been
"Peaceful Rise" or "Peaceful Development," and Chinese leadership has emphasized that the rise of
China would not threaten any other countries. Recently, however, Beijing has adopted increasingly
assertive or even aggressive foreign policies in international security affairs. In particular, China has been
adamant about territorial issues in the East and South China Seas and is increasingly considered as a
severe threat by other nations in the Asia Pacific region. Since 2009, for example, Beijing has increased
naval activities on a large scale in the area of the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea. In 2010,
Beijing announced that just like Tibet and Taiwan, the South China Sea is considered a core national
interest. We can identify drastic rhetorical changes as well. In 2010, China's foreign minister publicly
stated, "China is a big country . . . and other countries are small countries and that is just a fact"
(Economist 2012). In October 2013, Chinese leader Xi Jinping also used the words "struggle and achieve
results," emphasizing the importance of China's territorial integrity (Waldron 2014, 166-167).
Furthermore, China has constructed man-made islands in the South China Sea to seek "de facto control
over the resource-rich waters and islets" claimed as well by its neighboring countries (Los Angeles Times
2015). As of now, China's strategy is to delay a direct military conflict with the United States as long as
possible and use its economic and political prowess to pressure smaller neighbors to give up their
territorial claims (Doran 2012). These new developments and rhetorical signals reflect significant
changes in China's foreign policies and signify that China's peaceful rise seems to be over. A rising great
power's consistent and determined policies to increase military buildups can be read as one of the
significant signs of the rising power's dissatisfaction with the existing order and its willingness to do
battle if it is really necessary. In the words of Rapkin and Thompson (2003, 318), "arms buildups and
arms races . . . reflect substantial dissatisfaction on the part of the challenger and an attempt to
accelerate the pace of military catchup and the development of a relative power advantage." Werner
and Kugler (1996) also posit that if an emerging challenger's military expenditures are increasing faster
than those of a system leader, parity can be very dangerous to the international political order. China's
GDP is currently around 60 percent of that of the United States, so parity has not been reached yet.
China's military budget, however, has grown enormously for the past two decades (double-digit growth
nearly every year), which is creating concerns among neighboring nations and a system leader, the
DebateUS!
Release 10-1-22
25
United States. In addition to its air force, China's strengthening navy or sea power has been one of the
main goals in its military modernization program. Beijing has invested large financial resources in
constructing new naval vessels, submarines, and aircraft carriers (Economist 2012). Furthermore, in its
new defense white paper in 2015, Beijing made clear a vision to expand the global role for its military,
particularly its naval force, to protect its overseas economic and strategic interests (Tiezzi 2015). Sea
power has special importance for an emerging great power. As Mahan (1987 [1890]) explained cogently
in one of his classic books on naval strategy, Great Britain was able to emerge as a new hegemonic
power because of the superiority of its naval capacity and technology and its effective control of main
international sealanes. Naval power has a special significance for China, a newly emerging power, as well
as for both economic and strategic reasons. First, its economy's rapid growth requires external
expansion to ensure raw materials and the foreign markets to sell its products. Therefore, naval power
becomes crucial in protecting its overseas business interests and activities. Second, securing major sealanes becomes increasingly important as they will be crucial lifelines for the supply of energy, raw
materials, and other essential goods should China become involved in a hegemonic war or any other
major military conflict (Friedberg 2011). In light of this, it is understandable why China is so stubborn
over territorial issues in the South China and East China Seas. In fact, history tells us that many rising
powers invested in sea power to expand their global influence, and indeed all the global hegemons
including Great Britain and the United States were predominant naval powers. Another important
aspect is that Beijing is beginning to voice its dissatisfaction with the existing international economic
order and take actions that could potentially change this order. The Chinese economy has overall
benefited from the post-World War II international liberal order, but the Bretton Woods institutions like
the IMF and the World Bank have been dominated by the United States and its allies and China does not
have much power or voice in these institutions. Both institutions are based in Washington, DC, and the
United States has enjoyed the largest voting shares with its veto power. Along with other emerging
economies, China has called for significant reforms, especially in the governing system of the IMF, but
reform plans to give more power to China and other emerging economies have been delayed by the
opposition of the US Congress (Choi 2013). In response to this, Beijing recently took the initiative to
create new international financial institutions including the AIIB. At this moment, it is premature to say
that these new institutions would be able to replace the Bretton Woods institutions. Nonetheless, this
new development can be read as a starting point for significant changes in global economic and financial
governance that has been dominated by the United States since the end of World War II (Subacchi
2015). China's historical legacies reinforce the view that China has a willingness to become a global
hegemon. From the Ming dynasty in the late fourteenth century to the start of the first Opium War in
1839, China enjoyed its undisputed hegemonic position in East Asia. "Sino-centrism" that is related to
this historical reality has long governed the mentality of Chinese people. According to this hierarchical
world view, China, as the most advanced civilization, is at the center of East Asia and the world, and all
China's neighbors are vassal states (Kang 2010). This mentality was openly revealed by the Chinese
foreign minister's recent public statement that I quoted previously: "China is a big country . . . and other
countries are small countries and that is just a fact" (Economist 2012). This view is related to Chinese
people's ancient superiority complex that developed from the long history and rich cultural heritage of
Chinese civilization (Jacques 2012). In a sense, China has always been a superpower regardless of its
economic standing at least in most Chinese people's mind-set. The strong national or civilizational pride
of Chinese people, however, was severely damaged by "the Century of Humiliation," a period between
the first Opium War (1839) and the end of the Chinese Civil War (1949). During this period, China was
DebateUS!
Release 10-1-22
26
encroached on by the West and invaded by Japan, experienced prolonged civil conflicts, and finally
became a semicolony of Great Britain while its northern territory was occupied by Japan. China's
economic modernization is viewed as a national project to lay an economic foundation to overcome this
bitter experience of subjugation and shame and recover its traditional position and old glory (Choi
2015). Viewed from this perspective, economic modernization or the accumulation of wealth is not an
ultimate objective of China. Rather, its final goal is to return to its traditional status by expanding its
global political and military as well as economic influence. What it ultimately desires is recognition
(Anerkennung), respect (Respekt), and status (Stellung). These are important concepts for
constructivists who see ideational motives as the main driving forces behind interstate conflicts (Lebow
2008). This reveals that constructivist elements can be combined with long cycle and power transition
theories in explaining the rise and fall of great powers, although further systematic studies on it are
needed.Considering all this, China has always been a territorial power rather than a trading state. China
does not seem to be satisfied only with the global expansion of international trade and the conquest of
foreign markets. It also wants to broaden its (particularly maritime) territories and spheres of influence
to recover its traditional political status as the Middle Kingdom. As emphasized previously, the type or
nature and goals or ideologies of a rising power matter. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan (territorial
powers) experienced rapid economic expansion and sought to expand their territories and influence in
the first half of the twentieth century. For example, during this period Japan's goal was to create the
Japanese empire in East Asia under the motto of the East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere. On the other
hand, democratized Germany and Japan (trading powers) that enjoyed a second economic expansion
did not pursue the expansion of their territories and spheres of influence in the post-World War II era.
Twentiethcentury history suggests that political regimes predicated upon nondemocratic or nonliberal
values and cultures (for instance, Nazism in Germany and militarism in Japan before the mid-twentieth
century, and communism in the Soviet Union during the Cold War) can pose significant challenges to
democratic and liberal regimes. The empirical studies of Lemke and Reed (1996) show that the
democratic peace thesis can be used as a subset of power transition theory. According to their studies,
states organized similarly to the dominant powers politically and economically (liberal democracy) are
generally satisfied with the existing international rules and order and they tend to be status quo states.
Another historical lesson is that economic interdependence alone cannot prevent a war for hegemony.
Germany was one of the main trade partners of Great Britain before World War I (Friedberg 2011), and
Japan was the number three importer of American products before its attack on Pearl Harbor (Keylor
2011). A relatively peaceful relationship or transition is possible when economic interdependence is
supported by a solid democratic alliance between a rising great power and an existing or declining one.
Some scholars such as Ikenberry (2008) emphasize nuclear deterrence and the high costs of a nuclear
war. Power transition theorists agree that the high costs of a nuclear war can constrain a war among
great powers but do not view them as "a perfect deterrent" to war (Kugler and Zagare 1990; Tammen et
al. 2000). The idea of nuclear deterrence is based upon the assumption of the rationality of actors
(states): as long as the costs of a (nuclear) war are higher than its benefits, an actor (state) will not
initiate the war. However, even some rationalists admit that certain actors (such as exceedingly
ambitious risk-taking states) do not behave rationally and engage in unexpected military actions or
pursue military overexpansion beyond its capacity (Glaser 2010). The state's behaviors are driven by its
values, perceptions, and political ambitions as well as its rational calculations of costs and benefits.
Especially, national pride, historical memories, and territorial disputes can make states behave
emotionally. The possibility of a war between a democratic nation and a nondemocratic regime
DebateUS!
Release 10-1-22
27
increases because they do not share the same values and beliefs and, therefore, the level of mistrust
between them tends to be very high. China and the United States have enhanced their cooperation to
address various global issues like global warming, international terrorism, energy issues, and global
economic stability. But these issues are not strong enough to bring them together to overcome their
mistrust that stems from their different values, beliefs, and perceptions (Friedberg 2011). What is more
important is whether they can set mutually agreeable international rules on traditional security issues
including territorial disputes.
Chinese revisionism collapses hegemony and ensures Taiwan war
Kapila 19 [Dr Subhash Kapila is a graduate of the Royal British Army Staff College, with a Masters in
Defence Science (Madras University) and a PhD in Strategic Studies (Allahabad University) Combines a
rich experience of Army (Brigadier) and diplomatic assignments in major countries."United States’
Potent Existential Crisis: The China Threat – Analysis." https://www.eurasiareview.com/18012019united-states-potent-existential-crisis-the-china-threat-analysis/]
The ‘China Threat ‘emerging in 2018 in comprehensive and diverse manifestations poses an existential
crisis challenging not only the continuance of United States as the global unipolar Superpower but also
targeted with intended consequences of prompting the United States to retreat into isolation within its
continental confines.
The United States has long ignored the China Threat to the detriment of United States own national
security but also to the security of US Allies and strategic partners. The acid test of a nations’ strategic
greatness lies not only in checkmating a threat in existence to its national security but also being vigilant
to a ‘Threat in the Making’, as I would put it. The United States is guilty of the latter in relation to China.
China has reached this stage of posing a potent existential challenge to the United States mainly due to
United States own acts of strategic omission and commission. United States misreading of China’s long
range intentions has not only facilitated the emergence of a China Threat to United States but also
United States permissive attitudes on China facilitated to create two ‘rogue nuclear weapons state’ of
Pakistan and North Korea as its proxy cats-paws against US Allies and strategic partners.
China is unlikely to succeed in achieving ‘strategic equivalence’ that it seeks with the United States in the
foreseeable future nor are the Major Powers of the world, including Japan and India, likely to accede
‘American Exceptionalism’ to China despite its burgeoning military power. This for the simple reason
that I have been stressing in my writings for two decades and that is China has no Natural Allies like the
United States.
For detailed analysis on the subject, kindly read my Book, “China-India Military Confrontation: 21st
Century Perspectives” (2015) Chapter 13 ‘China’s Giant Leap for Superpower Status in 21st Century:
Geopolitical Implications’.
However, China will in the 21st Century with great persistence, and unmindful of the prevailing reality,
that China is besieged today from both within and without, China will continue to challenge United
States global predominance and specifically Indo Pacific predominance with greater potency.
The United States has belatedly woken upto the reality that what they attempted to market globally for
decades that China can be co-opted as a responsible stakeholder in global security and stability was a
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mirage. Long years of United States ‘China Hedging Strategy’ and ‘Risk Aversion Strategy’ made China
only more recalcitrant and fed Chinese misperceptions that United States global power is on the decline.
United States policy formulations of this decade of a ‘Strategic Pivot to Asia Pacific’ and the recent
emphasis on Indo Pacific Security Blueprint are seemingly belated but welcome steps to checkmate
China’s unrestrained flexing of its military muscle as evident in the South China Sea.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s call on Chinese Armed Forces to prepare for an all- out war are not
defensive calls by a besieged nation but like Hitlerian Germany, these are offensive calls of a revisionist
power. Annexation of Taiwan by use of military force seems to be China’s aim today. This has a larger
aim of challenging United States resolve and determination to maintain its Superpower status. China has
placed the United States on the horns of a strategic dilemma where the United States will be damned if
it does not militarily intervene to defend Taiwan and if it does so it risks a full-fledged war with China.
China is gambling on the United States shying away from the latter option.
Right from the turnover of the 19th Century till today no major power, not even Nazi Germany, has
dared to challenge the United States predominance, geopolitically and strategically, as China is now
engaged in doing so. Even at the height of the Cold War 1945-91 when the United States and the Former
Soviet Union were involved in a bitter ideological struggle one did not witness the unfolding of the type
of China’s ‘Grand Strategy Blueprint’ decades in the making and operationalising, to initially unravel
United States security architecture in Asia Pacific, and graduated now to a more vividly clear reality in
2019 that China is on the avowed path of emerging as the ‘sole challenger ‘of United States
predominance and exceptionalism. That China could geopolitically and strategically engage in the
execution of such a blueprint unchallenged arose fundamentally from United States flawed policy
decisions spread over many US Administrations. Such flawed US policy decisions sprung from
misconceived American readings of China’s long range strategic intentions and short-term American
geopolitical expediency subjugating and distorting United States strategic vision of the ‘China Threat’ to
United States national security. The United States ‘original sin’ in relation to the latent China Threat to
US national security can be placed on shoulders of US President Truman who ignored General
MacArthur’s dire warnings on China and petulantly dismissed General MacArthur from the command of
UN Forces in Korea. If Japan today after decades since 1945 continues as the United States most
enduring and steadfast Ally, it has a lot to do with General MacArthur’s visionary zeal. The second most
serious sin in relation to flawed US policy decisions was inflicted by US President Richard Nixon in 1972
egged by his Sinophiles Secretary of States Henry Kissinger. To spite the Former USSR the United States
in 1972 endowed an unwarranted international legitimacy on China despite its disruptive credentials
and thereafter followed as to what could be termed as a China Appeasement policy. The third sin was
committed at the turn of the Millennium when US President Bush in his messianic zeal to tame
President Saddam’s Iraq left untended both Afghanistan and more significantly Asia Pacific security.
China made full use of the decade ending 2010 for its exponential military power expansion and with
emphasis on a well-calibrated buildup of Chinese naval power for ‘naval operations in distant seas’.
China’s latest strategic-economic enterprises of One Belt One Road and Maritime Silk Route are nothing
but an attempt to control maritime chokepoints along the global commons to United States
disadvantage and as strategic pressure points against regional peer competitors.
Chinese sphere of influence causes great power war
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Brands 20 [HAL BRANDS is Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns
Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), a resident scholar at the American Enterprise
Institute, and a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. “Don’t Let Great Powers Carve Up the World Spheres of
Influence Are Unnecessary and Dangerous”, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2020-0420/dont-let-great-powers-carve-world]
Opposition to spheres of influence, in other words, is a part of U.S. diplomatic DNA. The reason for this,
Charles Edel and I argued in 2018, is that spheres of influence clash with fundamental tenets of U.S.
foreign policy. Among them is the United States’ approach to security, which holds that safeguarding the
country’s vital interests and physical well-being requires preventing rival powers from establishing a
foothold in the Western Hemisphere or dominating strategically important regions overseas. Likewise,
the United States’ emphasis on promoting liberty and free trade translates to a concern that spheres of
influence—particularly those dominated by authoritarian powers—would impede the spread of U.S.
values and allow hostile powers to block American trade and investment. Finally, spheres of influence
do not mesh well with American exceptionalism—the notion that the United States should transcend
the old, corrupt ways of balance-of-power diplomacy and establish a more humane, democratic system
of international relations.
Of course, that intellectual tradition did not stop the United States from building its own sphere of
influence in Latin America from the early nineteenth century onward, nor did it prevent it from drawing
large chunks of Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East into a global sphere of influence after World War
II. Yet the same tradition has led the United States to run its sphere of influence far more progressively
than past great powers, which is why far more countries have sought to join that sphere than to leave it.
And since hypocrisy is another venerable tradition in global affairs, it is not surprising that Americans
would establish their own, relatively enlightened sphere of influence while denying the legitimacy of
everyone else’s.
That endeavor reached its zenith in the post–Cold War era, when the collapse of the Soviet bloc made it
possible to envision a world in which Washington’s sphere of influence—also known as the liberal
international order—was the only game in town. The United States maintained a world-beating military
that could intervene around the globe; preserved and expanded a global alliance structure as a check on
aggression; and sought to integrate potential challengers, namely Beijing and Moscow, into a U.S.-led
system. It was a remarkably ambitious project, as Allison rightly notes, but it was the culmination of,
rather than a departure from, a diplomatic tradition reaching back two centuries.
GIVE THEM AN INCH…
The post–Cold War moment is over, and the prospect of a divided world has returned. Russia is
projecting power in the Middle East and staking a claim to dominance in its “near abroad.” China is
seeking primacy in the western Pacific and Southeast Asia and using its diplomatic and economic
influence to draw countries around the world more tightly into its orbit. Both have developed the tools
needed to coerce their neighbors and keep U.S. forces at bay.
Allison is one of several analysts who have recently advanced the argument that the United States
should make a virtue of necessity—that it should accept Russian and Chinese spheres of influence,
encompassing some portion of eastern Europe and the western Pacific, as the price of stability and
peace. The logic is twofold: first, to create a cleaner separation between contending parties by clearly
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marking where one’s influence ends and the other’s begins; and second, to reduce the chances of
conflict by giving rising or resurgent powers a safe zone along their borders. In theory, this seems like a
reasonable way of preventing competition from turning into outright conflict, especially given that
countries such as Taiwan and the Baltic states lie thousands of miles from the United States but on the
doorsteps of its rivals. Yet in reality, a spheres-of-influence world would bring more peril than safety.
Russia’s and China’s spheres of influence would inevitably be domains of coercion and authoritarianism.
Both countries are run by illiberal, autocratic regimes; their leaders see democratic values as profoundly
threatening to their political survival. If Moscow and Beijing dominated their respective neighborhoods,
they would naturally seek to undermine democratic governments that resist their control—as China is
already doing in Taiwan and as Russia is doing in Ukraine—or that challenge, through their very
existence, the legitimacy of authoritarian rule. The practical consequence of acceding to authoritarian
spheres of influence would be to intensify the crisis of democracy that afflicts the world today.
The United States would suffer economically, too. China, in particular, is a mercantilist power already
working to turn Asian economies toward Beijing and could one day put the United States at a severe
disadvantage on the world’s most economically dynamic continent. Washington should not concede a
Chinese sphere of influence unless it is also willing to compromise the “Open Door” principles that have
animated its statecraft for over a century.
Such costs might be acceptable in exchange for peace and security. But spheres of influence during the
Cold War did not prevent the Soviets from repeatedly testing American redlines in Berlin, causing highstakes crises in which nuclear war was a real possibility. Nor did those spheres prevent the two sides
from competing sharply, and sometimes violently, throughout the “Third World.” Throughout history,
spheres-of-influence settlements, from the Thirty Years’ Peace between Athens and Sparta to the Peace
of Amiens between the United Kingdom and Napoleonic France have often ended, sooner or later, in
war.
China rise destroys the Liberal Internationa Order
Cottle et al 19 [Dr Drew Cottle is a Senior Lecturer in Politics and History in the School of Humanities and
Communication Arts at Western Sydney University in Sydney, Australia. “Contemporary Challenges to
the U.S.-led Liberal International Order from the United States and the Rising Powers of China and
Russia”, Volume 4, Issue 1 (The Fate of the Liberal International Order and Rising Powers),
https://risingpowersproject.com/quarterly/contemporary-challenges-to-the-u-s-led-liberalinternational-order-from-the-united-states-and-the-rising-powers-of-china-and-russia/]
It has been observed that China has largely complied with the rules of the global institutions of which it
is a member, and that China has generally participated as a supporter of the current liberal international
order (Mazarr, Heath & Stuth Cevallos 2018, p. 69-70; de Graaff & van Apeldoorn 2018, p. 114).
However, it cannot be overlooked that China remains one of the world’s largest authoritarian powers,
and in the last decade it has become even more repressive and autocratic (Joshi 2018, p. 9). Some have
cautioned that incorporating autocracies like China into the existing LIO potentially advances the
‘credibility of authoritarian alternatives to the neoliberal order’ (Lee 2019, p. 57). Others contend that
the liberal international order is sustained by unipolarity and that the rise of China as a global power has
correspondingly weakened the US-led LIO (Mearsheimer 2019, p. 42). China’s participation in the LIO
may represent an attempt to obscure or distract from the nation’s authoritarianism. However, China’s
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apparent commitment to liberal internationalism and the LIO’s global institutions and covenants could
also be viewed as an effort to mask crucial problems that persist domestically. The mass migration,
urbanisation and industrialisation that drove China’s vast economic growth have in turn created ‘the
high levels of internal turmoil and the extremes of inequality that are giving rise to major political and
economic instability’ (Parmar 2018, p. 154; 168). China’s position as a global power is predicated on its
economic success; however, China’s economic power faces its own problems and ‘contradictions such as
overcapacity and a spiralling debt’ (de Graaff & van Apeldoorn 2018, p. 113).
The LIO solves every impact and is self-correcting – their critiques are founded on misconceptions and
any other system is worse
Ikenberry 20 [G. JOHN IKENBERRY is Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at
Princeton University and Global Eminence Scholar at Kyung Hee University, in South Korea. He is the
author of the forthcoming book A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of
Global Order. “The Next Liberal Order: The Age of Contagion Demands More Internationalism, Not
Less”, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-06-09/next-liberal-order]
The rivalry between the United States and China will preoccupy the world for decades, and the
problems of anarchy cannot be wished away. But for the United States and its partners, a far greater
challenge lies in what might be called “the problems of modernity”: the deep, worldwide
transformations unleashed by the forces of science, technology, and industrialism, or what the
sociologist Ernest Gellner once described as a “tidal wave” pushing and pulling modern societies into an
increasingly complex and interconnected world system. Washington and its partners are threatened less
by rival great powers than by emergent, interconnected, and cascading transnational dangers. Climate
change, pandemic diseases, financial crises, failed states, nuclear proliferation—all reverberate far
beyond any individual country. So do the effects of automation and global production chains on
capitalist societies, the dangers of the coming revolution in artificial intelligence, and other, as-yetunimagined upheavals.
The coronavirus is the poster child of these transnational dangers: it does not respect borders, and one
cannot hide from it or defeat it in war. Countries facing a global outbreak are only as safe as the least
safe among them. For better or worse, the United States and the rest of the world are in it together.
Past American leaders understood that the global problems of modernity called for a global solution and
set about building a worldwide network of alliances and multilateral institutions. But for many
observers, the result of these efforts—the liberal international order—has been a failure. For some, it is
tied to the neoliberal policies that produced financial crises and rising economic inequality; for others, it
evokes disastrous military interventions and endless wars. The bet that China would integrate as a
“responsible stakeholder” into a U.S.-led liberal order is widely seen to have failed, too. Little wonder
that the liberal vision has lost its appeal.
Liberal internationalists need to acknowledge these missteps and failures. Under the auspices of the
liberal international order, the United States has intervened too much, regulated too little, and
delivered less than it promised. But what do its detractors have to offer? Despite its faults, no other
organizing principle currently under debate comes close to liberal internationalism in making the case
for a decent and cooperative world order that encourages the enlightened pursuit of national interests.
Ironically, the critics’ complaints make sense only within a system that embraces self-determination,
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individual rights, economic security, and the rule of law—the very cornerstones of liberal
internationalism. The current order may not have realized these principles across the board, but flaws
and failures are inherent in all political orders. What is unique about the postwar liberal order is its
capacity for self-correction. Even a deeply flawed liberal system provides the institutions through which
it can be brought closer to its founding ideals.
However serious the liberal order’s shortcomings may be, they pale in comparison to its achievements.
Over seven decades, it has lifted more boats—manifest in economic growth and rising incomes—than
any other order in world history. It provided a framework for struggling industrial societies in Europe
and elsewhere to transform themselves into modern social democracies. Japan and West Germany were
integrated into a common security community and went on to fashion distinctive national identities as
peaceful great powers. Western Europe subdued old hatreds and launched a grand project of union.
European colonial rule in Africa and Asia largely came to an end. The G-7 system of cooperation among
Japan, Europe, and North America fostered growth and managed a sequence of trade and financial
crises. Beginning in the 1980s, countries across East Asia, Latin America, and eastern Europe opened up
their political and economic systems and joined the broader order. The United States experienced its
greatest successes as a world power, culminating in the peaceful end to the Cold War, and countries
around the globe wanted more, not less, U.S. leadership. This is not an order that one should eagerly
escort off the stage.
Any alternative is worse and causes great power war
Haass 19 [RICHARD HAASS is President of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of A World in
Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order. ”How a World Order Ends”,
http://biblio.institutoelcano.org/DOCS/VVidaPolitica/BMarcoPolInter/Haass_HowWorldOrderEnds.pdf]
The major alternatives to a modernized world order supported by the United States appear unlikely,
unappealing, or both. A Chinese-led order, for example, would be an illiberal one, characterized by
authoritarian domestic political systems and statist economies that place a premium on maintaining
domestic stability. There would be a return to spheres of influence, with China attempting to domi-nate
its region, likely resulting in clashes with other regional powers, such as India, Japan, and Vietnam,
which would probably build up their conventional or even nuclear forces.
A new democratic, rules-based order fashioned and led by medium powers in Europe and Asia, as well
as Canada, however attractive a concept, would simply lack the military capacity and domestic political
will to get very far. A more likely alternative is a world with little order—a world of deeper disarray.
Protectionism, nationalism, and populism would gain, and democracy would lose. Conflict within and
across borders would become more common, and rivalry between great powers would increase.
Cooperation on global challenges would be all but precluded. If this picture sounds familiar, that is
because it increasingly corresponds to the world of today.
The deterioration of a world order can set in motion trends that spell catastrophe. World War I broke
out some 60 years after the Concert of Europe had for all intents and purposes broken down in Crimea.
What we are seeing today resembles the mid-nineteenth century in important ways: the post– World
War II, post–Cold War order cannot be restored, but the world is not yet on the edge of a systemic crisis.
Now is the time to make sure one never materializes, be it from a breakdown in U.S.-Chinese relations, a
clash with Russia, a conflagration in the Middle East, or the cumulative effects of climate change. The
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good news is that it is far from inevitable that the world will eventually arrive at a catastrophe; the bad
news is that it is far from certain that it will not.
Even the transition causes war with China
Schake 17 [Kori Schake is Deputy Director-General of the International Institute for Strategic Studies,
London, “Safe Passage: The Transition from British to American Hegemony”, Harvard University Press]
A hundred years after the moment when America shook off Britain and strode forward to reshape the
international order in its image come other claimants for global dominance, growing in strength and
testing alternatives to the American equation for dominance of the international order. China, in
particular, merits examination because of the momentousness of its great leap forward since the
economic reforms of 1978. Its dynamism has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, with
an economic growth rate of 9.8 percent between 1978 and 2005.5 After a century of humiliation, its
success has fostered a swaggering nationalism. It is the world’s second largest economy, and even if it
fails to maintain its galloping growth rate it may well surpass the United States.
The Chinese government has a fundamentally different model of the relationship between the state and
its people than does America: it is counting on prosperity preventing demands for political
representation, a reversal of the dynamic that America asserts as the natural order of politics. It has an
increasingly combative military being primed with high-tech weaponry. And it envisions a manifestly
different regional order in Asia than does the United States. John Maynard Keynes famously quipped
that “practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are
usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” Many of the practical men and women running
American policy toward a rising China are unwittingly enslaved to the ideas of living political scientist
Francis Fukuyama. Policy makers often deride Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man as
though he were proclaiming that events would cease to occur, rather than ruminating on Hegel’s
critique of traditional liberalism and advocacy of a state with limited powers based on social consent.6
Yet those same policy makers have also consistently across more than forty years supported an
approach to the world based on the Fukuyaman belief that sustained success is impossible for states
that are undemocratic and that there can be no successful challenger to the Western model of market
economies and representative governance. It is the lesson the West took from World War II and the
collapse of the Soviet bloc. It is enshrined in Robert Zoellick’s solemn invocation for China to become a
“responsible stakeholder” in the international order. It is the rationalization for American businesses to
invest in and shift manufacturing to China.
What America means by “responsible stakeholder” is, of course, a China that accepts as given the rules
of the international order America has established. America supports a powerful and prosperous China
because it is wagering there cannot be a powerful and prosperous China unless it becomes democratic,
that a democratic China will dovetail into the same interests as America, that sharing those interests it
will share the burden of upholding them, and that in upholding those interests China will conduct itself
as America conducts itself. It is the strategic calculation Salisbury’s government made in 1895 about the
United States.
Salisbury’s reorientation of British policy was essential to a peaceful transition of hegemony between
Great Britain and the United States. So, too, may a Fukuyaman orientation of American policy prove
essential to a peaceful transition of hegemony between America and China should it occur. If prevention
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of war is the metric, Salisbury’s policy is the right choice. But it merits recollecting that Salisbury’s
gamble ultimately proved wrong: the United States did not fully share Britain’s interests and did not
uphold the rules Britain had established. A hegemonic America established its own rules, based on its
domestic ideology.
G. John Ikenberry has emphasized the importance of liberality in the American-led order.7 The rules are
considered by participants— not just the dominant power—to be fair and fairly applied. This culture
invests other powers in helping uphold the order and utilizes legitimacy to drive down the cost to the
United States of sustaining the order. The American-led order thus has a great capacity to accommodate
fluctuations of strength—which is to say that rising powers need not change the rules in order to
become dominant in the existing order.
But China clearly does want to change the rules—even as it benefits from them. China has afforded the
United States glimpses at least as numerous as nineteenth-century America did for Britain that the
country’s reflexes are different from those of the reigning hegemon. It does not embrace the philosophy
that people have inherent rights and loan them in limited ways to government. It centralizes power
beyond the constraint of laws or institutions. It does not hold the wielders of power accountable to the
public by either election or journalism. It enforces a bias in favor of national corporations, both overtly
through access to Chinese markets and opaquely through theft of intellectual property. It appears to
view the international order as a tribute system, with weak states forced into compliance and strong
states lulled into accepting small changes by threat of consequences out of all proportion to the
infraction. It would thereby destroy the alliance system that is the basis for American presence in the
region and provision of defense for the weak states on China’s periphery. While China’s is currentlya
regional strategy, there is little reason to believe it would not also constitute a global strategy if the
nation is in the position to assert one. This suggests that China will pose a normative challenge as well as
a power challenge to the American-led order.8
Salisbury, Chamberlain, and Balfour at least had the strong bases of common political culture and public
affection between the two countries when they placed their bet on a rising America aligning so closely
with Great Britain that both nations’ power could be harnessed for Britain’s interests. The United States
is making the same bet on much shakier grounds with China.
To be sure, America has hedged its bets with China. It maintains alliance relationships that support
America’s military reach and intensify when China behaves threateningly. It is attempting a major trade
pact that will set the rules for Asia’s economies. It is purportedly “rebalancing” its attention to Asia. Its
military forces are reengaged on the challenge of a great power war and the defense spending for
adequate preparation. Few defense specialists believe China’s military could defeat America’s, but the
Pentagon watches with anxiety at China’s ability to develop asymmetric capabilities that might render
moot America’s military advantages.
Few defense specialists in 1895 would have agreed that America’s military could defeat Britain’s, and yet
Salisbury fundamentally changed the course of British strategy to cede American objectives rather than
persist in the rules of order Britain had set and previously enforced. Might not America cede China even
more rather than fight a war that could collapse American power in the Pacific?
Another element of the challenge is that military power is a derivative index; it relies in large measure
on a country’s economic base. America’s consolation thus far with China’s meteoric rise is that China’s
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economy is merely a cheap manufacturing base that has yet to prove it can navigate the middle-income
trap, whereas America’s wealth is driven by innovation. This, too, is Fukuyama’s long shadow: belief that
only free societies can foster the intellectual creativity to sustain dynamism. It is a complacency that
Germany’s rise in the prewar years ought to have shattered. Freedom is not the only motivator for
innovation. Authoritarian capitalism in China is proving itself as creative and unrestrained as its
American counterpart.
Prosperity is the main allure of the authoritarian model, especially when capitalism’s champions lag.9
Nationalism, too, is a powerful force. Moreover, the outsize disputatiousness and risk tolerance of
Americans may itself be a national characteristic rather than a universal human attribute. Most
Europeans choose forms of governance and economy less tumultuous than those of Americans; public
acceptance of retrograde motion in democratizing societies is often a function of exhaustion with the
enervation of political and economic change. The people of China could well choose a government less
free but more predictable than America’s—and prosper in the choice.
America naturally believes such a system is unsustainable. Not only would China have to impose it by
force on free societies, but it is susceptible to corrosion from within. This is often mentioned in
conjunction with the fact that nearly 150,000 Chinese students study at American universities each year.
In Fukuyaman terms, education offers a path to China becoming part of the American order. American
policy encourages the practice in the belief that while Chinese may not return home hoping their
teenage daughters behave as American teenagers do, they surely want a government they can hold
accountable. And if a government is accountable, then it will become liberal. But if the Chinese dream
proves magnetic, America will have educated the political, economic, and military leaders that occasion
its demise.
American government during the country’s rise to prominence was not liberal. The government became
liberal in conjunction with prosperity and power, and it could be argued that America’s liberality was
practiced to a greater extent in its foreign policy than in remaining true to its creed at home. The
Fukuyaman mind-set takes as causality the increased liberalism of America; it may have simply been
correlation.
The Lockean liberal ethos is so fully embedded in American hegemony, though, that it is difficult to
imagine the United States refusing admission to Chinese students. Indeed, liberalism may so far pervade
American political culture that courts would deny government the ability to proscribe university
admissions on national security grounds. While conservatives bemoan the preoccupations of liberal
societies, they are the defining element of the American brand and the seemingly inescapable basis for
American foreign policy in the time of its hegemony. The American order will succeed or fail along
Fukuyaman lines: either the United States will prove right that free people and free markets are the sole
basis for sustainable prosperity and political power, and China will either fail to continue rising or
become indistinguishable from other states in the American order, or China will prove resistant to the
attractions of liberalism and overtake America as hegemon.
If the Chinese model sustains itself, then a dominant China is likely to recast the rules in ways that
extrapolate to the international order its domestic political ideology, just as America did. Hegemony
with Chinese characteristics would be a very different international order from the one America has
fostered in its hegemony. It would encourage and support other authoritarian governments politically,
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financially, and socially. It would penalize states for interfering in the internal practices of repressive
governments. It would offer privileged access to state-associated commercial concerns. It would prevent
market forces levying penalties that make markets efficient and reliable allocators of capital. China lacks
an ideology likely to appeal to America in the seductive way America’s ideology appealed within Britain
and beyond. Without such an ideology, any hegemonic transition will require imposition by force.
Failure to counter China’s growing relative strength in Asia means that China means
that China will dominate and lead the development of alternative security and
economic arrangements
Ronce Alond, December 12, 2016, The Diplomat, Finding Balance in the US-China Relationship,
http://thediplomat.com/2016/12/finding-balance-in-the-us-china-relationship/ Roncevert (Ronce)
Ganan Almond is Partner and Vice-President at The Wicks Group, based in Washington, D.C. His practice
is devoted to U.S. regulation and policy, international law, and government relations involving aviation,
aerospace and national security matters. He has advised the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review
Commission and governments in Asia, Europe, Africa, and Latin America on issues of international law.
Even with the rebalance strategy, the USCC noted that the balance in military power in the region has
shifted towards China and away from the United States and its allies, mostly due to the accelerated
growth of Chinese defense spending. As a result, China feels increasingly empowered to assert
alternative regional security and economic frameworks. The tension with the U.S. regional presence is
exacerbated by geographic proximity and threats to what Beijing perceives are core territorial interests.
In the East and South China Seas, where the U.S. and its allies share complimentary core interests,
holding firm against Chinese aggression is critically important. The president-elect sent a critical
message when receiving Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, his first in-person meeting with a foreign
leader. In a similar vein, the Trump administration should continue freedom of navigation operations,
including in conjunction with key allies, and the shifting of military resources to regional assets like
Guam.
Failure to deter Chinese adventurism threatens to undermine the entire rules-based
global order
Ross Babbage, December 14, 2016, Baggage is a nonresident senior fellow at the Center for Strategic
and Budgetary Assessments, December 14, 2016, Countering China’s Adventurism in the South China
Sea: Strategy Options for the Trump Administration,
http://csbaonline.org/research/publications/countering-chinas-adventurism-in-the-south-china-seastrategy-options-for-t
One of the least recognized failures of the Obama Administration was its inability to counter China’s
territorial expansion in the South China Sea. During President Obama’s second term, Beijing militarized
and established effective control over one of the world’s most important strategic waterways. In
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consequence, an important question for the Trump Administration is how the United States and its close
regional allies (primarily Japan and Australia) can thwart Beijing’s expansionism in the South China Sea
and deter further Chinese adventurism. The challenge in the Western Pacific is complex and unlikely to
be resolved quickly. China is a rising revisionist state with authoritarian Leninist leadership that is
prepared to take risks to retain its own power and advance the nation’s international position. At the
core of the leadership’s domestic legitimacy is its promise to restore Chinese civilization to the position
of global pre-eminence, which the Chinese people believe is their rightful place. A key element of
China’s strategy is to push Western forces and strategic influence out of the South China Sea and most
of the Western Pacific. To advance these goals, the Chinese leadership has marshalled a broad range of
political, economic, information, and military resources. Beijing has made substantial progress by taking
incremental steps, each of which has fallen below the threshold that would trigger a forceful Western
response. This Chinese campaign poses a serious challenge to the power of the United States, its allies
and partners, and, more fundamentally, to the rules-based global order. Protecting the rulesbased
component of global order is becoming more important for the United States and the other Western
Pacific allies as they all suffer a relative decline in their traditional forms of power. Beijing’s breaches of
international law and U.S. allies’ reactions set precedents for how China is permitted to treat its
neighbors and others. The growth of Chinese power and its largely unchecked gray zone aggression
enables Beijing to coerce other countries to make decisions that undermine their sovereignty. In effect,
Beijing is pressuring regional countries into an arrangement that mirrors the contract struck with its own
people: economic benefits in exchange for political compliance, with a big stick lurking in the
background threatening retaliation for aberrant behavior.
When allied leaders have addressed China’s territorial and military expansion in the South China Sea,
they have almost always responded by repeating a standard mantra: we have a strong interest in free
sea and air passage; we have no national claims to territories in the area; and we call on all parties to
exercise restraint and resolve competing claims in accordance with international law. In token support
of these interests, allied ships and aircraft have periodically transited the region, though they have
rarely challenged China’s territorial claims directly. This approach is flawed and has so far failed to deter
Beijing’s substantial territorial expansion. The United States and its closest relevant allies1 urgently need
a new approach. They should develop a coherent strategy to induce Chinese compliance with
international law and deter further adventurism. This paper addresses the Chinese regime’s strategy in
the Western Pacific, particularly its construction of military facilities on several newly created islands in
the South China Sea and its establishment of effective sovereignty over some 80 percent of this strategic
waterway. It also discusses China’s psychological operations that are designed to undermine the proWestern stance of key countries in the West Pacific, including the Philippines and Australia. This paper
then considers a range of strategy options available to the Western allies to counter the Chinese
offensive in the South China Sea and in the Indo-Pacific region more generally. It enumerates several
viable strategies available to allied leaders in addition to a surprisingly broad range of practical measures
that could be taken to implement the chosen strategy. Candidate measures extend well beyond the
standard diplomatic and military domains to include geo-strategic, information, economic, financial,
immigration, legal, and counterleadership measures. The most effective allied campaigns will likely
combine a carefully calibrated mix of measures that can be sustained by the allies and their friends over
an extended period. Some of these measures would comprise declaratory policies designed to deter
Chinese actions, give confidence to allies and friends, and shape the broader operating environment.
Other measures would be classified, designed in part to keep the Chinese off-balance and encourage
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greater caution in Beijing. Some allied leaders may be tempted to do nothing or continue to take timid,
token actions in response to Beijing’s expansionism. This flat-footed stance is already fostering major
changes in Southeast Asia. The Philippines’ President Rodrigo Duterte, appears tempted to bandwagon
with Beijing. Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and even Malaysia are also developing closer relationships with
China. Regional governments now view China as not only their most important economic partner, but
also as a friend who doesn’t interfere with their sensitive domestic issues, unlike the United States.
Moreover, they appreciate that China is aggressive and has, by far, the largest military force in the South
China Sea. By contrast, the United States and its allies have sporadic military presences in the region and
are behaving very cautiously. Significant damage is being done to U.S. and allied credibility. In the
absence of major changes, much of Southeast Asia will shift into Beijing’s orbit. An even more serious
risk is that Beijing may be emboldened by its recent successes to launch new and more serious
expansionist operations. In that event, a more dangerous crisis is likely to confront allied leaders
downstream, most likely in more challenging circumstances not of their choosing. Far higher human,
military, and financial costs may be unavoidable.
The rules based international order is critical for global peace and global economic
growth
Ross Babbage, December 14, 2016, Baggage is a nonresident senior fellow at the Center for Strategic
and Budgetary Assessments, December 14, 2016, Countering China’s Adventurism in the South China
Sea: Strategy Options for the Trump Administration,
http://csbaonline.org/research/publications/countering-chinas-adventurism-in-the-south-china-seastrategy-options-for-t
The security, stability, and prosperity of the Western allies, their partners and friends are heavily
dependent on maintenance of the rules-based global order. This order provides a clear framework that
is fair, almost universally acknowledged, and highly predictable. It provides an environment within
which individuals, corporations, and nations can plan, invest, and operate with confidence and minimal
friction. It is an essential lubricant of the global economy and a pre-condition for sound international
relations and global peace. The Western allies have a particularly strong interest in seeing the United
Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea maintained. This convention has been ratified by 169
countries and provides a clear and fair set of principles and processes for determining the maritime
rights and responsibilities of member states.74 It also provides sound mechanisms for adjudicating
maritime disputes. These provisions have been used to resolve many longstanding conflicts. Through
these and associated means, UNCLOS is contributing significantly to international peace and security.
For a major power signatory to the Convention to persist in operating with little regard to the
Convention’s rules and refuse to implement the lawful adjudication of maritime disputes is completely
unacceptable. The failure of the Western allies to act strongly to defend the rule of law in the South
China Sea is effectively ceding key norms of international behavior to the strong and powerful, rather
than to the lawful. When a powerful authoritarian state is permitted to seize effective sovereignty over
a substantial maritime region without being thwarted by strong counteraction, the constraints on
further, potentially more serious aggressive actions are greatly reduced. There is a serious risk that the
Western allies will be seen in Beijing as paper tigers. Indeed, Australia has already been described in the
Chinese press as a “paper cat.”75
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Sustaining the current liberal order is critical to prevent aggression, nuclearization,
and respect for human rights
Michael Mazaar, is a Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation and Associate Director of the
Strategy, Doctrine, and Resources Program at the RAND Corporation’s Arroyo Center, January/February
2017, Foreign Affairs, The Once and Future Order, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2016-1212/once-and-future-order
The creation of the current order, like that of its two modern predecessors—the Concert of Europe and
the League of Nations—was an effort to design the basic architecture of international relations in the
wake of a war among major powers. All three orders used a range of tools—organizations, treaties,
informal meetings, and norms—to attain the goals of their creators. The current order’s main
institutions include the United Nations, NATO, the World Trade Organization, the International
Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the G-20. Together, these bodies have influenced almost
every aspect of the modern world. The UN has provided a forum for the international community to
rally around shared interests and ratify joint action. The international financial institutions have boosted
trade and stabilized the global economy during crises. Multilateral treaties and agreements brokered
through various bodies have helped avoid chaotic arms races and uncontrolled nuclear proliferation.
And dense global networks of experts, activists, businesses, and nonprofits, operating within the
framework of the liberal order, have built consensus and taken action on hundreds of other issues. The
rules of any such order are not self-enforcing. When combined with direct state power, however, they
encourage governments to accept norms of conduct such as nonaggression, the avoidance of nuclear
weapons, and respect for human rights. The United States would be wise to do what it can to sustain
these norms in the future. The trick is figuring out how to do so—and what, given all the changes the
world is now experiencing, the emerging order should look like.
Failure to stop China now means war in the future
Ross Babbage, December 14, 2016, Baggage is a nonresident senior fellow at the Center for Strategic
and Budgetary Assessments, December 14, 2016, Countering China’s Adventurism in the South China
Sea: Strategy Options for the Trump Administration,
http://csbaonline.org/research/publications/countering-chinas-adventurism-in-the-south-china-seastrategy-options-for-t
There will certainly be people in allied countries who would prefer their governments to turn a blind eye
or say the “right” things but do very little. However, the scale and nature of the Chinese challenge
means that a failure of Western leadership to respond with a robust counter-strategy would have
fundamental consequences. The first major consequence would be to effectively cede sovereignty over
almost all of the South China Sea to China. Giving Beijing effective control over such a major transport
and communications expanse would have very substantial and enduring geo-strategic implications. It
would reconfigure major parts of the security environment in the Western Pacific and seriously
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complicate many types of future allied operations in the region. The second major consequence would
be to acquiesce to Beijing’s serious breaches of international law. This would do great damage to
decades of allied effort to build frameworks of international law that govern international relations,
commerce, and international disputes. It would signal to the international community that the Western
allies are not prepared to defend international law. A third key consequence is the risk of emboldening
China to launch other, potentially more serious, acquisitive operations in coming years. Beijing may view
the timidity, distraction, and disorganization of Western leaders as an invitation to seize other strategic
territories and undertake other highly assertive operations. Hence, by remaining timid and flat-footed,
allied leaders would run a serious risk of fostering a far more serious conflict with China in coming years
that would be much harder, if not impossible, to avoid. In effect, the allied leaders would inadvertently
produce a “Munich moment,” the downstream consequences of which could be extremely damaging
and costly. A fourth major consequence of failing to act in a robust manner would be to damage allied
deterrence. Weak Western action at this point would send very unfortunate messages not just to
Beijing, but also to Moscow, Tehran, Pyongyang, and other capitals, as well as to a range of terrorist and
other sub-national groups. A fifth major consequence of allied and especially U.S. inaction would be to
force a major recalibration of defense and broader national security assumptions by almost all allied and
friendly states in the Western Pacific, and many beyond. Given the ineffective responses of allied
leaders to such serious transgressions of international law and global security norms, what changes
should they make to their own security planning? Some are already exploring new and potentially more
reliable security partnerships; others may launch substantial new programs of self-defense; yet others
may surrender key elements of their sovereignty to reach accommodations with Beijing or other
revisionist regimes.
China expansionism collapses alliances and the LIO – guarantees war
Xiangning Wu 20, Xiangning Wu is an Assistant Professor of Department of Government and Public
Policy, University of Macau. She held her Ph.D from the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research
focuses on Asia-Pacific regionalization, China-US relations, and International Political Economy,
"Technology, power, and uncontrolled great power strategic competition between China and the United
States," SpringerLink, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42533-020-00040-0/AL
Many observers conclude that the post-Cold War era of international relations, which is referred to as the “unipolar moment” (with the United States as the
unipolar power), began to fade from 2006–2008 (O’Rourke 2020). China's rise is often accompanied by corresponding predictions of inevitable conflict and U.S.
decline (Lewis 2018). The idea of a "Thucydides trap", an analogy that draws upon the Peloponnesian War in ancient Greece to suggest that China and the U.S. may
be headed for war, is still debatable, since the analogy fails considering the factors including international institutions, economic interdependence and public
resentment towards war. However, Washington
believes that China clearly "wants to shape a world consistent with
their authoritarian model—gaining veto authority over other nations' economic, diplomatic, and
security decisions" (Mattis 2018, 2). The 2018 U.S. National Defense Strategy argues that the U.S. is "facing increased global
disorder, characterized by a decline in the long-standing rules-based international order" and that "inter-state
strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security" (Mattis 2018, 1). When the Cold War took place in the twentieth century,
the post-war order and various international institutions gradually came into being and aimed to keep peace through collective military might and shared
prosperity. Despite enormous hardships and intermittent disruption, the U.S. made utmost efforts to enforce security and sustain its global leadership, which the
majority of its allies recognized. However, the 2008–2009 financial crisis not only signalled that the post-war order that has dominated geopolitical affairs for more
than 70 years is on life support, but also indicated that the U.S. has fallen short of its wish to maintain the order as its relative power declines. The stability of the
post-war order has been challenged by a surge of nationalism, populism, and, not least, the United States. The primacy of national interests has been readdressed
by Trump, which weakens the language of multilateral cooperation and intentionally ignores the sophisticated institutions that hold the world together. The
backlash to liberal democracy is not exaggerated. The fact of Brexit concretely knocks down the seemingly firm faith of the West in multilateral cooperation. Liberal
internationalism is essentially threatened by developments within the West itself (Ikenberry 2018). The
increased global disorder is
characterized by the decline and internal collapse of the rules-based post-war international order, and
the U.S. has fallen short, psychologically and economically, of taking on the burdens of global leadership.
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The democratic system guarded by the U.S. and its allies is even more fragile when it confronts threats from a single high-tech company that is believed to represent
an entirely different value system (CGTN 2020). The
emergence of a powerful China is only a catalyst for the internal
collapse. Critically, even though the U.S. seeks to convince its allies to share more responsibilities and
alleviate burdens from American shoulders, the U.S. will not risk considering China for sharing such
responsibilities if China’s involvement would undermine American dominance. Therefore, the U.S and its
allies have to pick up the broken fragments and pieces of the post-war international order and struggle
to glue them back together while creating barricades to prevent threats from a non-Western, nondemocratic, and non-market-economy country, China. The United States and its Western allies might stand firmly to protect the 75year-old order while concealing their sinister motives on premises that have little to do with official post-war institutions, customs, and traditions. The law of the
jungle is returning in popularity in an anarchic world where we used to have an illusion of order. In the short term, China might find some opportunities from the
dynamics of great power competition, but the correlation of world forces has not changed fundamentally in favour of socialism and to the detriment of Western
capitalism (Aspaturian 1980). As the second-largest country in the world, China naturally seeks to enhance its technological superiority, though it should not be
overconfident in its inevitable and irresistible rise. There is a long road before China can announce the triumph of its grand plans because of the inherent
uncertainty of big plans and external unpredictability. However, the U.S. would rather describe the potential for China’s triumph as an imminent threat to call for
strength and defeat—but not compete with—China. Before
the end of the fierce and vicious competition, which is for the
rules, norms, and institutions that will govern international relations in the decades to come, China
and the U.S. will inevitably confront the challenges of preventing competition from falling into conflict.
China war goes nuclear – strategic partnerships are key to prevent escalation
Seidel 22 (Jamie Seidel, Media Arts and Entertainment Alliance (MEAA) accredited freelance journalist,
“US-China war over Taiwan could escalate quickly to nuclear,” 6-6-22,
https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/military/uschina-war-over-taiwan-could-escalatequickly-to-nuclear/news-story/113d892580aef6d4c0c1de682fbdee10)
US President Joe Biden
has vowed to protect Taiwan from China but there are fears it could “escalate quickly”
with apocalyptic consequences. US President Joe Biden says he won’t go to war with Russia over Ukraine because it’s a nuclear
power. But he insists he will fight China over Taiwan. Analysts say that has apocalyptic implications. A recent set of war
games conducted by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) demonstrated once again that any conflict between
nuclear powers rapidly spirals out of control. It’s a lose-lose scenario that sustained a tentative peace during the Cold War.
But Russian President Vladimir Putin has changed that dynamic. He’s now using nuclear force as a shield behind which he beats up on his nonnuclear neighbours. Mr Putin has been quick to threaten strikes against anyone who dares to directly intervene in his invasion of Ukraine. The
US and NATO have openly yielded – while rushing arms, ammunition and information to support Kyiv’s resistance effort. But the spectre of
“consequences you have never seen” still looms large over Europe as Russia’s bungled war places immense pressure on its autocratic leader.
Mr Biden, however, doesn’t share the same caution over Taiwan. He’s repeatedly said
he would order US forces to fight on
Taipei’s behalf. Even though his White House staff unconvincingly rush in afterwards to reassure the world that Washington remains
“ambiguous” over its intent to intervene actively. Like Russia, China is also a nuclear power. Its arsenal is small. But it’s still more
than enough to rain down fire and fury upon the mainland US – and plunge the world into an apocalyptic
crisis. It's the potential chains of events that could lead to such mutually assured destruction that the CNAS war-games sought to unravel.
“Our recent war game – in which members of Congress, former government officials, and subject matter experts assumed the roles of
senior national security decision-makers in China and the United States – illustrated that a US-Chinese war could escalate
quickly,” it warns. Trigger point The year is 2027. China’s military modernisation and expansion are nearing completion. Its nuclear arsenal is
in the middle of a major expansion. Its leader is desperate to justify his position of ultimate power by finishing what the 1949 civil war failed to
do – seize Taiwan. “If the Chinese Communist Party decides to invade the island, its leaders may not be able to accept failure without seriously
harming the regime’s legitimacy,” argue CNAS analysts Stacie Pettyjohn and Becca Wasser. “Thus, the
CCP might be willing to take
significant risks to ensure that the conflict ends on terms that it finds acceptable.” When it comes to a fight over
Taiwan, most of the cards are already in China’s favour. It’s close. Combat aircraft can fly from mainland bases. Troop transports have only a
narrow strait to cross. Its vulnerable lines of logistics – so effectively exploited by Ukraine over Russia – are short. It’s the opposite scenario for
the United States and any coalition forces. They must cross thousands of kilometres of open ocean. And the few island bases they have nearby
are vulnerable to attack. “If
China opened up with everything they’ve got – their so-called carrier killer missiles, submarines
and everything – it would be devastating,” says Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) analyst Dr Michael Green. “And
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the US and probably Japan and Taiwan would take massive casualties. We’d lose a lot of ships. But so would China.”
Such a human and material may not be acceptable to either side. Which is where the temptation of coercive nuclear leverage comes in. Like
Moscow, Beijing may threaten a nuclear attack against the US if it intervenes. It may then find its bluff called.
“Does China want to escalate to full nuclear war?” asks Dr Green. I’d seriously doubt it. So China’s strategy is to convince Japan and US, Europe,
Australia, and especially Taiwan, that resistance is futile.” China syndrome Beijing is building three vast new nuclear missile silo fields under the
deserts of Xinjiang. It’s also tested new hypersonic glide vehicles intended to manoeuvre nuclear warheads around any defences. By 2030,
China will have about 1000 nuclear warheads on call. “Based on these projections, Chinese leaders may believe that as early as five years from
now, the PLA will have made enough conventional and nuclear gains that it could fight and win a war to unify with Taiwan,” the CNAS analysts
write. Like Putin, Beijing
will likely need a quick victory. That would give it an incentive to strike military bases
on US and allied territory. In the war-games, this never turned out well. “Both sides tried to walk a fine line by attacking only military
targets,” the analysts say. “But such attacks crossed red lines for both countries, and produced a tit-for-tat cycle of attacks that
broadened the scope and intensity of the conflict.” In one scenario, China launched a pre-emptive nuclear attack on the
US Pacific base on the island of Guam. The US retaliated by using nuclear weapons against a Chinese military
port. “Each side justified the initial blows as military necessities that were limited in nature and would be seen by the other as such,” CNAS
notes. But it didn’t turn out that way. “Both sides perceived these strikes as attacks on their home territory, crossing an important threshold.” A
new world order “One particularly alarming finding from the war game is that China
found it necessary to threaten to go
nuclear from the start in order to ward off outside support for Taiwan,” the CNAS wargamers note. “But China had difficulty
convincing the United States that its nuclear threats were credible.” Dr Green says this is the fundamental challenge of
deterrence. “So China’s strategy is not to use force, but to make us think that any fight would be futile,” he argues. “And so far, in a way, that’s
not working. They’re steeling our resolve. “And President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is helping in Ukraine to show what’s at stake. “But that said, if
we can’t maintain deterrence, we can’t make it too hard for them to invade. “We want Beijing to think an invasion would not work. And there
we’ve slipped behind the last decade or two.” When it comes to the nuclear threat, Beijing doesn’t have the Cold War experience the US and
Russia have. It hasn’t been through a Cuban missile crisis or an Archer Able invasion scare. “This
may push China to pre-emptively
detonate a nuclear weapon to reinforce the credibility of its warning,” argues CNAS. In the war game, the US was
confident its own large and diverse nuclear arsenal was enough to deter escalation and didn’t appreciate how serious the threat was. “As a
result, China felt it needed to escalate significantly to send a message that the US homeland could be at risk if Washington did not back down.”
And that, the CNAS analysts say, left Washington to choose defeat through de-escalation – or escalating itself. “The clear lesson from the war
game is that the United States needs
to strengthen its conventional capabilities (and strategic and operational planning
with key partners) in the Indo-Pacific to ensure that China never views an invasion of Taiwan as a
prudent tactical move,” the CNAS report concludes. Dr Green agrees that the peril is greater now than at any point
since the end of the Cold War. “And we are looking at Xi Jinping now in a new light because of what Putin did. These authoritarian
leaders may be willing to roll the dice. So it is a perilous time, although I do think the chances of an actual war are still low.”
LIO Collapse cause extinction
Yuval Noah Harari 20, Professor, Department of History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, “How to
Survive the 21st Century: Three Existential Threats to Humanity,” Journal of Data Protection & Privacy,
vol. 3, no. 4, 03/11/2020, pp. 463–468
As we enter the third decade of the 21st century, humanity faces so many issues and questions, that it is really hard to know what to focus on.
So I would like to use the next 20 minutes to help us focus on all the different issues we face. Three
problems pose existential
challenges to our species.
These three existential challenges are nuclear war, ecological collapse and technological disruption. We should focus on them.
Now nuclear war and ecological collapse are already familiar threats, so let me spend some time explaining the less-familiar threat posed by
technological disruption.
In Davos, we hear so much about the enormous promises of technology — and these promises are certainly real. But technology might also
disrupt human society and the very meaning of human life in numerous ways, ranging from the creation of a global useless class to the rise of
data colonialism and of digital dictatorships.
SOCIO-ECONOMIC UPHEAVAL
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Automation will soon eliminate millions upon millions of jobs, and while new jobs will certainly be created, it is unclear whether people will be
able to learn the necessary new skills fast enough. Suppose you are a 50-year-old truck driver, and you just lost your job to a self-driving vehicle.
Now there are new jobs in designing software or in teaching yoga to engineers — but how does a 50-year-old truck driver reinvent himself or
herself as a software engineer or as a yoga teacher? And people will have to do it not just once but again and again throughout their lives,
because the automation revolution will not be a single watershed event following which the job market will settle down into a new equilibrium.
Rather, it will be a cascade of ever bigger disruptions, because artificial intelligence (AI) is nowhere near its full potential.
Old jobs will disappear, new jobs will emerge, but then the new jobs will rapidly change and vanish. Whereas in the past humans had to
struggle against exploitation, in the 21st century, the really big struggle will be against irrelevance. And it is much worse to be irrelevant than
exploited.
Those who fail in the struggle against irrelevance would constitute a
new ‘useless class’ — people who are useless not from the
viewpoint of their friends and family, but useless from the viewpoint of the economic and political system. And this
useless class will be separated by an ever-growing gap from the ever more powerful elite.
THE AI REVOLUTION CREATING UNPRECEDENTED INEQUALITY BETWEEN CLASSES AND COUNTRIES
In the 19th century, a few countries like Britain and Japan industrialised first, and they went on to conquer and exploit most of the world. If we
are not careful, the same thing will happen in the 21st century with AI.
We are already in the midst of an AI arms race, with China and the US leading the race, and most countries being left far, far
behind. Unless we take action to distribute the benefit and power of AI between all humans, AI will likely create immense wealth in a few hightech hubs, while other countries will either go bankrupt or become exploited data colonies.
Now we
are not talking here about a science fiction scenario of robots rebelling against humans. We are
talking about far more primitive AI, which is nevertheless enough to disrupt the global balance.
Just think what will happen to developing economies once it is cheaper to produce textiles or cars in California than in Mexico? And what will
happen to politics in your country in 20 years, when somebody in San Francisco or Beijing knows the entire medical and personal history of
every politician, every judge and every journalist in your country, including all their sexual escapades, all their mental weaknesses and all their
corrupt dealings? Will it still be an independent country or will it become a data colony?
When you have enough data, you do not need to send soldiers in order to control a country.
THE RISE OF DIGITAL DICTATORSHIPS AND GLOBAL MONITORING
This danger can be stated in the form of a simple equation, which I think might be the defining equation of life in the 21st century:
B ×C×D =AHH!
Which means? Biological knowledge multiplied by computing power multiplied by data equals the ability to hack humans, ahh!
If you know enough biology and have enough computing power and data, you can hack my body and my brain and my life, and you can
understand me better than I understand myself. You can know my personality type, my political views, my sexual preferences, my mental
weaknesses, my deepest fears and hopes. You know more about me than I know about myself. And you can do that not just to me, but to
everyone.
A system that understands us better than we understand ourselves can predict our feelings and decisions, can manipulate our feelings and
decisions and can ultimately make decisions for us.
Now in the past, many governments and tyrants wanted to do it, but nobody understood biology well enough, and nobody had enough
computing power and data to hack millions of people. Neither the Gestapo nor the KGB could do it. But soon at least some corporations and
governments will be able to systematically hack all the people. We humans should get used to the idea that we are no longer mysterious souls
— we are now hackable animals. That is what we are.
The power to hack humans can be used for good purposes — like providing much better healthcare. But if this power falls into the hands of a
21st-century Stalin, the result will be the worst totalitarian regime in human history. And we already have a number of applicants for the job of
21stcentury Stalin.
Just imagine North Korea in 20 years, when everybody has to wear a biometric bracelet that constantly monitors your blood pressure, your
heart rate, your brain activity 24 hours a day. You listen to a speech on the radio by the great leader, and they know what you actually feel. You
can clap your hands and smile, but if you are angry, they know, you will be in the gulag tomorrow.
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And if we allow the emergence of such total surveillance regimes, do not think that the rich and powerful in places like Davos will be safe, just
ask Jeff Bezos. In Stalin’s USSR, the state monitored members of the communist elite more than anyone else. The same will be true of future
total surveillance regimes. The higher you are in the hierarchy — the more closely you will be watched.
Do you want your chief executive officer or your president to know what you really think about them?
So it is in the interest of all humans, including the elites, to prevent the rise of such digital dictatorships. And in the meantime, if you get a
suspicious WhatsApp message, from some Prince, do not open it.
Now if we indeed prevent the establishment of digital dictatorships, the ability to hack humans might still undermine the very meaning of
human freedom. Because as humans will rely on AI to make more and more decisions for us, authority will shift from humans to algorithms and
this is already happening.
Already today billions of people trust the Facebook algorithm to tell us what is new, the Google algorithm tells us what is true, Netflix tells us
what to watch, and the Amazon and Alibaba algorithms tell us what to buy.
In the not-so-distant future, similar algorithms might tell us where to work and who to marry, and also decide whether to hire us for a job,
whether to give us a loan, and whether the central bank should raise the interest rate.
And if you ask why you were not given a loan, and why you the bank did not raise the interest rate, the answer will always be the same —
because the computer says no. And as the limited human brain lacks sufficient biological knowledge, computing power and data — humans will
simply not be able to understand the computer’s decisions.
So even in supposedly free countries, humans are likely to lose control over our own lives and also lose the ability to understand public policy.
Already now, how many humans understand the financial system? Maybe 1 per cent, to be very generous. In a couple of decades, the number
of humans capable of understanding the financial system will be exactly zero.
Now we humans are used to thinking about life as a drama of decision-making. What will be the meaning of human life when most decisions
are taken by algorithms? We do not even have philosophical models to understand such an existence.
The usual bargain between philosophers and politicians is that philosophers have a lot of fanciful ideas, and politicians basically explain that
they lack the means to implement these ideas. Now we are in an opposite situation. We are facing philosophical bankruptcy.
The twin revolutions of infotech and biotech are now giving politicians the means to create heaven or hell, but
the philosophers are having trouble conceptualising what the new heaven and the new hell will look like. And that is a very dangerous
situation.
If we fail to conceptualise the new heaven quickly enough, we might be easily misled by naïve utopias.
And if we fail to conceptualise the new hell quickly enough, we might find ourselves entrapped there
with no way out.
Technological disruption of not just our economy, politics and philosophy but also our biology
In the coming decades, AI and biotechnology will give us godlike abilities to reengineer life, and even to create completely new life forms. After
four billion years of organic life shaped by natural selection, we are about to enter a new era of inorganic life shaped by intelligent design.
Our intelligent design is going to be the new driving force of the evolution of life and in using our new divine powers of creation, we might
make mistakes on a cosmic scale. In particular, governments, corporations and armies are likely to use technology to enhance human skills that
they need — like intelligence and discipline — while neglecting other humans skills – like compassion, artistic sensitivity and spirituality.
The result might be a race of humans who are very intelligent and very disciplined but lack compassion, artistic sensitivity and spiritual depth.
Of course, this is not a prophecy. These are just possibilities. Technology is never deterministic.
In the 20th century, people used the same industrial technology to build very different kinds of
societies: fascist dictatorships, communist regimes, liberal democracies. The same thing will happen in
the 21st century.
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AI and biotech will certainly transform the world, but we can use them to create very different kinds of
societies. And if you are afraid of some of the possibilities I have mentioned, you can still do something about it.
But to do something effective, we need global cooperation.
GLOBAL PROBLEMS THAT DEMAND GLOBAL SOLUTIONS
Whenever a leader says something like ‘My country first!’ we should remind that leader that no nation can prevent nuclear war or stop
ecological collapse by itself, and no nation can regulate AI and bioengineering by itself.
Almost every country will say, ‘Hey, we don’t want to develop killer robots or to genetically engineer human babies. We are the good guys. But
we can’t trust our rivals not to do it. So we must do it first’.
If we allow such an arms race to develop in fields like AI and bioengineering, it does not really matter who wins the arms race — the loser will
be humanity.
Unfortunately, just when global cooperation is more needed than ever before, some of the most powerful leaders and countries in the world
are now deliberately undermining global cooperation. Leaders like the US president tell us that there is an inherent contradiction between
nationalism and globalism, and that we should choose nationalism and reject globalism.
But this is a dangerous mistake. There is no contradiction between nationalism and globalism. Because nationalism is not about hating
foreigners. Nationalism is about loving your compatriots. And in the 21st century, in order to protect the safety and the future of your
compatriots, you must cooperate with foreigners.
So in the 21st century, good nationalists must be also globalists. Now globalism does not mean establishing a global government, abandoning
all national traditions or opening the border to unlimited immigration. Rather, globalism means a commitment to
some global
rules.
Rules that do not deny the uniqueness of each nation, but only regulate the relations between nations.
THE WORLD CUP: AN EFFECTIVE MODEL FOR GLOBAL COOPERATION
The World Cup is a competition between nations, and people often show fierce loyalty to their national team. But at the same time, the World
Cup is also an amazing display of global harmony. France cannot play football against Croatia unless the French and the Croatians agree on the
same rules for the game. And that is globalism in action.
If you like the World Cup — you are already a globalist.
Now hopefully, nations could agree on global rules not just for football, but also for
how to prevent ecological collapse, how to
regulate dangerous technologies and how to reduce global inequality. How to make sure, for example, that AI benefits
Mexican textile workers and not only American software engineers. Now of course, this is going to be much more difficult than football — but
not impossible. Because the impossible, well we
have already accomplished the impossible.
We have already escaped the violent jungle in which we humans have lived throughout history. For thousands of
years, humans lived under the law of the jungle in a condition of omnipresent war. The law of the jungle
said that for every two nearby countries, there is a plausible scenario that they will go to war against
each other next year. Under this law, peace meant only ‘the temporary absence of war’.
When there was ‘peace’ between — say — Athens and Sparta, or France and Germany, it meant that now
they are not at war, but next year they might be. And for thousands of years, people had assumed that it
was impossible to escape this law.
But in the last few decades, humanity has managed to do the impossible, to break the law and to
escape the jungle. We have built the rule-based liberal global order that, despite many imperfections,
has nevertheless created the most prosperous and most peaceful era in human history.
Peace has changed
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‘Peace’ no longer means just the temporary absence of war. Peace now means the implausibility of
war.
There are many countries that you simply cannot imagine going to war against each other next year — like
France and Germany. There are still wars in some parts of the world. I come from the Middle East, so believe me, I
know this perfectly well. But it should not blind us to the overall global picture.
We are now living in a world in which war kills fewer people than suicide, and gunpowder is far less
dangerous to your life than sugar. Most countries — with some notable exceptions like Russia — do not even fantasise
about conquering and annexing their neighbours. Which is why most countries can afford to spend maybe
just about 2 per cent of their gross domestic product on defence, while spending far, far more on
education and healthcare. This is not a jungle.
Unfortunately, we have gotten so used to this wonderful situation that we take it for granted, and we
are therefore becoming extremely careless. Instead of doing everything we can to strengthen the
fragile global order, countries neglect it and even deliberately undermine it.
The global order is now like a house that everybody inhabits and nobody repairs. It can hold on for a
few more years, but if we continue like this, it will collapse — and we will find ourselves back in the
jungle of omnipresent war.
We have forgotten what it is like, but believe me as a historian — you do not want to be back there. It is far, far
worse than you imagine.
Yes, our species has
evolved in that jungle and lived and even prospered there for thousands of years, but
if we return there now, with the powerful new technologies of the 21st century, our species will probably
annihilate itself.
Of course, even if we disappear, it will not be the end of the world. Something will survive us. Perhaps the rats will eventually take
over
and rebuild civilisation. Perhaps, then, the rats will learn from our mistakes.
China war inevitable -- Tensions higher than ever between US and China – war
is inevitable
Ann Wright 6/29/22 (Ann Wright is a retired United States Army colonel and retired U.S. State
Department official, known for her outspoken opposition to the Iraq War. She received the State
Department Award for Heroism in 1997, after helping to evacuate several thousand people during
the civil war in Sierra Leone; “US and NATO escalate tensions with Asia-Pacific War Games”) <
https://fpif.org/us-and-nato-escalate-tensions-with-asia-pacific-war-games/ > JI GWAY
While the world’s attention is focused on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, halfway around the world in
the Pacific Ocean, U.S. and NATO confrontation with China and North Korea is increasing
dramatically. Ever since the Obama administration’s “Pivot to Asia,” which was created in part to take the spotlight off the decision
to surge troops in Afghanistan and Iraq in the failed U.S. war policies in the Middle East, U.S. military naval and air presence
in the Western Pacific has been steadily increasing. During the Obama administration, Washington used “freedom
of navigation”—an integral part of the Law of the Seas treaty that the United States has failed to ratify—to send large numbers
of U.S. naval ships into contested areas in and around the South China Sea. Under the Trump
administration, freedom-of-navigation armadas sailed in an even more confrontational manner.
Now, during the Biden administration, NATO countries have joined in the armadas as British, French, and
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German navies have sent ships to join with U.S. aircraft carrier groups of more than 20 ships. For
the first time, the UK’s only aircraft carrier, the Queen Elizabeth, sailed into the Pacific to
participate in war maneuvers off the coast of China. The Trump administration ramped up confrontation with China
by sending the highest-ranking U.S. diplomat to visit Taiwan in the history of the 40-year-old U.S. policy of “One China,” according to
which Washington does not recognize Taiwan diplomatically. Trump’s actions deeply angered Beijing. The
Biden
administration has dramatically increased the number of high-level diplomats visiting Taiwan. Its
encouragement of congressional delegations to visit has infuriated the Chinese even more. The Chinese response to U.S.
actions has been to send over 50 military aircraft across the narrow Taiwan Strait to the edge
of Taiwan’s air defense zone in a show of potential military action. The confrontation over Taiwan expanded in
mid-June 2022. After China claimed that the Strait does not qualify as international waters, that Beijing
has sovereignty over the zones extending from both Taiwan’s and China’s shores to the middle of
the Strait, the United States said it would not stop conducting military operations there. Although
the United States does not have a defense agreement with it, Taiwan has always purchased U.S. weapons and U.S. military
trainers regularly visit Taiwan. President Biden has responded to media questions about the prospect of an
invasion by China with statements such as “We will defend Taiwan,” statements that his advisors have had to walk back.
Since 2010, the United States has announced more than $23 billion in arms sales to Taiwan. In
2022, U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan so far total $1 billion and are for Patriot missiles and howitzers.
RIMPAC War Games Adding to the tensions in the region, NATO countries and “partners” are joining
the massive Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) naval war exercises. Held every two years since 1971,
2022 RIMPAC will feature 38 ships from 26 countries, four submarines, 170 aircraft, and 25,000
military personnel practicing naval war maneuvers in the Hawaiian waters from June 29 to August
4. Additionally, ground units from nine countries will come ashore on the islands of Hawai’i in
amphibious landings. Forty-five percent of RIMPAC participants are either in NATO or have NATO ties. Eight of the 26 RIMPAC
countries are NATO members—Canada, Colombia, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United
States. The four other participating countries are Asia-Pacific “partners” of NATO: Australia, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand. The
other countries participating in 2022 RIMPAC are Brunei, Chile, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Israel, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, the Republic of
the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Tonga. With
participation of India for the first time in
RIMPAC, all four members of the Quad—U.S., Japan, Australia and India—will be war gaming
in the Pacific. In previous RIMPAC war exercises, both China and Russia have been invited to
participate, but neither is invited this year. Russia participated in RIMPAC for the first time in 2012, but after issues in
Ukraine in 2014, Russia was not invited back, but China did receive a 2014 invitation. China had four ships in RIMPAC in 2014 and five
ships in 2016. Congress passed the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act in December, 2021, which included a provision that Taiwan
would be invited to participate in future RIMPAC exercises, but ultimately no invitation was extended for the 2022 RIMPAC. RIMPAC
military war exercises have dangerous, intended or unintended, consequences that put the Pacific
region at ever increasing risk of military confrontation and destruction. Major cities in Asia—
Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, and Pyongyang— could be destroyed in an
exchange of ballistic missiles. The same holds true for major U.S. cities. Civic Opposition to RIMPAC Many
citizens of the 26 RIMPAC countries do not agree with their country’s participation in the war
games, calling them provocative and dangerous for the region. The Pacific Peace Network, with members from
countries/islands across the Pacific including Guåhan, Jeju Island, South Korea, Okinawa, Japan, Philippines, Northern Mariana Islands,
Aotearoa (New Zealand), Australia, Hawai’i and the United States, demand that RIMPAC be cancelled, calling the naval armada
“dangerous, provocative and destructive.” The network’s petition states that RIMPAC
dramatically contributes to the
destruction of the ecology system and aggravation of the climate crisis in the Pacific region. RIMPAC
war forces will blow up decommissioned ships with missiles endangering marine mammals such as humpback whales, dolphins and
Hawaiian monk seals and polluting the ocean with contaminates from the vessels. Land forces will conduct ground assaults that will tear
up beaches where green sea turtles come to breed. The petition rejects “the massive expenditure of funds on war-making when humanity
is suffering from lack of food, water and other life-sustaining elements. Human security is not based on military war drills, but on care for
the planet and its inhabitants.” Other citizen groups in the Pacific region are adding their voices to the call to cancel RIMPAC. In its
statement about RIMPAC, the Hawai’i-based Women’s Voices, Women Speak declared that “RIMPAC causes ecological devastation,
colonial violence and gun worship. RIMPAC’s ship sinking, missile testing, and torpedo blasting have destroyed island ecosystems and
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disturbed sea creatures’ wellbeing. This convening of military personnel promotes toxic masculinity; sex trafficking and violence against
local populations.” In a June 14, 2022 opinion piece in the Honolulu Star Advertiser, the only state-wide newspaper in Hawai’i where the
headquarters of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command is located, three local activists with the Hawai’i Committee for Human Rights in the
Philippines wrote: We are one with the people of Hawaii in opposing the U.S.-led wars, for which Balikatan (US-Philippine ground war
maneuvers) and RIMPAC are warmups. As it is, our governments bring together the people of Hawaii and the people of the Philippines to
prepare for war, death and destruction. Military
posturing in the Asia-Pacific also risks nuclear war and
the potential extinction of the human species. We must instead work toward global cooperation
to address the threats of climate change and biodiversity loss; to build toward peace, life and
coexistence.
China’s threat is real
Anthony H. Cordesman and Grace Hwang ’22, Anthony Cordesman holds the Arleigh A. Burke Chair
in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and is a national security analyst on a
number of global conflicts, Grace Hwang is Program Coordinator and Research Assistant, Burke Chair in
Strategy and Transnational Threats Project at Center for Strategic and International Studies “NATO and
the Ukraine: Reshaping NATO to Meet the Russian and Chinese Challenge”,
http://resp.llas.ac.cn/C666/handle/2XK7JSWQ/346603/bmo
The U.S.
also needs to revitalize its focus on NATO and Europe. China’s emergence as a major strategic
challenge is all too real, but Europe and Russia are just as critical to an effective U.S. strategic posture as
are China and Asia. The recent U.S. focus on the Chinese threat is all too necessary, but so is the U.S.
focus on NATO, Russia, and the rest of the world. The U.S. must treat all its strategic partners as real partners, and the U.S. needs to
recognize that its strategic force plans must continue to be global – not swing from region to region. At the same time, Europe needs to be far more realistic about
its strategic dependence on U.S. forces and the major shortfall in most European forces. European members of NATO need to do far more to improve the
modernization, interoperability, sustainability, and deployment capabilities of many of its member states. They need to recognize there
is no credible
European alternative to NATO and an Atlantic alliance, and they should focus on nation-by-nation force improvements, rather than burdensharing and arbitrary spending levels. As the following summary analysis of current national forces shows, NATO not only must deal with many individual
sets of national military weaknesses, it must address a wide range of “emerging and disruptive” technologies that are
steadily reshaping military forces, tactics, and capabilities.1
AND Taiwan proves aggressive posture.
Faisal & Maqbool, 22 (Ramsha Faisal-University of Central Punjab) (Talal Maqbool-University of
Central Punjab). “China-Taiwan Dispute and the Role of United States War Risks and Conflict,” Pakistan
Journal of International Affairs 5, no. 2 (2022). IB)
The People’s Republic of China and Taiwan are on aggressive terms with each other. Taiwan is separated
from China and it is governed independently. The nationalism government took over the administration
of China and it contested its power on the mainland. The political leaders in China have adopted a different view point on China and Taiwan relations. Cross-strait
tensions have been developed between China and Taiwan since the elections of 2016. (Maizland, 2021) China is not ready to accept Taiwan as separated from
them completely. And for this purpose, China even rejected Taiwan’s place in the United Nations. Their
conflict could be used by other countries for their benefit. Beijing even took some aggressive actions
against Taiwan through its fighter jets. It attacked near the island. China also faced failure of a lot of
plans. It tried to destroy Taiwan’s tourism sector but all in vain. The United States of America is taking complete advantage of the conflict between China
and Taiwan which could result in War Confrontation between China and United states of America. China, the largest country of Asia is currently the rising power of the world. It has developed diplomatic relations with a lot 177
countries of the world and this is the most common reason of its progress and development. Since 2019, China has had the most diplomatic missions of any country in the world. Its one of the superpowers in the world and there is
No
super power could tolerate its part being separated from them and it will make every possible attempt
to gain its part back either hook or by crook. The relationship between China and Taiwan is complex due
to the political status of Taiwan. China considers Taiwan as a break-away province. ROC came into being in the yar 1912 in China.
a clear prediction of China leading all over the world rather than America. Though it has Diplomatic relations with other countries but has cross-strait tensions with the Republic of China commonly known as Taiwan.
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Taiwan is an island commonly known
as the Republic of China (ROC). Taiwan has its own democratically elected government and it’s a home
of twenty-three million people. The people disagree with the Chinese government as they call Taiwan as
a breakaway province. Also, the Chinese government sees Taiwan as part of China again in the future. But
During that time, Taiwan was being ruled by Japan. It was a colonial rule which was a result of 1985 Treaty of Shimonoseki. (Taiwan.gov.tw, 2021)
the people of Taiwan consider themselves as an independent nation whether or not independence is officially declared. China wants the reunification of China and Taiwan for the progress and development of the country. For that
). But Taiwan relaxed the
rules on China on visits. In 1991, Taiwan proclaimed the War on the People’s Republic of China on the
mainland to be over. China conducted a political session in 2004. China got the benefit to use ‘unfair
means’ against Taiwan through the law if Taiwan tried to take its roots out of China. In 2016, Taiwan's
current president Tsai Ing-wen was elected. She is leading the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). It’s definitely
purpose, it gave the formula of ‘One Country Two System’ under which Taiwan would be given separate significance but Taiwan rejected the offer. (BBC news , 2021
tilted towards the independence of China. United States of America is the superpower of the world. No Leading power could the other in competition. Seeing China as the rising power America is using every possible means to see
the downfall of China. On January, 1979 the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China established diplomatic relations with each other. At that time, US tried to develop unofficial relations with the Republic of
China
objected on US having the diplomatic relations with the both People’s Republic of China and the
Republic of China. Having relations with Taiwan would mean that the United States of America believe
that there are ‘Two China’ and not just ‘One China’. China believes on the “One-China Principle”. (Maizland, 2021)
China as well. United States of America intentionally did that after seeing the complex terms of China and Taiwan. China also objected on the United States of America on recognizing Taiwan as separate island.
It has been observed that Taiwan has become the most dangerous flashpoint in US-China relations. Taiwan is in the center of two superpowers of the world. And US will definitely use it against China. Secret diplomacy could be the
best word used for China and Taiwan so far. The relations between United States of America and Taiwan have remained unofficial. US is involved in helping Taiwan improving their military. It was to make them strong against
. Both US and China are now locked in a Security Dilemma. (BBC news, 2021) In response to the unofficial
relations of US and Taiwan, China will increase its military reinforcement. China still doubts the relations of US and Taiwan. There is a big
China
question mark on United States of America in defending Taiwan against China. The defense question is still unanswered.
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Deterrence Key to Prevent China’s Aggression
Hegemony Key to Stop China Aggression
Brands ’20 – Professor of Global Affairs [Hal; Hal Brands is the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished
Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a
scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He is the
author or editor of several books regarding foreign policy and grand strategy; 10-1-21; "The End of
China’s Rise”; https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2021-10-01/end-chinas-rise; Foreign
Affairs; accessed 6-23-2022; AH]
RING OF FIRE Eurasia
has often been a deathtrap for aspiring hegemons: there are too many nearby
enemies that can make common cause with offshore superpowers. For almost 40 years, a rising China avoided
strategic encirclement by downplaying its global ambitions and maintaining friendly relations with the United States. But that period is over. As
Beijing has become more aggressive in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, and elsewhere, it has
engendered hostility nearly all around. Over the past five years, the United States has abandoned
engagement and embraced neo-containment. Washington has carried out its largest naval and missile
expansion in a generation, imposed its most aggressive tariffs since World War II, and implemented its
tightest restrictions on foreign investment since the Cold War—all directed at China. Arms sales and
military support to frontline states have increased; U.S. technological sanctions are threatening to
destroy Huawei and other Chinese firms. In 2021, China’s deputy foreign minister complained that “a whole-of-government and
whole-of-society campaign is being waged to bring China down.” The United States’ turn against China has contributed to
a broader backlash against Beijing’s power. In Northeast Asia, Taiwan has become more determined
than ever to maintain its de facto independence, and the government has approved a bold new defense
strategy that could make the island extremely hard to conquer. Japan has agreed to cooperate closely
with the United States to fend off Chinese aggression in the region. Through its own belligerence, Beijing
has given the U.S.-Japanese alliance an explicitly anti-China cast. The countries around the South China Sea are also
starting to hedge against China. Vietnam is acquiring mobile shore-based missiles, Russian attack submarines, new fighter aircraft, and surface
ships armed with advanced cruise missiles. Singapore has quietly become a significant U.S. military partner. Indonesia increased its defense
spending 20 percent in 2020 and another 21 percent in 2021. Even the Philippines, which courted China for most of President Rodrigo Duterte’s
term, is now reiterating its claims in the South China Sea and ramping up air and naval patrols. China’s ambitions are provoking a response
beyond East Asia, too, from Australia to India to Europe. Everywhere Beijing is pushing, a growing cast of rivals is pushing back. The
Quadrilateral Security Dialogue—a strategic partnership that includes Australia, India, Japan, and the United States—has emerged as a focal
point of anti-China cooperation among the most powerful democracies in the Indo-Pacific. The new AUKUS (Australia–United Kingdom–United
States) alliance unites the core of the Anglosphere against Beijing. The
United States is forging overlapping mini-coalitions
to ensure that advanced democracies stay ahead in key technologies, while the G-7 and NATO are
staking out tougher positions on Taiwan and other issues. To be sure, counter-China cooperation remains a work in
progress, because many countries still rely on trade with Beijing. But these interlocking partnerships could eventually
form a noose around Beijing’s neck. FLAMING OUT China is a risen power, not a rising one: it has acquired
formidable geopolitical capabilities, but its best days are behind it. That distinction matters, because China has staked out vaulting ambitions
and now may not be able to achieve them without drastic action. The
CCP aims to reclaim Taiwan, dominate the western
Pacific, and spread its influence around the globe. Xi has declared that China seeks a “future where we
will win the initiative and have the dominant position.” Yet that dream is starting to slip away, as growth
slows and China faces an increasingly hostile world.
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Heg prevents Chinese military expansion and nuclear war through containment
Brands ’20 – Professor of Global Affairs [Hal; Hal Brands is the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished
Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a
scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He is the
author or editor of several books regarding foreign policy and grand strategy; 4-20-20; " Don’t Let Great
Powers Carve Up the World”; https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2020-04-20/dont-let-greatpowers-carve-world; Foreign Affairs; accessed 6-22-2022; AH]
Such costs might be acceptable in exchange for peace and security. But
spheres of influence during the Cold War did not prevent
the Soviets from repeatedly testing American redlines in Berlin, causing high-stakes crises in which nuclear war was a real
possibility. Nor did those spheres prevent the two sides from competing sharply, and sometimes
violently, throughout the “Third World.” Throughout history, spheres-of-influence settlements, from the Thirty Years’ Peace
between Athens and Sparta to the Peace of Amiens between the United Kingdom and Napoleonic France have often ended, sooner or
later, in war. The idea that spheres of influence are a formula for peace rests on assumptions that often
go unexamined: that revisionist powers are driven primarily by insecurity, that their grievances are limited and can be easily satisfied, that
the truly vital interests of competing powers do not conflict, and that creative statecraft can therefore fashion an enduring, mutually acceptable
equilibrium. The
trouble is that these premises don’t always hold. Ideology and the quest for greatness—
not simply insecurity—often drive great powers. Rising states are continually tempted to renegotiate previous bargains once
they have the power to do so. Offering concessions to a revisionist state may simply convince it that the existing
order is fragile and can be tested further. Conceding a sphere of influence to a great-power challenger
might not produce stability but simply give that challenger a better position from which to realize its
ambitions. Consider the situation in the western Pacific. The most minimal Chinese sphere of influence would surely
include Taiwan. Yet if Taiwan became a platform for Chinese military capabilities, the defense of other
U.S. allies in the region, such as Japan and the Philippines, would become vastly more difficult. Nor would
such a concession likely satisfy Chinese ambitions. A growing body of literature by scholars such as Toshi Yoshihara,
James Holmes, Liza Tobin, and Elizabeth Economy suggests that China desires at the very least to push
the United States beyond the chain of islands running from Japan to Taiwan to the Philippines. Even a
limited Chinese sphere in the western Pacific would serve as a springboard to this larger objective.
Meanwhile, the United States will have sacrificed a number of critical advantages by pulling out. A free Taiwan offers proof that
Chinese culture and democracy are not incompatible; subjugating Taiwan would also allow Beijing to remove this
ideological threat. Worse still, the United States would lose the edge that comes from being the only
great power without significant security hazards near its borders. It was only after the United States achieved
dominance in the Western Hemisphere that it could project power globally. Russia and China, by
contrast, still have to deal with U.S. allies, partners, and military presences in their own backyards—a
circumstance that diverts resources they might otherwise use to pursue more distant ambitions and
compete with the United States at a truly global scale.
Short-term moves to bolster heg are key to check China’s rapid rise
Beckley and Brands – *Jeane Kirkpatrick Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute,
associate professor at Tufts University; **resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Henry A.
Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International
Studies. (*Michael and **Hal, January 1, 2021, “Into the Danger Zone - Coming Crisis in US-China
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Relations," American Enterprise Institute, Targeted News Service, ProQuest via UMich Libraries,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep27632?seq=1)
A Strategy for Navigating the Danger Zone
The United States obviously needs a long-term strategy to stay ahead of China economically, mili-tarily,
and diplomatically over the coming decades. But the more urgent task is to develop a short-term strategy to
blunt a potential surge of Chinese aggres-sion and expansion this decade.
A useful parallel is the early Cold War. The logic of the containment strategy Washington adopted in the late 1940s was that the contest with
Moscow would last many years, so America must set a course it could patiently follow. Yet winning the Cold War over the long term required
not losing it in the short term. The Marshall Plan, unveiled in 1947, was meant to prevent an imminent economic collapse in Western Europe,
which might enable Moscow to extend its political hegemony over the entire continent. The creation of NATO and the rearm-ament program
undertaken during the Korean War were crisis-driven efforts to forge a military shield that would allow the West to thrive--and containment to
work--over time. Strategic urgency was the prelude to strategic patience: America could exploit its lasting economic and political advantages
only if it closed off more immediate, and potentially fatal, vulnerabilities./22 Today, the United States will once again need a danger-zone
strategy, which should be based on four principles.
America should focus on denying China near-term successes, military or otherwise, that would significantly alter the longer-term balance of
power.
First, America should focus on denying China near-term successes, military or otherwise, that would
significantly alter the longer-term balance of power. The possibilities of greatest concern are a Chinese
conquest of Taiwan, which would fundamentally upend the strategic equilibrium in the western Pacific,
and Chinese technological breakthroughs--such as preeminence in 5G telecommunications networks--that would deliver
lasting dividends in economic power and geopolitical influence.
This isn't to say that Washington should cede the field in other areas of competition--such as in the
struggle for influence in international organizations--but simply to recognize that strict prioritization is
vital when dangers are acute and resources are limited. In fact, a danger-zone strategy may involve reacting calmly to, or
even encouraging, some Chinese ini-tiatives as a way to channel China's attention and resources in less threatening directions. If Beijing wants
to spend lavishly on white elephant projects in Pakistan or other detours along the Belt and Road, or if it invests in global power-projection
capabilities that will take decades to have a strategic impact, so much the better.
Second,
because a danger-zone strategy is a race against the clock, it rewards good-enough solutions
rather than perfect ones. Whether in the military, diplomatic, or economic realm, the United States should make the
most of tools, partners, and coalitions it has now, or can quickly summon, rather than assets that would
require years or longer to develop.
Third,
a danger-zone strategy requires slowing down one's opponent and speeding up one's own efforts.
selectively degrade Beijing's capabilities and
enthusiasm for expansion. This does not mean waging all-out economic or political warfare against an
insecure regime. As dis-cussed subsequently, it means identifying discrete areas where applying pressure can
throw Beijing off-balance or complicate its geopolitical designs.
As the Chinese challenge sharpens in the coming years, Washington must
Finally, a
danger-zone strategy requires risk-taking. The United States must be willing to actively roll back
Chinese power and limit its potential for aggression. As Dean Acheson remarked of desperate US efforts to rearm during the
Korean War, "The only thing that was more dangerous than undertaking this program was not undertaking it."/23 But US officials
should also eschew superfluous provocations, keeping their rhetoric calm and measured, and avoid
creating the impression that Washington is bent on all-out confrontation. Navigating a perilous passage
will require blending strength, pressure, and reassurance.
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American leadership in Asia-Pacific key to China deterrence
Hass 17 - served as the director for China, Taiwan and Mongolia at the National Security Council (NSC)
staff and served as a Foreign Service Officer in U.S. Embassy Beijing, 12/29/17 (Ryan, Brookings,
https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/the-case-for-continued-american-leadership-in-asia/, accessed
6/20/22)//jd
There is a sense that the U.S. has pressing needs at home, that the North Korea challenge feels
dangerous and intractable, and that China’s national power is on the rise — so China or others should do
more to manage problems in their own backyard. While I support focusing on getting our house in order
at home, I fear that it would be dangerously shortsighted for the U.S. to retreat from its 70-plus-year
status as the leading power and agenda-setter in the Asia-Pacific region. We have to be able to walk and
chew gum at the same time. Here’s why: First, the Asia-Pacific region is rapidly becoming the most
important area in the world for the U.S. It accounts for nearly 60 percent of global economic growth,
and U.S. exports to the region create more jobs (3.4 million) than any other part of the world. It is home
to five U.S. treaty allies, many of the world’s most capable militaries and the most proximate threat to
America’s national security: North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. When America has been active
in the region, it has spurred Asian countries to share the burden in responding to humanitarian
disasters, dealing with climate change, increasing pressure on North Korea and agreeing on trade rules
for nearly 40 percent of the global economy. At the same time, the U.S. has led efforts to push China to
emerge as a constructive — and not a coercive — actor. If the U.S. withdraws from these roles, there is
no other country capable of pulling the region together in common purpose to address shared
challenges. Second, America’s long and steady presence in the region has helped deter aggression, cool
historical rivalries, and support the spread of market-based democracies. While the people of the region
deserve credit, the U.S.-provided security umbrella also enabled progress. Up to now, the U.S. has
served as a buffer in regional disputes, and a check against China or others seeking to use their military
to move borders or seize resources. If confidence in U.S. resolve to protect the peace recedes, the risk
of interstate conflict will rise. Countries will confront a choice between becoming more deferential to
Beijing’s interests in exchange for hoped-for security and economic benefits, or developing military
capabilities — including nuclear weapons — to guard against coercion by China or North Korea. If Japan
goes nuclear, for example, South Korea and Taiwan could follow. A pattern of nuclear dominoes would
elevate risk of a catastrophic conflict that could crater the global economy and create unimaginable
destruction.
Nuclear escalation is likely — urgently strengthening allied coordination to send a
signal of resolve is the only way to prevent it.
Pettyjohn and Wasser 22 — Stacie L. Pettyjohn, Senior Fellow and Director of the Defense Program
at the Center for a New American Security, Adjunct Professor in the School of Advanced International
Studies at Johns Hopkins University, former Senior Political Scientist and Director of the Strategy and
Doctrine Program of Project AIR FORCE at the RAND Corporation, holds a Ph.D. in Foreign Affairs from
the University of Virginia, and Becca Wasser, Fellow in the Defense Program and Co-Leader of The
Gaming Lab at the Center for a New American Security, Adjunct Instructor in the School of Foreign
Service at Georgetown University, former Senior Policy Analyst at the RAND Corporation, former
Program Officer and Research Analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (UK), holds an
M.S. in Foreign Service from Georgetown University, 2022 (“A Fight Over Taiwan Could Go Nuclear: War-
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Gaming Reveals How a U.S.-Chinese Conflict Might Escalate,” Foreign Affairs, May 20th, Available Online
at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2022-05-20/fight-over-taiwan-could-go-nuclear,
Accessed 07-12-2022)
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has raised the specter of nuclear war, as Russian President Vladimir Putin
has placed his nuclear forces at an elevated state of alert and has warned that any effort by outside
parties to interfere in the war would result in “consequences you have never seen.” Such saber-rattling
has understandably made headlines and drawn notice in Washington. But if China attempted to forcibly
invade Taiwan and the United States came to Taipei’s aid, the threat of escalation could outstrip even
the current nerve-wracking situation in Europe.
A recent war game, conducted by the Center for a New American Security in conjunction with the NBC
program “Meet the Press,” demonstrated just how quickly such a conflict could escalate. The game
posited a fictional crisis set in 2027, with the aim of examining how the United States and China might
act under a certain set of conditions. The game demonstrated that China’s military modernization and
expansion of its nuclear arsenal—not to mention the importance Beijing places on unification with
Taiwan—mean that, in the real world, a fight between China and the United States could very well go
nuclear.
Beijing views Taiwan as a breakaway republic. If the Chinese Communist Party decides to invade the
island, its leaders may not be able to accept failure without seriously harming the regime’s legitimacy.
Thus, the CCP might be willing to take significant risks to ensure that the conflict ends on terms that it
finds acceptable. That would mean convincing the United States and its allies that the costs of defending
Taiwan are so high that it is not worth contesting the invasion. While China has several ways to achieve
that goal, from Beijing’s perspective, using nuclear weapons may be the most effective means to keep
the United States out of the conflict.
Gearing For Battle
China is several decades into transforming its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) into what the Chinese
President Xi Jinping has called a “world-class military” that could defeat any third party that comes to
Taiwan’s defense. China’s warfighting strategy, known as “anti-access/area denial,” rests on being able
to project conventional military power out several thousand miles in order to prevent the American
military, in particular, from effectively countering a Chinese attack on Taiwan. Meanwhile, a growing
nuclear arsenal provides Beijing with coercive leverage as well as potentially new warfighting
capabilities, which could increase the risks of war and escalation.
China has historically possessed only a few hundred ground-based nuclear weapons. But last year,
nuclear scholars at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies and the Federation of
American Scientists identified three missile silo fields under construction in the Xinjiang region. The
Financial Times reported that China might have carried out tests of hypersonic gliders as a part of an
orbital bombardment system that could evade missile defenses and deliver nuclear weapons to targets
in the continental United States. The U.S. Department of Defense projects that by 2030, China will have
around 1,000 deliverable warheads—more than triple the number it currently possesses. Based on
these projections, Chinese leaders may believe that as early as five years from now the PLA will have
made enough conventional and nuclear gains that it could fight and win a war to unify with Taiwan.
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Our recent war game—in which members of Congress, former government officials, and subject matter
experts assumed the roles of senior national security decision makers in China and the United States—
illustrated that a U.S.-Chinese war could escalate quickly. For one thing, it showed that both countries
would face operational incentives to strike military forces on the other’s territory. In the game, such
strikes were intended to be calibrated to avoid escalation; both sides tried to walk a fine line by
attacking only military targets. But such attacks crossed red lines for both countries, and produced a titfor-tat cycle of attacks that broadened the scope and intensity of the conflict.
For instance, in the simulation, China launched a preemptive attack against key U.S. bases in the IndoPacific region. The attacks targeted Guam, in particular, because it is a forward operating base critical to
U.S. military operations in Asia, and because since it is a territory, and not a U.S. state, the Chinese team
viewed striking it as less escalatory than attacking other possible targets. In response, the United States
targeted Chinese military ships in ports and surrounding facilities, but refrained from other attacks on
the Chinese mainland. Nevertheless, both sides perceived these strikes as attacks on their home
territory, crossing an important threshold. Instead of mirror-imaging their own concerns about attacks
on their territory, each side justified the initial blows as military necessities that were limited in nature
and would be seen by the other as such. Responses to the initial strikes only escalated things further as
the U.S. team responded to China’s moves by hitting targets in mainland China, and the Chinese team
responded to Washington’s strikes by attacking sites in Hawaii.
A New Era
One particularly alarming finding from the war game is that China found it necessary to threaten to go
nuclear from the start in order to ward off outside support for Taiwan. This threat was repeated
throughout the game, particularly after mainland China had been attacked. At times, efforts to erode
Washington’s will so that it would back down from the fight received greater attention by the China
team than the invasion of Taiwan itself. But China had difficulty convincing the United States that its
nuclear threats were credible. In real life, China’s significant and recent changes to its nuclear posture
and readiness may impact other nations’ views, as its nuclear threats may not be viewed as credible
given its stated doctrine of no first use, its smaller but burgeoning nuclear arsenal, and lack of
experience making nuclear threats. This may push China to preemptively detonate a nuclear weapon to
reinforce the credibility of its warning.
China might also resort to a demonstration of its nuclear might because of constraints on its long-range
conventional strike capabilities. Five years from now, the PLA still will have a very limited ability to
launch conventional attacks beyond locations in the “second island chain” in the Pacific; namely, Guam
and Palau. Unable to strike the U.S. homeland with conventional weapons, China would struggle to
impose costs on the American people. Up until a certain point in the game, the U.S. team felt its larger
nuclear arsenal was sufficient to deter escalation and did not fully appreciate the seriousness of China’s
threats. As a result, China felt it needed to escalate significantly to send a message that the U.S.
homeland could be at risk if Washington did not back down. Despite China’s stated “no-first use”
nuclear policy, the war game resulted in Beijing detonating a nuclear weapon off the coast of Hawaii as a
demonstration. The attack caused relatively little destruction, as the electromagnetic pulse only
damaged the electronics of ships in the immediate vicinity but did not directly impact the U.S. state. The
war game ended before the U.S. team could respond, but it is likely that the first use of a nuclear
weapon since World War II would have provoked a response.
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The most likely paths to nuclear escalation in a fight between the United States and China are different
from those that were most likely during the Cold War. The Soviet Union and the United States feared a
massive, bolt-from-the-blue nuclear attack, which would precipitate a full-scale strategic exchange. In a
confrontation over Taiwan, however, Beijing could employ nuclear weapons in a more limited way to
signal resolve or to improve its chances of winning on the battlefield. It is unclear how a war would
proceed after that kind of limited nuclear use and whether the United States could de-escalate the
situation while still achieving its objectives.
An Ounce of Prevention
The clear lesson from the war game is that the United States needs to strengthen its conventional
capabilities in the Indo-Pacific to ensure that China never views an invasion of Taiwan as a prudent
tactical move. To do so, the United States will need to commit to maintaining its conventional military
superiority by expanding its stockpiles of long-range munitions and investing in undersea capabilities.
Washington must also be able to conduct offensive operations inside the first and second island chains
even while under attack. This will require access to new bases to distribute U.S. forces, enhance their
survivability, and ensure that they can effectively defend Taiwan in the face of China’s attacks.
Moreover, the United States needs to develop an integrated network of partners willing to contribute
to Taiwan’s defense. Allies are an asymmetric advantage: the United States has them, and China does
not. The United States should deepen strategic and operational planning with key partners to send a
strong signal of resolve to China. As part of these planning efforts, the United States and its allies will
need to develop war-winning military strategies that do not cross Chinese red-lines. The game
highlighted just how difficult this task may be; what it did not highlight is the complexity of developing
military strategies that integrate the strategic objectives and military capacities of multiple nations.
Moving forward, military planners in the United States and in Washington’s allies and partners must
grapple with the fact that, in a conflict over Taiwan, China would consider all conventional and nuclear
options to be on the table. And the United States is running out of time to strengthen deterrence and
keep China from believing an invasion of Taiwan could be successful. The biggest risk is that Washington
and its friends choose not to seize the moment and act: a year or two from now, it might already be
too late.
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China is a Threat/Is Not Defensive
China is a revisionist power --- Only our evidence accounts for the Xi Doctrine that
legitimizes Chinese aggression
Thayer and Han 6-12-2019 - Bradley A. Thayer is Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas
San Antonio. Lianchao Han is vice president of Citizen Power Initiatives for China and a visiting fellow at
the Hudson Institute. (“The ‘Xi Doctrine’: Proclaiming and Rationalizing China’s Aggression,” National
Interest, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/%E2%80%98xi-doctrine%E2%80%99-proclaiming-andrationalizing-china%E2%80%99s-aggression-62402)
Using the occasion of the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore this month, Chinese Minister of National
Defense and State Councilor Gen. Wei Fenghe, delivered a sharp message to the United States, which
may be termed the “Xi Doctrine” on China’s use of force, after Chinese premier Xi Jinping. Wei declaring
both China’s resolve to aggress to advance its interests and a rationalization for the use of force. Wei’s
de facto threat of war should not be lost in his nuances, deliberate ambiguity, or in translation. His
remarks were so bellicose that the world has noticed, as was certainly intended by the leadership of the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Empirical evidence of China’s aggression is increasingly common, from
its attempt to dominate the South China Sea, the neo-imperialist effort to gain control of states through
the Belt and Road Initiative, to its technological imperialism to control 5G and artificial intelligence
technologies. What is rather less frequent are statements from high-level Chinese officials proclaiming
the country’s intent to be aggressive and offering an attempted legitimizing principle justifying that
aggression. While much of the content of Wei’s remarks were in keeping with the gossamer
pronouncements on China’s peaceful intentions, as well as a paean to Xi Jinping’s leadership, they still
conveyed that China is ready and willing to resort to war if the United States stands in its way of global
expansion; and they made clear that China must go to war, or even a nuclear war, to occupy Taiwan.
Specifically, there are four elements that comprise the Xi Doctrine and are indications of China’s
signaling its willingness to use force. The first component is a new and alarming proclamation of the
undisguised threats to use force or wage an unlimited war. China is becoming bolder as its military
power grows. This is evidenced in Wei’s muscular remarks on the People’s Republic of China’s approach
against Taiwan, his explicit statement that China does not renounce the use of force against Taiwan, and
his effort to deter the United States and its allies from intervention should an attack occur. Wei
forcefully stated: “If anyone dares to separate Taiwan from China, the Chinese military has no choice but
must go to war, and must fight for the reunification of the motherland at all costs.” “At all cost” means
that China will not hesitate to use nuclear weapons or launching another Pearl Harbor to take over
Taiwan. This is a clear warning of an invasion. Second, the Xi Doctrine legitimizes territorial expansion.
Through his remarks, Wei sought to convince the rest of the world that China’s seizure of most of the
South China Sea is an accomplished fact that cannot be overturned. He made bogus accusations, which
included blaming the United States for “raking in profits by stirring up troubles” in the region. He
insisted that only ASEAN and China must resolve the issue. He claimed that China’s militarization on
South China Sea islands and reefs were an act of self-defense. Should this be allowed to stand, then the
Xi Doctrine will set a perilous precedent of successful territorial expansion, which will further entice
China and jeopardize the peace of the region. Third, the doctrine targets the United States as a cause of
the world’s major problems and envisions a powerful China evicting the United States from the region.
Wei obliquely identified the United States as the cause wars, conflicts, and unrest, and sought to convey
that the United States will abandon the states of the South China Sea (SCS) when it is confronted by
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Chinese power, a typical divide and conquer strategy used by the CCP regime. The Xi Doctrine’s fourth
element is the mendacity regarding China’s historical use of force and current actions. While the
distortions of history were numerous, there were three major lies that should be alarming for the states
of the region and the global community. First, Wei said that China had never invaded another country,
which is a claim so transparently false it can only be a measure of the contempt he held for the
audience. China has a long history of aggression, including against the Tibetans and Vietnamese, and
perhaps soon against the Taiwanese. Second, Wei argued that hegemony does not conform to China’s
values when, in fact, China proudly was Asia’s hegemon for most of the last two thousand years. Lastly,
he claimed that the situation in the SCS is moving toward stability—from China’s perspective this
stability is caused by its successful seizure of territory. In fact, the SCS is far less stable as a result of
China’s actions. Efforts to counter this grab are denounced by Wei as destabilizing, which is a bit like a
thief accusing you of a crime for wanting your property returned. Wei’s belligerent rhetoric is an
indication that the CCP regime faces deep external and internal crises. Externally, the Trump
administration has shocked the CCP with the three major steps it has taken. First, it has shifted the focus
of the U.S. national-security strategy and now identifies China explicitly as its primary rival—abandoning
the far more muted policies of previous administrations. Second, Trump has acted on this peer
competitive threat by advancing tangible measures, such as arms sales to allies and the ban of Huawei.
Third, the administration has made credible commitments to assure partners and allies to counter
China’s aggression and bullying. These have unbalanced the CCP regime, and its natural reaction is to
bully its way out. Additionally, the CCP regime has perceived that the world today has begun to consider
the negative implications of China’s rise, and the United States is determined to prevent what
heretofore had been considered China’s unstoppable rise. From the perspective of CCP, conflict is
increasingly seen as inevitable and perhaps even imminent. Wei’s bellicosity should be seen in this light,
and the PLA is tasked with fighting and winning the war. Internally, Xi’s anti-corruption campaign that
selectively targets his political rivalries, and his abandoning the established rules such as term limited of
presidency, have introduced deep cleavages into the unity of the regime unity. China’s economic
slowdown, made worse by the U.S. trade war, is a fundamental challenge to the regime’s legitimacy. Xi’s
repression and suppression of the Chinese people, particularly human-rights defenders, Christians,
Kazakhs, Uighurs, and other minorities, have miscarried. Drawing from the pages of unfortunate history,
in a classic social-imperialist move, the regime wants to direct these internal tensions outward. At the
same time, the nationalistic fervor advanced by the CCP’s propaganda and by the rapid military
modernization have made many young militant officers in the PLA overconfident. This is infrequently
noticed in the West. They can hardly wait to fight an ultimate war to defeat the arch-enemy. This plainly
dangerous mentality echoes the Japanese military’s beliefs before Pearl Harbor. The bellicosity evinced
in Wei’s speech is serious and is not bluster intended to deter. The United States cannot meet China’s
threat with half-measures, which are likely to further encourage China’s aggressive behavior. The United
States must respond to China’s belligerence with greater strength, adamantine determination, and more
vigorous diplomatic and military measures. With the Xi Doctrine, China has proclaimed and rationalized
its aggression. A Trump Doctrine forged in response has to reveal to all global audiences, most
importantly the CCP leadership, the recklessness of the Xi Doctrine and the supreme folly of aggression
Ignore rhetorically strong evidence --- Statistical analysis goes our way
Kihyun Lee 17 and Sung Chul Jung, Myongji University and Korea Institute for National Unification,
4/10/17, “The Offensive Realists Are Not Wrong: China's Growth and Aggression, 1976–2001”,
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/pafo.12088
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We conduct logit analyses of China's initiation of military conflict from 1976 to 2001 (Table 2: Models 1
& 3) but also rare event logit analyses because the binary dependent variable is heavily skewed to zero
(Table 2: Models 2 & 4). Generally speaking, the results of the statistical analyses provide strong support
for the hypotheses about economic power itself and territorial disputes (H1a, H2b) and weak support
for those regarding economic power growth and US alliance (H1b, H2a) (see Table 2). 41 As China's
economic power grows, whether it is assessed relative to all states or only Asian states, its likelihood of
initiating conflict increases in a statistically significant way (H1a). As offensive realists argue, China's
economic power had a positive effect on its foreign aggression during the period from 1976 to 2001
(Models 1, 2, 3, 4). China's economic power growth rate also shows a positive but insignificant effect on
conflict initiation when measured relative to all states (Models 1 & 2). But the effect of rapid growth on
conflict initiation becomes negative, not positive, and negative in the model when China's power is
measured relative to Asian states (Models 3 & 4). This means that when China was rising rapidly
compared to its regional neighbors, it was less aggressive toward Asian neighbors and major powers.
In support of H2b, the effect of territorial disputes on conflict initiation is positive and significant in
Models 1, 2, 3, and 4. Not surprisingly, China was more prone to using military options against its
opponents in territorial disputes than against other nations. Many international relations scholars argue
that territory is a major reason why states fight each other, because it cannot be easily divided and
often possesses symbolic and religious meanings. 37 China and its opponents are not an exception to
this rule.
However, in contrast to H2a, China was not more aggressive toward US allies than toward other
countries. Whether its opponent had a defense pact with the United States did not affect China's
decision to initiate military conflict. This implies that China did not seek a direct military confrontation
with the United States during the period from 1976 to 2001. Because this finding is about China's
behaviors during the second half of the 20th century, however, it does not directly contradict the
offensive realists’ expectation that China will challenge the United States in the future when the two
nations are equal in power, at least in East Asia.
Among the four control variables, Distance has a significant effect on conflict initiation in Models 1 and
3. However, the other three variables – Relative Power, Economic Dependence, and Contiguity – do not
affect China's military aggression in a statistically significant way.
Next, we illustrate the prediction of China's initiation of military conflict against a non‐US ally. 38 As
China's share of global economic power changes from 0.05 to 0.35, its probability of conflict initiation
against a territorial dispute opponent increases from 0.01 to 0.81, and its probability of conflict initiation
against a non‐territorial dispute opponent increases from 0.002 to 0.45 (see Fig. 3). Although this
prediction derives from China's past military behaviors, we can draw two implications: (i) China's
economic power has some positive effects on its military aggression; and (ii) China's territorial dispute
opponents are likely targets of the rising power.
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Summary and Implications
Offensive realists are right: China's growth has destabilized regional stability
in the post‐Mao period. Our statistical analysis of China's initiation of military conflict shows that its
economic power has had significant and positive effects. In addition, China was more aggressive toward
its territorial dispute opponents, although the United States’ Asian allies were no more likely to be
military targets than other Asian states. In short, China's greater power made the country more
assertive, rather than cooperative, toward Asian states and major powers. This leads us to expect that
China will maintain its current uncompromising and firm position in the South and East China Seas if its
economic rise continues. Also, China's growth will accelerate its resolute protection of core interests in
strategic and economic matters.
The China threat is real – realism is inevitable and explains interstate conflict
Mearsheimer 15, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, US, China heading toward
face-off, says Mearsheimer, March, asia.nikkei.com/Politics-Economy/International-Relations/US-Chinaheading-toward-face-off-says-Mearsheimer?page=2
A: China sends mixed signals when it talks -- it says very different things. China talks about rising
peacefully and it tries to assure its neighbors, countries like Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines, that as it
grows more powerful, those neighbors have nothing to worry about. However, at the same time the
Chinese have made it clear that: No. 1, they want the Senkaku Islands back or they want to make them
part of China; No. 2, they intend to make Taiwan part of China once again and, No. 3, they plan to turn
the South China Sea into a giant Chinese lake. What the Chinese are saying is that as we get more
powerful we're going to try to change the status quo. This is going to frighten all of China's
neighbors, and it's sending the opposite message from the one that says China can rise peacefully
and that China is a benign power in the region. I think in the end ... that message -- that China is a benign
power -- will be drowned out by China's behavior, which will be much more oriented towards altering
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the status quo, and by military force, if necessary. Q: It sounds like you are saying a conflict between the
U.S. and China is unavoidable unless China changes its behavior. But are you also saying that China will
not change if its economy continues to grow? A: My argument is that it makes good sense for China, if it
continues to grow economically in an impressive way, to try to dominate Asia. It's not foolish for any
country to want to dominate its area of the world. It makes very good sense for China to be in a position
where it is by far the most powerful state in Asia and the United States is no longer in Asia. That's the
ideal situation from China's point of view, just as from the American point of view, the ideal situation is
to dominate the Western Hemisphere, to have no other great powers in the neighborhood and no
distant great powers from either Europe or Asia come into the Western Hemisphere. That's ideal from
the American point of view. But to go back to Asia, it may be in China's interest to dominate Asia. But it
is not in Japan's interest and it is not in America's interest to have a China that is what we call a "regional
hegemon." Now, what will happen if China continues to grow is that you will get an intense security
competition between China on the one hand and countries like Japan and the United States on the
other. Whether or not that security competition leads to an actual war is difficult to say. It might not
lead to a war, but there is at least a good chance that you'll have a fight, an armed conflict over
the Senkakus or Taiwan or the South China Sea
China is rising – domestic and international infrastructure and agricultural exports
outpace any other nation
McCoy 22 – Alfred McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of WisconsinMadison (Alfred, 2-25-2022, "Will the Fight for Hegemony Survive Climate Change?," Nation,
https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-china-usa-beijing/)//KH
THE RISE OF CHINESE GLOBAL HEGEMONY
China’s rise to world power could be considered not just the result of its own initiative but also of
American inattention. While Washington was mired in endless wars in the Greater Middle East in the decade
following the September 2001 terrorist attacks, Beijing began using a trillion dollars of its swelling dollar
reserves to build a tricontinental economic infrastructure it called the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that
would shake the foundations of Washington’s world order. Not only has this scheme already gone a long way
toward incorporating much of Africa and Asia into Beijing’s version of the world economy, but it has
simultaneously lifted many millions out of poverty.
During the early years of the Cold War, Washington funded the reconstruction of a ravaged Europe and the development of 100 new nations
emerging from colonial rule. But as the Cold War ended in 1991, more than a third
of humanity was still living in extreme
poverty, abandoned by Washington’s then-reigning neoliberal ideology that consigned social change to
the whims of the free market. By 2018, nearly half the world’s population, or about 3.4 billion people, were
simply struggling to survive on the equivalent of five dollars a day, creating a vast global constituency for
Beijing’s economic leadership.
For China, social change began at home. Starting in the 1980s, the Communist Party
presided over the transformation of
an impoverished agricultural society into an urban industrial powerhouse. Propelled by the greatest mass migration
in history, as millions moved from country to city, its economy grew nearly 10 percent annually for 40 years and lifted
800 million people out of poverty—the fastest sustained rate ever recorded by any country. Meanwhile,
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between 2006 and 2016 alone, its industrial output increased from $1.2 trillion to $3.2 trillion, leaving
the United States in the dust at $2.2 trillion and making China the workshop of the world.
By the time Washington awoke to China’s challenge and tried to respond with what President Barack Obama called a
“strategic pivot” to Asia, it was too late. With foreign reserves already at $4 trillion in 2014, Beijing launched its Belt and Road
Initiative, while establishing an Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, with 56 member nations and an impressive
$100 billion in capital. When a Belt and Road Forum of 29 world leaders convened in Beijing in May 2017, President Xi Jinping hailed the
initiative as the “project of the century,” aimed both at promoting growth and improving “people’s wellbeing” through “poverty alleviation.” Indeed, two years later a World Bank study found that BRI transportation projects
had already increased the gross domestic product in 55 recipient nations by a solid 3.4 percent.
Amid this flurry of flying dirt and flowing concrete, Beijing
seems to have an underlying design for transcending the
vast distances that have historically separated Asia from Europe. Its goal: to forge a unitary market that will
soon cover the vast Eurasian land mass. This scheme will consolidate China’s control over a continent that is home to 70 percent
of the world’s population and productivity. In the end, it could also break the US geopolitical grip over a region that has
long been the core of, and key to, its global power. The foundation for such an ambitious transnational
scheme is a monumental construction effort that in just two decades has already covered China and much
of Central Asia with a massive triad of energy pipelines, high-speed rail lines, and highways.
To break that down, start with this: Beijing
is building a transcontinental network of natural gas and oil pipelines
that will, in alliance with Russia, extend for 6,000 miles from the North Atlantic Ocean to the South
China Sea.
For the second arm in that triad, Beijing
has built the world’s largest high-speed rail system, with more than
15,000 miles already operational in 2018 and plans for a network of nearly 24,000 miles by 2025. All this, in
turn, is just a partial step toward what’s expected to be a full-scale transcontinental rail system that
started with the “Eurasian Land Bridge” track running from China through Kazakhstan to Europe. In addition to its
transcontinental trunk lines, Beijing plans branch-lines heading due south toward Singapore, southwest through
Pakistan, and then from Pakistan through Iran to Turkey.
To complete its transport triad, China
has also constructed an impressive set of highways, representing (like those
Washington’s current petrol-powered world order. In 1990, that
country lacked a single expressway. By 2017, it had built 87,000 miles of highways, nearly double the
size of the US interstate system. Even that breathtaking number can’t begin to capture the extraordinary engineering feats
pipelines) a problematic continuation of
necessary—the tunneling through steep mountains, the spanning of wide rivers, the crossing of deep gorges on towering pillars, and the
spinning of concrete webs around massive cities.
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China Tech Dominance
China ahead of the US in AI development
Shafeeq, 6-15, 22, Maheen Shafeeq is a researcher at the Centre for Aerospace and Security Studies
(CASS). She is a graduate of the University of Sheffield. She holds a Master's degree in International
Relations and a Bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences with majors in International Relations from Bahria
University Islamabad, Little Self-Regulation for Militaries Developing Artificial Intelligence,
https://intpolicydigest.org/the-platform/little-self-regulation-for-militaries-developing-artificialintelligence/
It has been acknowledged that China has bypassed the U.S. in AI development. This could inform why
the focus of the U.S. and NATO has been on enhancing their competitive capabilities. In theory, all three
have emphasized adopting governance principles for the development and use of artificial intelligence,
however, the practical manifestation of these principles has yet to be seen.
NATO needs to increase investment in AI and biotech to compete with China
KOLINDA GRABAR-KITAROVIĆ, FORMER PRESIDENT OF CROATIA, JUNE 16, 2022, NATO Must Ensure
Defense and Civilian Industries Work Together, https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2022/06/natomust-ensure-defense-and-civilian-industries-work-together/368250/
The internet, microwaves, and synthetic rubber came into our lives as products invented for military purposes. Even everyday things, such as
undershirts and concentrated fruit juice were created to improve the combat readiness of armed forces. Though many people typically
associate the military with war and suffering, this industry has been a source of incredible progress, producing inventions that made our lives
longer, healthier, and easier. These days, innovation is likely to run the other way, with the military benefiting from inventions developed with
private funding. A
symbiotic relationship between military needs and human progress is not necessarily the default.
a well-oiled innovation ecosystem in which military and civilian industries share their expertise and
knowledge with one another. NATO has recently announced several initiatives to build on past success, but
more are needed—particularly as members increase their military funding. Virtually all alliance members are investing
more in defense or are soon planning to do so. Germany, for example, declared that it would create a 100-billion-Euro fund and reach its 2%
Instead, it requires
goal in 2022. Poland, which shares the longest EU border with Ukraine, has taken in more than 3.5 million Ukrainian refugees and promised to
dedicate 3% of its GDP to defense. Croatia ramped up its defense investment to 2.3% of GDP. To ensure that this new investment spurs
innovation and co-operation between military and civilian industries as well as academia, NATO
announced in April the Defense
Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic. DIANA will concentrate on deep technologies, including artificial intelligence, big-data
processing, quantum-enabled technologies, biotechnology, novel materials, and outer space. In addition, 17 NATO nations have agreed to set
up the world’s first multi-sovereign venture capital fund. It will invest 1 billion Euros in early-stage startups and other deep tech funds aligned
with its strategic objectives. NATO Must Contest Russian Moves in Its Southern Underbelly US Looks to Shift Ukraine from Soviet to NATO
Weapons = NATO’s Next Strategic Concept Will Add China’s Threats, US Ambassador Says But NATO members
need to do more
to maintain their technological advantage over Russia and China, who are also increasing spending on
military research and development. The trends make this clear. In 1960, the U.S. accounted for 69 percent of global R&D
investments, with U.S. defense-related R&D accounting for no less than 36% of global spending. The bulk (65%) of U.S. investments in defenserelated R&D was financed from the federal budget. However,
by 2019, the U.S. share of global R&D fell to 30%, and the
share of federal government investment in defense-related R&D fell from 65% to 21%, whereas the
share of business investment in R&D has grown from 33% to 71%. This leaves no doubt that
meaningful innovation is not possible without close co-operation with the private sector. As NATO
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prepares to adopt its next Strategic Concept at the summit in Madrid, it is essential that it focus on
mechanisms that maintain its technological advantage. As part of GLOBSEC’s work at the Future Security and Defense
Council, we have proposed several ideas to help promote innovation in the Alliance. We are convinced that NATO’s innovation ecosystem must
integrate public and private sectors to ensure this edge
China wants tech dominance in AI and biotechnology to enable global leadership
MICHAEL BECKLEY is is Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University, a Nonresident Senior
Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the
World’s Sole Superpower., March/April 2022,https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2021-0214/china-new-world-order-enemies-my-enemy, Enemies of My Enemy How Fear of China Is Forging a
New World Order
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
The architecture of the new order remains a work in progress. Yet two key features are already
discernible. The first is a loose economic bloc anchored by the G-7, the group of democratic allies that
controls more than half of the world’s wealth. These leading powers, along with a rotating cast of likeminded states, are collaborating to prevent China from monopolizing the global economy. History has
shown that whichever power dominates the strategic goods and services of an era dominates that
era. In the nineteenth century, the United Kingdom was able to build an empire on which the sun
never set in part because it mastered iron, steam, and the telegraph faster than its competitors. In the
twentieth century, the United States surged ahead of other countries by harnessing steel, chemicals,
electronics, aerospace, and information technologies. Now, China hopes to dominate modern
strategic sectors—including artificial intelligence, biotechnology, semiconductors, and
telecommunications—and relegate other economies to subservient status. In a 2017 meeting in
Beijing, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang told H. R. McMaster, then the U.S. national security adviser, how he
envisioned the United States and other countries fitting into the global economy in the future: their role,
McMaster recalled Li saying, “would merely be to provide China with raw materials, agricultural
products, and energy to fuel its production of the world’s cutting-edge industrial and consumer
products.”
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Threat to Taiwan
China trying to provoke a military response from Taiwan; diplomacy fails; strategic
ambiguity fails
Gordon G. Chang is the author of “The Coming Collapse of China” and “The Great U.S.-China Tech War.”,
9-2, 22, China’s increasing aggression signals a looming war over Taiwan,
https://thehill.com/opinion/international/3625726-chinas-increasing-aggression-signals-a-looming-warover-taiwan/
Today, China sent two drones toward Taiwan’s Kinmen County island grouping, but the craft returned to
Xiamen — a major Chinese port — after soldiers fired warning flares. Yesterday, Taiwan shot down a
Chinese drone violating airspace over Lion Islet, part of Kinmen. The incident occurred on the fourthstraight day unidentified drones were spotted near or over those islands. Lion, a rock outcropping, lies
just 2.5 miles from Xiamen. China’s aggressive drone actions are almost certainly an attempt to
provoke Taiwan. China’s regime immediately tried to play down the Wednesday incident. Hu Xijin, once
editor of the Communist Party’s “Global Times” tabloid and now China’s “most famous propagandist,”
maintains the drones buzzing Taiwan islands on Thursday were operated by “mainland civilian drone
hobbyists.” That contention is extremely difficult to believe. Due to the sensitivity of the drone flights, it
is far more likely the crafts seen during the five days were launched under the orders of the Chinese
ruler, Xi Jinping. There are three especially disturbing aspects to yesterday’s incident. First, the Chinese
operators of the downed drone did not retreat after Taiwan’s soldiers fired flares as warnings. In other
words, it looks like the flight was designed to trigger an incident. That says, in turn, the Chinese regime
is prepared to go to war now, or at least authorize provocations that can result in conflict. Second,
China created Thursday’s incident despite a clear warning from the Biden administration. On
Wednesday, National Security Coordinator John Kirby called Tuesday’s drone incursions “a clear attempt
by the Chinese to permanently alter the status quo in and around Taiwan and to sort of set a new
normal for their activities and behaviors, be that behavior crossing over the medium line with air and
maritime assets or in this case, overflight by unmanned aerial systems.” “Changing the status quo is
unacceptable,” he added. Beijing was evidently not impressed by Kirby’s words and does not appear to
be deterred by America. Third, traditional diplomacy is not working. Yesterday’s shoot-down is the
culmination of Chinese overflight incidents. On Feb. 5, China sent a Harbin Y-12 utility plane over
Tungyin, one of Taiwan’s offshore Matsu Islands. Taipei, hoping to avoid a crisis, first tried to ignore the
clear violation of Taiwan’s airspace and then, after local residents would not keep quiet, minimized the
incident. Taipei’s strategy failed. Xi Jinping did not respond to Taiwan’s restraint with restraint. His
response was, among other things, this week’s drone flights, which became progressively bolder
through Thursday. Just about everyone is in favor of “measured” and “proportional” responses to China
these days, but the overflight incidents show they do not work. China’s regime has become militant, and
it is not clear that any policies, other than extreme ones, will have any effect. Yesterday’s shoot-down
did not stop the drone flights, but at least China exhibited more caution today. So far, the Biden
administration has not abandoned long-held beliefs about China. As Kirby said on Wednesday, there are
“active efforts” to arrange a meeting between the American and Chinese leaders. There is speculation
that Biden and Xi will talk on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Bali in November. Americans have
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unshakable faith in communication with China, and U.S. diplomats for decades have chased — both
literally and figuratively — their Chinese counterparts to arrange dialogue. Now, after five phone and
video calls between Biden and Xi, relations are breaking down fast. America’s general policy of
restraint on Taiwan — the policy of “strategic ambiguity” is meant in part to placate Beijing — has
kept the peace for decades, but that policy approach worked in a generally benign era. The policy is
obviously failing now as Beijing ramps up tensions with neighbors, especially India, Japan and the
Philippines, in addition to Taiwan. So what could work? Perhaps only robust responses. President
Biden should realize China has become combative and adjust policy fast. He can do that by publicly
declaring that the United States will defend Taiwan, offering the island republic a mutual defense treaty,
extending diplomatic recognition to Taiwan as a sovereign state and basing American troops on the
island as a “tripwire” force. Whatever your energy source preference, local support is the only way to
get it built Keeping Turkey on the right side of the battle between US and Russia In any event, the
Pentagon should move to a higher state of worldwide readiness, DEFCON 2. After all, China’s regime,
with its various overflights, has shown an apparent willingness to back up its warlike talk with warlike
actions. Of course, robust responses would outrage Xi and could escalate the situation, but at this
moment, traditional non-escalatory approaches have failed. Now, every path forward is exceedingly
dangerous, but the most dangerous path of all is to continue policies that have allowed Beijing to
think it can engage in provocation without cost.
China will look at Ukraine as motivation for a speedy, violent attack – war!
Brands 22 – Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global
Affairs at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the
Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (Hal, 4-22-22, "Putin’s Struggles in Ukraine May
Embolden Xi on Taiwan,” Asharq Al-Awsat, https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3605626/halbrands/putin%E2%80%99s-struggles-ukraine-may-embolden-xi-taiwan)//KH
One of the biggest questions of the Ukraine war concerns tensions half a world away: What lessons will China draw from the Russian invasion?
Western observers hope that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s faltering invasion of Ukraine will convince China
to go slow — that it will discourage President Xi Jinping from undertaking an invasion of Taiwan. Yet there’s a
real possibility that it could actually induce Beijing to go fast — to use force more harshly and decisively
in hopes of avoiding the type of quagmire into which Moscow has stumbled.
Learning from other people’s wars is a time-honored tradition. In the early 20th century, Western observers scrutinized the Russo-Japanese war
for hints about the dynamics of modern conflict. During the Cold War, lessons drawn from the Arab-Israeli wars strongly influenced Moscow’s
and Washington’s preparations for a superpower showdown that, mercifully, never occurred.
Today, Chinese
observers are surely scrutinizing events on the battlefield as well as the global response to
Putin’s assault. There are two conflicting narratives about what they are learning.
The first, touted by high-ranking Pentagon officials and some other analysts, is that Ukraine offers a cautionary tale for Beijing. In this telling,
Chinese officials now see how hard it is to conquer a country that is fighting for national survival. The People’s Liberation Army, which has not
waged a significant conflict in more than 40 years, has likely been sobered by how poorly another autocratic military has executed the complex
tasks associated with contemporary warfare.
Xi must also be stunned by the performance of US intelligence, which deprived Putin of anything resembling strategic surprise and has thus
given fair warning that China, too, might have any aggressive plans laid bare. The economic costs that the democratic world has imposed on
Moscow, the unity it has summoned in response to an unprovoked attack, and the fact that the conflict is creating a larger, more invigorated
North Atlantic Treaty Organization cannot escape Xi’s attention, either.
From this vantage point, a bloody war in Europe could help preserve the peace in Asia. It could force Xi’s government to revisit a whole range of
assumptions about how well the PLA would perform under wartime stress and what consequences a war might bring down on Beijing.
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This is certainly the lesson Western officials want Xi to draw — a desire that surely reflects some of the self-congratulation that has crept into
the West’s assessment of its own performance. If the democracies have stunned themselves with their support for Ukraine, then surely Xi has
been stunned as well.
Or perhaps China’s ruler is drawing a much different lesson.
Xi has presumably noticed that the US and other democracies have given arms, training and money to
Ukraine but refrained from joining the fighting. Beijing may not be impressed with the sanctions
imposed on Moscow, given Europe’s reluctance to take more drastic steps, such as quickly halting purchases of Russian
energy, that would inflict pain on its own citizens. The Chinese know, moreover, that their larger, more
sophisticated economy would be far harder to strangle than Russia’s.
And maybe, in
Xi’s view, Putin’s mistake was not his decision to invade Ukraine — it was that he conducted
the invasion in such a bumbling, indecisive manner, giving the Ukrainians the chance to fight back and
Washington and its allies the opportunity to make Moscow pay.
This interpretation might
push Xi in a more dangerous direction. It could convince him that the key to
winning a potential Taiwan conflict is to use overwhelming force — crippling [powerful] missile barrages,
coordinated cyberattacks, assassination and subversion campaigns, followed by a decisive, large-scale
invasion — to break the country’s resistance before the US and other nations can get in the way.
This conclusion
would mesh well with a Chinese military tradition that has long emphasized surprise
attacks, and with doctrinal writings that call for asserting control of a contest in its earliest moments. “Seize the battlefield
initiative, paralyze the enemy’s war command, and give shock to the enemy’s will,” one of China’s
authoritative military publications exhorts.
There is, unavoidably, some guesswork here. Even talented China watchers struggle to pierce the opacity of the regime and know what is in Xi’s
mind. China’s lessons from Ukraine may evolve as the conflict does: Whether Russia ultimately succeeds or fails could be critical.
The two narratives sketched here aren’t even necessarily contradictory. Putin’s difficulties could give Xi pause about whether to invade Taiwan,
while also pushing the PLA to be more forceful in how it conducts any prospective assault.
Yet if
Xi is as committed to unification with Taiwan as his public rhetoric and the PLA’s feverish
preparations suggest, then “go fast” is at least as plausible a takeaway as “go slow.” American observers need to
be wary of mirror-imaging — of assuming that our rivals perceive reality as we do. In supporting Ukraine, the world’s democracies
may think they are convincing Xi not to invade Taiwan. They may simply be encouraging him to do it
faster and better.
Yes invasion – any US attempt at deterrence causes a China-Taiwan war
Mastro 21 – Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford
University and a Senior Nonresident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. (Oriana Skylar,
July/August 2021, "The Taiwan Temptation," Foreign Affairs,
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2021-06-03/china-taiwan-war-temptation)//KH
For more than 70 years, China and Taiwan have avoided coming to blows. The two entities have been separated since 1949, when the Chinese Civil War, which had
begun in 1927, ended with the Communists’ victory and the Nationalists’ retreat to Taiwan. Ever since, the strait separating Taiwan from mainland China—81 miles
wide at its narrowest—has been the site of habitual crises and everlasting tensions, but never outright war. For the past decade and a half, cross-strait relations
have been relatively stable. In
the hopes of persuading the Taiwanese people of the benefits to be gained through
a long-overdue unification, China largely pursued its long-standing policy of “peaceful reunification,”
enhancing its economic, cultural, and social ties with the island.
To help the people of Taiwan see the light, Beijing sought to isolate Taipei internationally, offering economic inducements to the island’s allies if they agreed to
abandon Taipei for Beijing. It also used its growing economic leverage to weaken Taipei’s position in international organizations and to ensure that countries,
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corporations, universities, and individuals—everyone, everywhere, really—adhered to its understanding of the “one China” policy. As sharp as these tactics were,
they stopped well short of military action. And although Chinese officials always maintained that they had a right to use force, that option seemed off the table.
In recent months, however, there have been disturbing signals that Beijing is reconsidering its peaceful
approach and contemplating armed unification. Chinese President Xi Jinping has made clear his ambition to
resolve the Taiwan issue, grown markedly more aggressive on issues of sovereignty, and ordered the
Chinese military to increase its activity near the island. He has also fanned the flames of Chinese nationalism
and allowed discussion of a forceful takeover of Taiwan to creep into the mainstream of the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP). The palpable shift in Beijing’s thinking has been made possible by a decades-long
military modernization effort, accelerated by Xi, aimed at allowing China to force Taiwan back into the fold. Chinese forces plan to prevail
even if the United States, which has armed Taiwan but left open the question of whether it would defend it against an attack, intervenes militarily. Whereas Chinese
leaders used to view a military campaign to take the island as a fantasy, now they consider it a real possibility.
U.S. policymakers may hope that Beijing will balk at the potential costs of such aggression, but there are
many reasons to think it might not. Support for armed unification among the Chinese public and the
military establishment is growing. Concern for international norms is subsiding. Many in Beijing also
doubt that the United States has the military power to stop China from taking Taiwan—or the international clout
to rally an effective coalition against China in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency. Although a Chinese invasion of Taiwan may not be
imminent, for the first time in three decades, it is time to take seriously the possibility that China could
soon use force to end its almost century-long civil war.
“NO OPTION IS EXCLUDED”
Those who doubt the immediacy of the threat to Taiwan argue that Xi has not publicly declared a timeline for unification—and may not even have a specific one in
mind. Since 1979, when the United States stopped recognizing Taiwan, China’s policy has been, in the words of John Culver, a retired U.S. intelligence officer and
Asia analyst, “to preserve the possibility of political unification at some undefined point in the future.” Implied in this formulation is that China can live with the
status quo—a de facto, but not de jure, independent Taiwan—in perpetuity.
But although
Xi may not have sent out a save-the-date card, he has clearly indicated that he feels
differently about the status quo than his predecessors did. He has publicly called for progress toward unification, staking his
legitimacy on movement in that direction. In 2017, for instance, he announced that “complete national reunification is an inevitable requirement for realizing the
great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” thus tying Taiwan’s future to his primary political platform. Two years later, he stated explicitly that unification is a
requirement for achieving the so-called Chinese dream.
Xi has also made
clear that he is more willing than his predecessors to use force. In a major speech in January 2019, Xi
called the current political arrangement “the root cause of cross-strait instability” and said that it
“cannot go on generation to generation.” Chinese scholars and strategists I have spoken to in Beijing say that although there is no explicit
timeline, Xi wants unification with Taiwan to be part of his personal legacy. When asked about a possible timeline by an
Associated Press journalist in April, Le Yucheng, China’s vice foreign minister, did not attempt to assuage concerns of an imminent invasion or deny the shift in mood
in Beijing. Instead, he took the opportunity to reiterate that national unification “will not be stopped by anyone or any force” and that while
China will
strive for peaceful unification, it does not “pledge to give up other options. No option is excluded.”
Chinese leaders, including Xi, regularly extol the virtues of integration and cooperation with Taiwan, but the prospects for peaceful unification have been dwindling
for years. Fewer and fewer Taiwanese see themselves as Chinese or desire to be a part of mainland China .
The reelection in January 2020 of
Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, who favors pursuing more cautious ties with China, reinforced
Beijing’s fears that the people of Taiwan will never willingly come back to the motherland. The death
knell for peaceful unification came in June 2020, however, when China exerted sweeping new powers
over Hong Kong through a new national security law. Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” formula was supposed to provide an attractive template for
peaceful unification, but Beijing’s crackdown there demonstrated clearly why the Taiwanese have been right to reject such an arrangement.
Many in Beijing doubt that the United States has the military power to stop China from taking Taiwan.
Chinese leaders will continue to pay lip service to peaceful unification until the day the war breaks out, but their actions increasingly suggest that they have
something else in mind. As tensions with the United States have heated up,
China has accelerated its military operations in the
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vicinity of Taiwan, conducting 380 incursions into the island’s air defense identification zone in 2020
alone. In April of this year, China sent its largest-ever fleet, 25 fighters and bombers, into Taiwan’s air defense
identification zone. Clearly, Xi is no longer trying to avoid escalation at all costs now that his military is capable of contesting the U.S. military presence in
the region. Long gone are the days of the 1996 crisis over Taiwan, when the United States dispatched two aircraft carrier battle groups to sail near the strait and
China backed off. Beijing
did not like being deterred back then, and it spent the next 25 years modernizing its
military so that it would not be so next time.
Much of that modernization, including updates to hardware, organization, force structure, and training, was designed
to enable the
People’s Liberation Army to invade and occupy Taiwan. Xi expanded the military’s capabilities further,
undertaking the most ambitious restructuring of the PLA since its founding, aimed specifically at
enabling Chinese forces to conduct joint operations in which the air force, the navy, the army, and the
strategic rocket force fight seamlessly together, whether during an amphibious landing, a blockade, or a missile attack—exactly the kinds
of operations needed for armed unification. Xi urgently pushed these risky reforms, many unpopular with the military, to ensure that the PLA could fight and win
wars by 2020.
The voices in Beijing arguing that it is time to use these newfound military capabilities against Taiwan
have grown louder, a telling development in an era of greater censorship. Several retired military officers
have argued publicly that the longer China waits, the harder it will be to take control of Taiwan. Articles in
state-run news outlets and on popular websites have likewise urged China to act swiftly. And if public opinion polls are to be believed, the
Chinese people agree that the time has come to resolve the Taiwan issue once and for all. According to a survey
by the state-run Global Times, 70 percent of mainlanders strongly support using force to unify Taiwan with the
mainland, and 37 percent think it would be best if the war occurred in three to five years.
The Chinese analysts and officials I have spoken to have revealed similar sentiments. Even moderate
voices have admitted that not only
are calls for armed unification proliferating within the CCP but also they themselves have recommended
military action to senior Chinese leadership. Others in Beijing dismiss concerns about a Chinese invasion as overblown, but in the same
breath, they acknowledge that Xi is surrounded by military advisers who tell him with confidence that China can
now regain Taiwan by force at an acceptable cost.
BATTLE READY
Unless the United States or Taiwan moves first to alter the status quo, Xi will likely consider initiating armed unification only if he is confident that his military can
successfully gain control of the island. Can it?
The answer is a matter of debate, and it depends on what it would take to compel Taiwan’s capitulation. Beijing
is preparing for four main
campaigns that its military planners believe could be necessary to take control of the island. The first
consists of joint PLA missile and airstrikes to disarm Taiwanese targets—initially military and
government, then civilian—and thereby force Taipei’s submission to Chinese demands. The second is a
blockade operation in which China would attempt to cut the island off from the outside world with
everything from naval raids to cyberattacks. The third involves missile and airstrikes against U.S. forces
deployed nearby, with the aim of making it difficult for the United States to come to Taiwan’s aid in the
initial stages of the conflict. The fourth and final campaign is an island landing effort in which China
would launch an amphibious assault on Taiwan—perhaps taking its offshore islands first as part of a phased invasion or carpet bombing
them as the navy, the army, and the air force focused on Taiwan proper.
Among defense experts, there is little debate about China’s ability to pull off the first three of these campaigns—the joint strike, the blockade, and the
counterintervention mission. Neither U.S. efforts to make its regional bases more resilient nor Taiwanese missile defense systems are any match for China’s ballistic
and cruise missiles, which are the most advanced in the world. China could quickly destroy Taiwan’s key infrastructure, block its oil imports, and cut off its Internet
access—and sustain such a blockade indefinitely. According to Lonnie Henley, a retired U.S. intelligence officer and China specialist, “U.S. forces could probably push
through a trickle of relief supplies, but not much more.” And because China has such a sophisticated air defense system, the United States would have little hope of
regaining air or naval superiority by attacking Chinese missile transporters, fighters, or ships.
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But China’s fourth and final campaign—an amphibious assault on the island itself—is far from guaranteed to succeed. According to a 2020 U.S. Department of
Defense report, “China continues to build capabilities that would contribute to a full-scale invasion,” but “an attempt to invade Taiwan would likely strain China’s
armed forces and invite international intervention.” The then commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Philip Davidson, said in March that China will have the
ability to successfully invade Taiwan in six years. Other observers think it will take longer, perhaps until around 2030 or 2035.
The voices in Beijing arguing that it is time to use newfound military capabilities against Taiwan have grown louder.
What everyone agrees is that China
has made significant strides in its ability to conduct joint operations in recent
years and that the United States needs adequate warning to mount a successful defense. As Beijing
hones its
spoofing and jamming technologies, it may be able to scramble U.S. early warning
systems and thereby keep U.S. forces in the dark in the early hours of an attack. Xi’s military reforms have improved
China’s cyberwarfare and electronic warfare capabilities, which could be trained on civilian, as well as military, targets. As Dan Coats, then the U.S. director of
national intelligence, testified in 2019, Beijing
is capable of offensive cyberattacks against the United States that
would cause “localized, temporary disruptive effects on critical infrastructure.” China’s offensive weaponry, including
ballistic and cruise missiles, could also destroy U.S. bases in the western Pacific in a matter of days.
In light of these enhanced capabilities, many U.S.
experts worry that China could take control of Taiwan before the
United States even had a chance to react. Recent war games conducted by the Pentagon and the RAND
Corporation have shown that a military clash between the United States and China over Taiwan would
likely result in a U.S. defeat, with China completing an all-out invasion in just days or weeks.
Ultimately, on the question of whether China will use force, Chinese
leaders’ perceptions of their chances of victory will
matter more than their actual chances of victory. For that reason, it is bad news that Chinese analysts and
officials increasingly express confidence that the PLA is well prepared for a military confrontation with
the United States over Taiwan. Although Chinese strategists acknowledge the United States’ general military superiority, many have come to
believe that because China is closer to Taiwan and cares about it more, the local balance of power tips in Beijing’s favor.
As U.S.-Chinese tensions have risen, China’s state-sponsored media outlets have grown more vocal in their praise for the country’s military capabilities. In April, the
Global Times described an unnamed military expert saying that “the PLA exercises are not only warnings, but also show real capabilities and pragmatically practicing
reunifying the island if it comes to that.”
If China chooses to invade, the analyst added, the Taiwanese military “won’t
stand a chance.”
GO FAST, GO SLOW
Once China has the military capabilities to finally solve its Taiwan problem, Xi could find it politically
untenable not to do so, given the heightened nationalism of both the CCP and the public. At this point, Beijing
will likely work its way up to a large-scale military campaign, beginning with “gray zone” tactics, such as
increased air and naval patrols, and continuing on to coercive diplomacy aimed at forcing Taipei to
negotiate a political resolution.
Psychological warfare will also be part of Beijing’s playbook. Chinese exercises around Taiwan not only help train the PLA but also wear down Taiwan’s military and
demonstrate to the world that the United States cannot protect the island. The PLA wants to make its presence in the Taiwan Strait routine. The more common its
activities there become, the harder it will be for the United States to determine when a Chinese attack is imminent, making it easier for the PLA to present the world
with a fait accompli.
At the same time that it ramps up its military activities in the strait, China will continue its broader diplomatic campaign to eliminate international constraints on its
ability to use force, privileging economic rights over political ones in its relations with other countries and within international bodies, downplaying human rights,
and, above all, promoting the norms of sovereignty and noninterference in internal affairs. Its goal is to create the narrative that any use of force against Taiwan
would be defensive and justified given Taipei’s and Washington’s provocations. All these coercive and diplomatic efforts will move China closer to unification, but
they won’t get it all the way there. Taiwan is not some unoccupied atoll in the South China Sea that China can successfully claim so long as other countries do not
respond militarily. China needs Taiwan’s complete capitulation, and that will likely require a significant show of force.
If Beijing decides to initiate a campaign to forcibly bring Taiwan under Chinese sovereignty, it will try to calibrate its actions to discourage U.S. intervention. It might,
for example, begin with low-cost military options, such as joint missile and airstrikes, and only escalate to a blockade, a seizure of offshore islands, and, finally, a fullblown invasion if its earlier actions fail to compel Taiwan to capitulate. Conducted slowly over the course of many months, such a gradual approach to armed
unification would make it difficult for the United States to mount a strong response, especially if U.S. allies and partners in the region wish to avoid a war at all costs.
A gradual, coercive approach would also force Washington to initiate direct hostilities between the two powers. And if China has not fired a shot at U.S. forces, the
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United States would find it harder to make the case at home and in Asian capitals for a U.S. military intervention to turn back a slow-motion Chinese invasion. An
incremental approach would have domestic political benefits for Beijing, as well. If China received more international pushback than expected or became embroiled
in a campaign against the United States that started to go badly, it would have more opportunities to pull back and claim “mission accomplished.”
But China could decide to escalate much more rapidly if it concluded that the United States was likely to intervene militarily regardless of whether Beijing moved
swiftly or gradually. Chinese military strategists believe that if they give the United States time to mobilize and amass firepower in the vicinity of the Taiwan Strait,
China’s chances of victory will decrease substantially. As a result, they could decide to preemptively hit U.S. bases in the region, crippling Washington’s ability to
respond.
In other words,
U.S. deterrence—to the extent that it is based on a credible threat to intervene militarily to
protect Taiwan—could actually incentivize an attack on U.S. forces once Beijing has decided to act. The
more credible the American threat to intervene, the more likely China would be to hit U.S. forces in the
region in its opening salvo. But if China thought the United States might stay out of the conflict, it would
decline to attack U.S. forces in the region, since doing so would inevitably bring the United States into
the war.
Taiwan war is definite – assumes possibilities of economic isolationism
Mastro 21 – Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford
University and a Senior Nonresident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. (Oriana Skylar,
July/August 2021, "The Taiwan Temptation," Foreign Affairs,
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2021-06-03/china-taiwan-war-temptation//KH
WISHFUL THINKING
What might dissuade Xi from pursuing armed unification, if not U.S. military might? Most
Western analysts believe that Xi’s
devotion to his signature plan to achieve the “Chinese dream” of “national rejuvenation,” which
requires him to maintain economic growth and improve China’s international standing, will deter him
from using military force and risking derailing his agenda. They argue that the economic costs of a military
campaign against Taiwan would be too high, that China would be left completely isolated internationally, and that Chinese
occupation of the island would tie up Beijing for decades to come.
But these arguments
about the cost of armed unification are based more on American projections and
wishful thinking than on fact. A protracted, high-intensity conflict would indeed be costly for China, but
Chinese war planners have set out to avoid this scenario; China is unlikely to attack Taiwan unless it is confident that it can
achieve a quick victory, ideally before the United States can even respond.
Even if China found itself in a protracted war with the United States, however, Chinese
leaders may believe they have social
and economic advantages that would enable them to outlast the Americans. They see the Chinese
people as more willing to make sacrifices for the cause of Taiwan than the American people. Some argue,
too, that China’s large domestic market makes it less reliant on international trade than many other
countries. (The more China economically decouples from the United States and the closer it gets to technological self-sufficiency, the
greater this advantage will be.) Chinese leaders could also take comfort in their ability to quickly transition to an
industrial wartime footing. The United States has no such ability to rapidly produce military equipment.
International isolation and coordinated punishment of Beijing might seem like a greater threat to Xi’s great Chinese experiment. Eight of China’s
top ten trading partners are democracies, and nearly 60 percent of China’s exports go to the United States and its allies. If these countries
responded to a Chinese assault on Taiwan by severing trade ties with China, the economic costs could threaten the developmental components
of Xi’s rejuvenation plan.
Once China has the military capabilities to solve its Taiwan problem, Xi could find it politically untenable
not to do so.
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But Chinese
leaders have good reason to suspect that international isolation and opprobrium would be
relatively mild. When China began to cultivate strategic partnerships in the mid-1990s, it required other
countries and organizations, including the European Union, to sign long-term agreements to prioritize
these relationships and proactively manage any tensions or disruptions. All these agreements mention trade,
investment, economic cooperation, and working together in the United Nations. Most include provisions in support of Beijing’s position on
Taiwan. (Since 1996, China has convinced more than a dozen countries to switch their diplomatic recognition to Beijing, leaving Taiwan with
only 15 remaining allies.) In other words, many
of China’s most important trading partners have already sent a
strong signal that they will not let Taiwan derail their relationships with Beijing.
Whether compelling airlines to take Taiwan off their maps or pressuring Paramount Pictures to remove the Taiwanese flag from the Top Gun
hero Maverick’s jacket, China
has largely succeeded in convincing many countries that Taiwan is an internal
matter that they should stay out of. Australia has been cautious about expanding its military cooperation
with the United States and reluctant even to consider joint contingency planning over Taiwan (although the
tide seems to be shifting in Canberra). Opinion polls show that most Europeans value their economic ties with China and
the United States roughly the same and don’t want to be caught in the middle. Southeast Asia feels
similarly, with polls showing that the majority of policymakers and thought leaders from member states of the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations believe the best approach to U.S.-Chinese sparring is for the association to “enhance its own resilience and unity to fend off their
pressures.” One South
Korean official put it more memorably in an interview with The Atlantic, comparing the need to pick
sides in the U.S.-Chinese dispute to “asking a child whether you like your dad or your mom.” Such attitudes
suggest that the United States would struggle to convince its allies to isolate China. And if the international reaction to Beijing’s crackdowns in
Hong Kong and Xinjiang is any indication, the most China can expect after an invasion of Taiwan are some symbolic sanctions and words of
criticism.
The risk that a bloody insurgency in Taiwan will drag on for years and drain Beijing of resources is no more of a deterrent—and the idea that it
would be says more about the United States’ scars from Afghanistan and Iraq than about likely scenarios for Taiwan. The PLA’s military
textbooks assume the need for a significant campaign to consolidate power after its troops have landed and broken through Taiwan’s coastal
defenses, but they do not express much concern about it. This may be because although the PLA has not fought a war since 1979, China has
ample experience with internal repression and dedicates more resources to that mission than to its military. The People’s Armed Police boasts
at least 1.5 million members, whose primary mission is suppressing opposition. Compared with
the military task of invading
and seizing Taiwan in the first place, occupying it probably looks like a piece of cake.
For all these reasons, Xi may
believe he can regain control of Taiwan without jeopardizing his Chinese dream. It
is telling that in the flood of commentary on Taiwan that has come out of China in recent months, few
articles have mentioned the costs of war or the potential reaction from the international community. As
one retired high-level military officer explained to me recently, China’s main concern isn’t the costs; it’s sovereignty.
Chinese leaders will always fight for what is theirs. And if China defeats the United States along the way, it will become the
new dominant power in the Asia-Pacific. The prospects are tantalizing. The worst-case scenario, moreover, is that the United States reacts more
quickly and effectively than expected, forcing China to declare victory after limited gains and go home. Beijing would live to capture Taiwan
another day.
Taiwan – half cut because I am not sure what its use is
Green and Talmadge – *Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Cincinnati;
**Associate Professor of Security Studies at the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown
University. (Brendan Rittenhouse* and Caitlin**, July/August 2022, "The Consequences of Conquest,"
Foreign Affairs, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2022-06-16/consequences-conquesttaiwan-)//KH
Of all the intractable issues that could spark a hot war between the United States and China, Taiwan is
at the very top of the list. And the potential geopolitical consequences of such a war would be
profound. Taiwan—“an unsinkable aircraft carrier and submarine tender,” as U.S. Army General Douglas
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MacArthur once described it—has important, often underappreciated military value as a gateway to the
Philippine Sea, a vital theater for defending Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea from possible
Chinese coercion or attack. There is no guarantee that China would win a war for the island—or that
such a conflict wouldn’t drag on for years and weaken China. But if Beijing gained control of Taiwan and
based military assets there, China’s military position would improve markedly.
Beijing’s ocean surveillance assets and submarines, in particular, could make control of Taiwan a
substantial boon to Chinese military power. Even without any major technological or military leaps,
possession of the island would improve China’s ability to impede U.S. naval and air operations in the
Philippine Sea and thereby limit the United States’ ability to defend its Asian allies. And if, in the future,
Beijing were to develop a large fleet of quiet nuclear attack submarines and ballistic missile submarines,
basing them on Taiwan would enable China to threaten Northeast Asian shipping lanes and strengthen
its sea-based nuclear forces.
Clearly, the island’s military value bolsters the argument for keeping Taiwan out of China’s grasp. The
strength of that case, however, depends on several factors, including whether one assumes that China
would pursue additional territorial expansion after occupying Taiwan and make the long-term military
and technological investments needed to take full advantage of the island. It also depends on the
broader course of U.S. China policy. Washington could remain committed to its current approach of
containing the expansion of Chinese power through a combination of political commitments to U.S.
partners and allies in Asia and a significant forward military presence. Or it might adopt a more flexible
policy that retains commitments only to core treaty allies and reduces forward deployed forces. Or it
might reduce all such commitments as part of a more restrained approach. Regardless of which of these
three strategies the United States pursues, however, Chinese control of Taiwan would limit the U.S.
military’s ability to operate in the Pacific and would potentially threaten U.S. interests there.
But the issue is not just that Taiwan’s tremendous military value poses problems for any U.S. grand
strategy. It is that no matter what Washington does—whether it attempts to keep Taiwan out of
Chinese hands or not—it will be forced to run risks and incur costs in its standoff with Beijing. As the
place where all the dilemmas of U.S. policy toward China collide, Taiwan presents one of the toughest
and most dangerous problems in the world. Simply put, Washington has few good options there and a
great many bad ones that could court calamity.
TAIWAN IN THE BALANCE
A Chinese assault on Taiwan could shift the military balance of power in Asia in any number of ways. If
China were to take the island swiftly and easily, many of its military assets geared toward a Taiwan
campaign might be freed up to pursue other military objectives. China might also be able to assimilate
Taiwan’s strategic resources, such as its military equipment, personnel, and semiconductor industry, all
of which would bolster Beijing’s military power. But if China were to find itself bogged down in a
prolonged conquest or occupation of Taiwan, the attempt at forced unification might become a
significant drag on Beijing’s might.
Any campaign that delivers Taiwan to China, however, would allow Beijing to base important military
hardware there—in particular, underwater surveillance devices and submarines, along with associated
air and coastal defense assets. Stationed in Taiwan, these assets would do more than simply extend
China’s reach eastward by the length of the Taiwan Strait, as would be the case if China based missiles,
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aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles, or other weapons systems on the island. Underwater surveillance
and submarines, by contrast, would improve Beijing’s ability to impede U.S. operations in the Philippine
Sea, an area that would be of vital importance in many possible future conflict scenarios involving China.
The most likely scenarios revolve around the United States defending its allies along the so-called first
island chain off the Asian mainland, which starts north of Japan and runs southwest through Taiwan and
the Philippines before curling up toward Vietnam. For example, U.S. naval operations in these waters
would be essential to protecting Japan against potential Chinese threats in the East China Sea and at the
southern end of the Ryukyu Islands. Such U.S. operations would also be important in most scenarios for
defending the Philippines, and for any scenario that might lead to U.S. strikes on the Chinese mainland,
such as a major conflagration on the Korean Peninsula. U.S. naval operations in the Philippine Sea will
become even more important as China’s growing missile capabilities render land-based aircraft and their
regional bases increasingly vulnerable, forcing the United States to rely more heavily on aircraft and
missiles launched from ships.
If a war in the Pacific were to break out today, China’s ability to conduct effective over-the-horizon
attacks—that is, attacks targeting U.S. ships at distances that exceed the line of sight to the horizon—
would be more limited than commonly supposed. China might be able to target forward-deployed U.S.
aircraft carriers and other ships in a first strike that commences a war. But once a conflict is underway,
China’s best surveillance assets—large radars located on the mainland that allow China to “see” over the
horizon—are likely to be quickly destroyed. The same is true of Chinese surveillance aircraft or ships in
the vicinity of U.S. naval forces.
Chinese satellites would be unlikely to make up for these losses. Using techniques the United States
honed during the Cold War, U.S. naval forces would probably be able to control their own radar and
communications signatures and thereby avoid detection by Chinese satellites that listen for electronic
emissions. Without intelligence from these specialized signal-collecting assets, China’s imaging satellites
would be left to randomly search vast swaths of ocean for U.S. forces. Under these conditions, U.S.
forces operating in the Philippine Sea would face real but tolerable risks of long-range attacks, and U.S.
leaders probably would not feel immediate pressure to escalate the conflict by attacking Chinese
satellites.
If China were to wrest control of Taiwan, however, the situation would look quite different. China could
place underwater microphones called hydrophones in the waters off the island’s east coast, which are
much deeper than the waters Beijing currently controls inside the first island chain. Placed at the
appropriate depth, these specialized sensors could listen outward and detect the low-frequency sounds
of U.S. surface ships thousands of miles away, enabling China to more precisely locate them with
satellites and target them with missiles. (U.S. submarines are too quiet for these hydrophones to
detect.) Such capabilities could force the United States to restrict its surface ships to areas outside the
range of the hydrophones—or else carry out risky and escalatory attacks on Chinese satellites. Neither
of these options is appealing.
Washington has few good options on Taiwan and a great many bad ones that could court calamity.
Chinese hydrophones off Taiwan would be difficult for the United States to destroy. Only highly
specialized submarines or unmanned underwater vehicles could disable them, and China would be able
to defend them with a variety of means, including mines. Even if the United States did manage to
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damage China’s hydrophone cables, Chinese repair ships could mend them under the cover of air
defenses China could deploy on the island.
The best hope for disrupting Chinese hydrophone surveillance would be to attack the vulnerable
processing stations where the data comes ashore via fiber-optic cables. But those stations could prove
hard to find. The cables can be buried on land as well as under the sea, and nothing distinguishes the
buildings where data processing is done from similar nondescript military buildings. The range of
possible U.S. targets could include hundreds of individual structures inside multiple well-defended
military locations across Taiwan.
Control of Taiwan would do more than enhance Chinese ocean surveillance capabilities, however. It
would also give China an advantage in submarine warfare. With Taiwan in friendly hands, the United
States can defend against Chinese attack submarines by placing underwater sensors in key locations to
pick up the sounds the submarines emit. The United States likely deploys such upward-facing
hydrophones—for listening at shorter distances—along the bottom of narrow chokepoints at the
entrances to the Philippine Sea, including in the gaps between the Philippines, the Ryukyu Islands, and
Taiwan. At such close ranges, these instruments can briefly detect even the quietest submarines,
allowing U.S. air and surface assets to trail them. During a crisis, that could prevent Chinese submarines
from getting a “free shot” at U.S. ships in the early stages of a war, when forward-deployed U.S. naval
assets would be at their most vulnerable.
If China were to gain control of Taiwan, however, it would be able to base submarines and supporting
air and coastal defenses on the island. Chinese submarines would then be able to slip from their pens in
Taiwan’s eastern deep-water ports directly into the Philippine Sea, bypassing the chokepoints where
U.S. hydrophones would be listening. Chinese defenses on Taiwan would also prevent the United States
and its allies from using their best tools for trailing submarines—maritime patrol aircraft and helicopterequipped ships—near the island, making it much easier for Chinese submarines to strike first in a crisis
and reducing their attrition rate in a war. Control of Taiwan would have the added advantage of
reducing the distance between Chinese submarine bases and their patrol areas from an average of 670
nautical miles to zero, enabling China to operate more submarines at any given time and carry out more
attacks against U.S. forces. Chinese submarines could also make use of the more precise targeting data
collected by hydrophones and satellites, dramatically improving their effectiveness against U.S. surface
ships.
UNDER THE SEA
Over time, unification with Taiwan could offer China even greater military advantages if it were to invest
in a fleet of much quieter advanced nuclear attack and ballistic missile submarines. Operated from
Taiwan’s east coast, these submarines would strengthen China’s nuclear deterrent and allow it to
threaten Northeast Asian shipping and naval routes in the event of a war.
Currently, China’s submarine force is poorly equipped for a campaign against the oil and maritime trade
of U.S. allies. Global shipping has traditionally proved resilient in the face of such threats because it is
possible to reroute vessels outside the range of hostile forces. Even the closure of the Suez Canal
between 1967 and 1975 did not paralyze global trade, since ships were instead able to go around the
Cape of Good Hope, albeit at some additional cost. This resiliency means that Beijing would have to
target shipping routes as they migrated north or west across the Pacific Ocean, likely near ports in
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Northeast Asia. But most of China’s current attack submarines are low-endurance diesel-electric boats
that would struggle to operate at such distances, while its few longer-endurance nuclear-powered
submarines are noisy and thus vulnerable to detection by U.S. outward-facing hydrophones that could
be deployed along the so-called second island chain, which stretches southeast from Japan through the
Northern Mariana Islands and past Guam.
Similarly, China’s current crop of ballistic missile submarines do little to strengthen China’s nuclear
deterrent. The ballistic missiles they carry can at best target Alaska and the northwest corner of the
United States when launched within the first island chain. And because the submarines are vulnerable to
detection, they would struggle to reach open ocean areas where they could threaten the rest of the
United States.
Seizing Taiwan would offer Beijing the kind of military option that previous great powers found very
useful.
Even a future Chinese fleet of much quieter advanced nuclear attack or ballistic missile submarines
capable of evading outward-facing hydrophones along the second island chain would still have to pass
over U.S. upward-facing hydrophones nestled at the exits to the first island chain. These barriers would
enable the United States to impose substantial losses on Chinese advanced nuclear attack submarines
going to and from Northeast Asian shipping lanes and greatly impede the missions of Chinese ballistic
missile submarines, of which there would almost certainly be fewer.
But if it were to acquire Taiwan, China would be able to avoid U.S. hydrophones along the first island
chain, unlocking the military potential of quieter submarines. These vessels would have direct access to
the Philippine Sea and the protection of Chinese air and coastal defenses, which would keep trailing U.S.
ships and aircraft at bay. A fleet of quiet nuclear attack submarines deployed from Taiwan would also
have the endurance for a campaign against Northeast Asian shipping lanes. And a fleet of quiet ballistic
missile submarines with access to the open ocean would enable China to more credibly threaten the
continental United States with a sea-launched nuclear attack.
Of course, it remains to be seen whether China can master more advanced quieting techniques or solve
a number of problems that have plagued its nuclear-powered submarines. And the importance of the
anti-shipping and sea-based nuclear capabilities is open for debate, since their relative impact will
depend on what other capabilities China does or doesn’t develop and on what strategic goals China
pursues in the future. Still, the behavior of past great powers is instructive. Nazi Germany and the Soviet
Union both invested heavily in attack submarines, and the latter made a similar investment in ballistic
missile submarines. The democratic adversaries of those countries felt deeply threatened by these
undersea capabilities and mounted enormous efforts to neutralize them. A Chinese seizure of Taiwan
would thus offer Beijing the kind of military option that previous great powers found very useful.
NO GOOD OPTIONS
A fuller understanding of Taiwan’s military value clearly bolsters the argument in favor of keeping the
island in friendly hands. Yet just how decisive that argument should be depends, in part, on what overall
strategy the United States pursues in Asia. And whatever approach Washington adopts, it will have to
contend with challenges and dilemmas stemming from the military advantages that Taiwan has the
potential to confer on whoever controls it.
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If the United States maintains its current strategy of containing China, retaining its network of alliances
and forward military presence in Asia, defending Taiwan could be extremely costly. After all, the island’s
military value gives China a strong motive for seeking unification, beyond the nationalist impulses most
commonly cited. Deterring Beijing would therefore probably require abandoning the long-standing U.S.
policy of strategic ambiguity about whether Washington would come to the island’s defense in favor of
a crystal-clear commitment of military support.
But ending strategic ambiguity could provoke the very crisis the policy is designed to prevent. It would
almost certainly heighten pressures for an arms race between the United States and China in
anticipation of a conflict, intensifying the already dangerous competition between the two powers. And
even if a policy of strategic clarity were successful in deterring a Chinese attempt to take Taiwan, it
would likely spur China to compensate for its military disadvantages in some other way, further
heightening tensions.
Alternatively, the United States might pursue a more flexible security perimeter that eliminates its
commitment to Taiwan while still retaining its treaty alliances and some forward-deployed military
forces in Asia. Such an approach would reduce the chance of a conflict over Taiwan, but it would carry
other military costs, again owing to the island’s military value. U.S. forces would need to conduct their
missions in an arena made much more dangerous by Chinese submarines and hydrophones deployed off
the east coast of Taiwan. As a result, the United States might need to develop decoys to deceive Chinese
sensors, devise ways to operate outside their normal range, or prepare to cut the cables that connect
these sensors to onshore processing centers in the event of war. Washington would almost certainly
want to ramp up its efforts to disrupt Chinese satellites.
Should the United States take this approach, reassuring U.S. allies would become a much more arduous
task. Precisely because control of Taiwan would grant Beijing significant military advantages, Japan, the
Philippines, and South Korea would likely demand strong demonstrations of a continuing U.S.
commitment. Japan, in particular, would be inclined to worry that a diminished U.S. ability to operate on
the surface of the Philippine Sea would translate into enhanced Chinese coercion or attack capability,
especially given the proximity of Japan’s southernmost islands to Taiwan.
Over the longer term, U.S. allies in the region would also likely fear the growing Chinese threat to
shipping routes and worry that a stronger sea-based Chinese nuclear deterrent would reduce the
credibility of U.S. commitments to defend them from attack. Anticipation of these dangers would almost
certainly drive U.S. allies to seek greater reassurance from the United States in the form of tighter
defense pacts, additional military aid, and more visible U.S. force deployments in the region, including of
nuclear forces on or near allies’ territory and perhaps collaborating with their governments on nuclear
planning. East Asia could come to look much like Europe did in the later stages of the Cold War, with
U.S. allies demanding demonstrations of their U.S. patron’s commitment in the face of doubts about the
military balance of power. If the Cold War is any guide, such steps could themselves heighten the risks of
nuclear escalation in a crisis or a war.
Finally, the United States might pursue a strategy that ends its commitment to Taiwan and also reduces
its military presence in Asia and other alliance commitments in the region. Such a policy might limit
direct U.S. military support to the defense of Japan or even wind down all U.S. commitments in East
Asia. But even in this case, Taiwan’s potential military value to China would still have the potential to
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create dangerous regional dynamics. Worried that some of its islands might be next, Japan might fight to
defend Taiwan, even if the United States did not. The result might be a major-power war in Asia that
could draw in the United States, willingly or not. Such a war would be devastating. Yet upsetting the
current delicate equilibrium by ceding this militarily valuable island could make such a war more likely,
reinforcing a core argument in favor of current U.S. grand strategy: that U.S. alliance commitments and
forward military presence exert a deterring and constraining effect on conflict in the region.
Ultimately, however, Taiwan’s unique military value poses problems for all three U.S. grand strategies.
Whether the United States solidifies its commitment to Taiwan and its allies in Asia or walks them back,
in full or in part, the island’s potential to alter the region’s military balance will force Washington to
confront difficult tradeoffs, ceding military maneuverability in the region or else risking an arms race or
even an open conflict with China. Such is the wicked nature of the problem posed by Taiwan, which sits
at the nexus of U.S.-Chinese relations, geopolitics, and the military balance in Asia. Regardless of what
grand strategy Washington pursues, the island’s military value will present some hazard or exact some
price.
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AT: Thucydides Trap---Turn
Turn---maintaining US heg is key to prevent the Thucydides trap
Nye 20, University Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus, former Dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School
of Government, B.A. cum laude from Princeton, Rhodes Scholarship winner to Oxford, Ph.D. in political
science from Harvard, former US Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Chair
of the National Intelligence Council and a Deputy Under-Secretary of State, fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, fellow of the British Academy, fellow of the American Academy of
Diplomacy, Foreign Policy’s 2011 top 100 Global Thinkers, recipient of the Order of the Rising Sun
award, 3-19-2020, (Joseph, "Power and Interdependence with China The Washington Quarterly, 43:1, 721, https://doi.org/10.1080/0163660X.2020.1734303, kav)
A Thucydides Trap as a Strategic Challenge?
Failure of the United States to successfully cope with the rise of China could have disastrous
consequences for the United States and the rest of the world. Ever since the Peloponnesian war, realists
have warned that the interaction of an established power and a rising power could lead to
miscalculations that could disrupt this century, much as the last century was devastated in 1914.
Graham Allison has recently labelled this strategic problem a “Thucydides Trap” and asserted that it has
occurred in 12 out of 16 cases of hegemonic transition in recent history.14 While his numbers have been contested, the
strategic problem has long been recognized.15
To avoid such an outcome, a
successful US strategy on China must neither over nor underestimate Chinese power.
Underestimation breeds complacency, while overestimation creates fear—either of which can lead to miscalculation. Contrary to current conventional wisdom,
China has not yet replaced the United States as the world’s largest economy. Measured in purchasing power parity, the Chinese economy became larger than the
American economy in 2014, but purchasing power parity is an economist’s device for comparing estimates of welfare, not for measuring power. Current exchange
rates are a better measure of power, and they show that China is about two-thirds the size of the United States. Many economists do expect China to surpass the
United States someday as the world’s largest economy (measured as GDP in dollars), but the estimated date varies from 2030 to midcentury depending on what
one assumes about the rates of Chinese and American growth. Moreover, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a crude measure of power. Including per capita income
gives a better index of the sophistication of an economy, and US per capita income is many times that of China’s. By any measure, however, the gravitational pull of
China’s economy is increasing, and China is rising.
A successful US strategy on China must neither over nor underestimate Chinese power.
Thucydides famously attributed the Peloponnesian war to two causes: the rise of a new power and the
fear that an established power creates. Most analysts focus on the first half of his statement, but the second is more within our control. It is
unlikely that US foreign policy can prevent the rise of China’s economy, but the United States can avoid
exaggerated fears that could create a new cold or hot war if it uses contextual intelligence well. Even if
China someday passes the United States in total economic size, there are other measures of geopolitical
power. China is well behind the United States on military and soft power indices. US military expenditure is several
times that of China’s. While Chinese military capabilities have been increasing in recent years and pose new challenges to US forces, analysts who look carefully at
the military balance conclude that China is not a global peer and will not be able to exclude the United States from the Western Pacific so long as the United States
maintains its alliance and bases in Japan. And opinion polls as well as a recent index published by Portland, a London consultancy, ranked China in twenty-sixth place
in soft power, while the United States ranked near the top.16 Mao’s Communism had a far greater transnational soft power appeal in the 1960s than “Xi Jinping
thought” does today.
On the other hand, China’s huge economic scale matters. The United States was once the world’s largest trading nation and largest bilateral lender—in 2001, more
than 80 percent of countries traded more with the United States than with China. By 2018, only 30 percent reported the same, with 128 out of 190 countries trading
more with China than with the United States.17 China plans to lend more than a trillion dollars for infrastructure projects with its “Belt and Road” initiative over the
next decade, while the United States has cut back aid. China’s
economic success story enhances its soft power, and
government control of access to its large market provides hard-power leverage. Moreover, China’s
authoritarian politics and mercantilist practices make its economic power readily usable by the
government. China will gain economic power from the sheer size of its market as well as its overseas
investments and development assistance. Of the seven giant global companies in the age of Artificial Intelligence (Google, Facebook,
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Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent), nearly half are Chinese. With its large population and data
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resources that are becoming the
“new oil” of world politics, China is poised to become the Saudi Arabia of big data.18
The United States has some long-term power advantages that will persist regardless of current Chinese
actions. One is geography. The United States is surrounded by oceans and neighbors that are likely to
remain friendly; China has borders with fourteen countries and has territorial disputes with India, Japan,
and Vietnam that set limits on its soft power. Energy is another American advantage. A decade ago, the
United States seemed hopelessly dependent on imported energy. Now, the shale revolution has
transformed it from an energy importer to exporter, and North America may be self-sufficient in the
coming decade.19 At the same time, China is becoming more dependent on energy imports, and much
of the oil it imports is transported through the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, where the United
States and others maintain a significant naval presence. Eliminating this vulnerability will take decades.
As we have seen, the United States enjoys financial power derived from its large transnational financial
institutions. Although the dollar cannot remain pre-eminent forever, the yuan is unlikely to displace the
dollar as a reserve currency in the near term.
The United States also has demographic strengths. It is the only major developed country that is
currently projected to hold its place (third) in the demographic ranking of countries. While the rate of US population
growth has slowed in recent years, it is not shrinking in population as will happen to Russia, Europe, and Japan. Seven of the world’s fifteen largest economies will
face a shrinking workforce over the next decade and a half, but the US workforce is likely to increase by 5 percent while China’s will decline by 9 percent. China will
soon lose its first place population rank to India, and its working age population already peaked in 2015.20 Chinese citizens sometimes say they worry about
“growing old before growing rich.”
The United States has been at the forefront in the development of key technologies (bio, nano, and
information) that are central to this century’s economic growth, and US research universities dominate
higher education. In a 2019 ranking by Shanghai Jiaotong University, eighteen of the top twenty-five global universities were in the United States; none
were in China.21 At the same time, China is investing heavily in research and development and competes well in some fields now, including artificial intelligence.22
Given the importance of machine learning as a general-purpose technology that affects many domains, China’s gains in AI are of particular significance. Chinese
technological progress is no longer based solely on imitation. However, a
successful US response to China’s technological
challenge will depend more upon improvements at home than upon external sanctions. US complacency
is always a danger, but so is lack of confidence and exaggerated fears that lead to overreaction. In the view of
John Deutch, former provost of MIT, if the United States attains its innovation potential, “China’s great leap forward will likely at best be a few steps toward closing
the innovation leadership gap that the United States currently enjoys.”23
In short, the
United States holds high cards in its poker hand, but hysteria could cause it to play its cards
ineffectively. When the Clinton administration published its East Asian Strategy Report in 1995, it decided to reaffirm the US-Japan alliance well before
seeking to engage China in the WTO. The US approach to the rise of China was to engage but hedge its bets first. Discarding its high cards of alliances and
international institutions would be a serious mistake. If the United States maintains its alliance with Japan, China cannot push beyond the first island chain because
Japan is a major part of that chain. Another possible mistake would be to try to cut off all immigration. When asked why he did not think China would pass the
United States in total power any time soon, former Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew cited the
ability of the United States to draw
upon the talents of the whole world and recombine them in diversity and creativity that was not
possible for China’s ethnic Han nationalism. If the United States were to discard its high cards of external
alliances and domestic openness, Lee could be wrong.24
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Russia
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 Russia Makes GPC Inevitable
Great Power Competition now due to Russian aggression; the West must endorse real
politic and deterrence to manage
Charles A. Kupchan, 9-2, 22, National Interest, The War in Ukraine and the Return of
Realpolitik, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/war-ukraine-and-return-realpolitik204515?page=0%2C2
GREAT POWER competition is back. The transatlantic alliance must revise its grand strategy
accordingly and downsize its idealist ambitions in favor of pragmatic realism. Throughout the crisis over
Ukraine, the West’s ideological North Star—the promotion of democracy—guided statecraft, with NATO
supporting and encouraging Kyiv’s aspirations to join the Western alliance. But Russian president
Vladimir Putin, unwilling to let Ukraine leave the Russian fold and emerge as a democracy anchored in
the West, launched a war to put Kyiv back under Moscow’s sway. Putin owns this war, with the death
and destruction that it has produced.
The West’s reaction—arming Ukraine, sanctioning Russia, bolstering NATO‘s eastern flank while
extending membership to Finland and Sweden—is fully justified. Yet legitimate outrage over Russia’s
pummeling of Ukraine threatens to obscure the need to draw sober lessons from the war. Perhaps the
most important is that the world is reverting to the rules of power politics, requiring that ideological
ambition more regularly yield to strategic realities in order to ensure that the West’s purposes remain in
sync with its means. This adjustment means that the West will need to focus more on defending,
instead of expanding, the democratic community. To be sure, by combining its values with its power,
the West has bent the arc of history away from the practice of realpolitik and toward greater freedom,
human dignity, and peace. But the transatlantic community must now temper its idealist ambitions
with greater strategic pragmatism to successfully navigate a world that has just shifted back toward
Hobbesian realism.
The unrulier and more competitive world that is taking shape will naturally bolster transatlantic unity—
just as the threat posed by the Soviet Union contributed to NATO’s cohesion during the Cold War. Yet
the political ills that have been plaguing the West have not dissipated; Russia’s invasion, along with the
prospect of a new cold war, is not enough to cure the United States and Europe of illiberalism and
political dysfunction. In fact, the war in Ukraine has produced economic spillover effects that could
further weaken political centrism. Accordingly, America and Europe face a double challenge: they must
continue getting their own houses in order even while they stand together to resist Russia’s war of
aggression against Ukraine.
THIS TENSION between lofty ambition and strategic reality is nothing new, particularly for the United
States. Since the earliest days of the republic, Americans have understood the purpose of their power to
entail not only security, but also the spread of liberal democracy at home and abroad. As Thomas Paine
wrote in 1776, “we have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the
present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now.”
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Paine was surely engaging in hyperbole, but successive generations of Americans have taken the
nation’s exceptionalist calling to heart—with quite impressive results. Through the power of its example
as well as its many exertions abroad—including World War I, World War II, and the Cold War—the
United States has succeeded in expanding the footprint of liberal democracy. At the time of the nation’s
founding, republics were far and few between. Today, more than half of the world’s countries are full or
partial democracies. The United States played a leading role in effecting this transformation.
But these ideological aspirations have at times fueled overreach, producing outcomes that compromise
the nation’s idealist ambitions. The founding generation was determined to build an extended republic
that would stretch all the way to the Pacific coast—a goal that the nation achieved by the middle of the
nineteenth century. Much of the United States’ westward expansion took place under the exalted
banner of Manifest Destiny, which provided ideological justification for expanding the frontier—but also
moral cover for trampling on Native Americans and launching a war of choice against Mexico that led to
U.S. annexation of roughly half of Mexican territory. The Mexican-American War and the bout of
expansion that accompanied it came back to haunt the United States by intensifying the sectional rift
over slavery and pushing the North and South toward civil war.
President William McKinley in 1898 embarked on a war to expel Spain from Cuba—one of its few
remaining colonies in the hemisphere—insisting that Americans had to act “in the cause of humanity.”
Yet victory in the Spanish-American War turned the United States itself into an imperial power, as it
asserted control over Spanish possessions in the Caribbean and Pacific, including the Philippines. “There
was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and
Christianize them,” McKinley insisted as U.S. forces occupied the Philippines. The resulting insurgency
led to the death of some 4,000 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Filipino fighters and civilians.
The United States held on to the Philippines until 1946.
into World War I, President Woodrow Wilson declared before Congress that “the world must be made
safe for democracy.” After U.S. forces helped bring the war to a close, he played a leading role in
negotiations over the League of Nations, a global body that was to preserve peace through collective
action, dispute resolution, and disarmament. But such idealist ambitions proved too much even for
Americans. The Senate shot down U.S. membership in the League; Wilson’s ideological overreach
cleared the way for the stubborn isolationism of the interwar era.
Just before launching the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush affirmed that “we
believe the Iraqi people are deserving and capable of human liberty ... they can set an example to all the
Middle East of a vital and peaceful and self-governing nation.” The result of the war in Iraq was far
different: region-wide suffering and sectarian conflict poised to continue for generations. As for
Afghanistan, Bush proclaimed in 2004: “Now the country is changing. There’s women’s rights. There’s
equality under the law. Young girls now go to school, many for the first time ever, thanks to the United
States and our coalition of liberators.” But two decades of exhaustive U.S. efforts to bring stability and
democracy to Afghanistan fell embarrassingly short, with the U.S. withdrawal last summer giving way to
Taliban rule and a humanitarian nightmare. Across these historical episodes, noble ambitions backfired
with dreadful consequences.
THE UKRAINE question has similarly exposed the inescapable tensions between lofty ambitions and
geopolitical realities. These tensions were, for the most part, in abeyance amid the bipolarity of the Cold
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War, when geopolitical expedience guided the U.S. strategy of containment. The Yalta agreement struck
by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin at the end of World War II was the
ultimate realist compromise, leaving much of Eastern Europe under Soviet domination. Roosevelt and
Churchill were wisely yielding principle to pragmatism by providing Soviet Russia with a buffer zone on
its western flank. Such strategic restraint paid off handsomely; it contributed to stability during the long
decades of the Cold War, buying time for a patient policy of containment that ultimately led to the fall of
the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the Soviet Union.
NATO’s eastward expansion then began in the 1990s, the era of unipolarity, when Washington was
confident that the triumph of American power and purpose would usher in the universalization of
democracy, capitalism, and a liberal, rules-based international order. The Clinton administration
embraced a grand strategy of “democratic enlargement”—a key plank of which was opening NATO’s
doors to Europe’s new democracies and formally welcoming into the West the states of the defunct and
discredited Warsaw Pact.
NATO’s eastward enlargement has fostered both moral and strategic gains. The West capitalized on the
opportunity to reverse Yalta; NATO members could reassert their moral authority by integrating
Europe’s newest democracies. The allure of meeting the political standards for entry into the Western
alliance helped guide through democratic transitions more than a dozen countries that long suffered
under communist rule. Opening NATO’s doors also provided the alliance strategic depth and increased
aggregate military strength. The defense guarantee that comes with membership serves as a strong
deterrent to Russian adventurism—a prized commodity given Moscow’s renewed appetite for invading
its neighbors. Indeed, Finland and Sweden have left behind decades of neutrality in order to avail
themselves of that guarantee.
But despite these principled and practical benefits, the enlargement of NATO also came with a
significant strategic downside: it laid the foundation for a post-Cold War security order that excluded
Russia while bringing the world’s most formidable military alliance ever closer to its borders. It was
precisely for this reason that the Clinton administration initially launched the Partnership for Peace—a
security framework that enabled all European states to cooperate with NATO without drawing new
dividing lines. But that alternative fell by the wayside early in January 1994, when President Bill Clinton
declared in Prague that “the question is no longer whether NATO will take on new members but when
and how.” The first wave of expansion extended membership to the Czech Republic, Hungary, and
Poland in 1999, followed since by four additional bouts of enlargement. So far, NATO has admitted
fifteen countries (encompassing some 100 million people) that were formerly in Russia’s sphere of
influence.
The Kremlin objected to NATO enlargement from the get-go. As early as 1993, Russian president Boris
Yeltsin warned that Russians across the political spectrum “would no doubt perceive this as a sort of
neo-isolation of our country in diametric opposition to its natural admission into Euro-Atlantic space.” In
a face-to-face meeting with President Clinton in 1995, Yeltsin was more direct: I see nothing but
humiliation for Russia if you proceed … Why do you want to do this? We need a new structure for PanEuropean security, not old ones! ... For me to agree to the borders of NATO expanding towards those of
Russia – that would constitute a betrayal on my part of the Russian people.
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Moscow’s discomfort only grew when Putin took the helm in 1999 and reversed Yeltsin’s flirtation with
a more liberal brand of governance. At the Munich Security Conference in 2007, Putin declared that
NATO enlargement “represents a serious provocation” and asked, “Why is it necessary to put military
infrastructure on our borders during this expansion?”
Russia soon began concrete efforts to stop further enlargement. In 2008, not long after NATO pledged
that Georgia and Ukraine “will become members of NATO,” Russia intervened in Georgia. In 2012,
Moscow allegedly attempted to organize a coup in Montenegro to block its accession to the alliance,
and later worked to prevent North Macedonia’s membership. These efforts in the Balkans were to no
avail; Montenegro joined the alliance in 2017 and North Macedonia followed suit in 2020. Now Putin
has invaded Ukraine, in part to block its pathway to NATO. In his February 24 address to the nation
justifying the beginning of the “special military operation,” Putin pointed to “the fundamental threats
which irresponsible Western politicians created for Russia ... I am referring to the eastward expansion of
NATO, which is moving its military infrastructure ever closer to the Russian border.”
The United States has largely dismissed Russia’s objections. While the Kremlin has been anxiously
watching NATO’s advance, Washington has viewed NATO’s eastward expansion primarily through the
benign lens of America’s exceptionalist calling. Enlarging the alliance has been about spreading
American values and removing geopolitical dividing lines rather than drawing new ones.
As he launched NATO’s open-door policy, President Clinton claimed that doing so would “erase the
artificial line in Europe drawn by Stalin at the end of World War II.” Madeleine Albright, his secretary of
state, affirmed that “NATO is a defensive alliance that ... does not regard any state as its adversary.” The
purpose of expanding the alliance, she explained, was to build a Europe “whole and free,” noting that
“NATO poses no danger to Russia.” That’s the line that Washington has taken ever since, including when
it came to Ukraine’s potential membership. As the crisis over Ukraine mounted, President Joe Biden
insisted that, “the United States and NATO are not a threat to Russia. Ukraine is not threatening Russia.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken agreed: “NATO itself is a defensive alliance ... And the idea that
Ukraine represents a threat to Russia or, for that matter, that NATO represents a threat to Russia is
profoundly wrong and misguided.” America’s allies have mostly been on the same page. Jens
Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary-general, affirmed during the run-up to Russia’s invasion that: “NATO is
not a threat to Russia.”
Yet Russia saw things quite differently—and not without reason. Geography and geopolitics matter;
major powers, regardless of their ideological bent, don’t like it when other major powers stray into their
neighborhoods. Russia has understandable and legitimate security concerns about NATO setting up shop
on the other side of its 1,000-mile-plus border with Ukraine. NATO may be a defensive alliance, but it
brings to bear aggregate military power that Russia understandably does not want parked near its
territory.
Indeed, Moscow’s protests have been, ironically, very much in line with America’s own statecraft, which
has long sought to keep other major powers away from its own borders. The United States spent much
of the nineteenth century ushering Britain, France, Russia, and Spain out of the Western Hemisphere.
Thereafter, Washington regularly turned to military intervention to hold sway in the Americas. The
exercise of hemispheric hegemony continued during the Cold War, with the United States determined to
box the Soviet Union and its ideological sympathizers out of Latin America. When Moscow deployed
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missiles to Cuba in 1962, the United States issued an ultimatum that brought the superpowers to the
brink of war. After Russia recently hinted that it might again deploy its military to Latin America, the
State Department spokesperson Ned Price responded: “If we do see any movement in that direction, we
will respond swiftly and decisively.” Given its own track record, Washington should have given greater
credence to Moscow’s objections to bringing Ukraine into NATO.
For almost three decades, NATO and Russia have been talking past each other. As Russian foreign
minister Sergey Lavrov quipped amid the flurry of diplomacy that preceded the Russian invasion, “we’re
having the conversation of a mute person with a deaf person. It’s as though we are hearing each other,
but not listening.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine makes clear that this disconnect between Russia and the West has exploded
into the open, finally doing so for a number of reasons. Moscow took the entry into NATO of a band of
countries stretching from the Baltics to the Balkans as a strategic setback and political insult. Ukraine, in
particular, looms much larger in the Russian imagination; in Putin’s own words, “Russians and Ukrainians
are one people. Kiev is the mother of Russian cities.” The 2019 split of the Orthodox church of Ukrainian
from its Russian counterpart was an especially bitter pill; the Ukrainian church had been subordinated to
the Moscow patriarch since 1686. Russia today is far more capable of pushing back than it was during
the early post-Cold War era, bolstered by its economic and military rebound and its tight partnership
with China.
Yet the Kremlin made several gross miscalculations in proceeding with its invasion of Ukraine. It vastly
underestimated the willingness and capability of Ukrainians to fight back, producing early Russian
setbacks on the battlefield. Moscow saw numerous sources of Western weakness—Brexit, the chaotic
withdrawal from Afghanistan, the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation, ongoing polarization, and populism—
leading to an underestimation of the strength and scope of the West’s response. In Putin’s mind, a
combination of Russian strength and Western frailty made it an opportune moment to throw down the
gauntlet in Ukraine. But Putin was wrong; the West has demonstrated remarkable steadiness as it has
armed Ukraine and imposed severe sanctions against Russia.
These miscalculations help shed light on why Putin chose to address his grievances through war rather
than diplomacy. Indeed, Putin had the opportunity to settle his objections to Ukraine’s membership in
NATO at the negotiating table. Last year, President Biden acknowledged that whether Ukraine joins the
alliance “remains to be seen.” Amid the flurry of diplomacy that preceded the Russian invasion,
President Emmanuel Macron of France floated the idea of “Finlandization” for Ukraine—effective
neutrality—and proposals for a formal moratorium on further enlargement circulated. Ukrainian
president Volodymyr Zelenskyy admitted that the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO may be “like a
dream.” His ambassador to the United Kingdom indicated that Kyiv wanted to be “flexible in trying to
find the best way out,” and that one option would be to drop its bid for NATO membership. The Kremlin
could have picked up these leads, but instead opted for war.
THE SAGA of NATO enlargement exposes the gap between the West’s ideological aspirations and
geopolitical realities that has been widening since the 1990s. During the heady decade after the end of
the Cold War, the United States and its allies were confident that the triumph of their power and
purpose cleared the way for the spread of democracy—an objective that the enlargement of NATO
would presumably help secure.
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But from early on, the Western foreign policy establishment allowed principle to obscure the
geopolitical downsides of NATO enlargement. Yes, NATO membership should be open to all countries
that qualify, and all nations should be able to exercise their sovereign right to choose their alignments as
they see fit. And, yes, Moscow’s decision to invade Ukraine was in part informed by fantasies of
restoring the geopolitical heft of the Soviet days, Putin’s paranoia about a “color revolution” arising in
Russia, and his delusions about unbreakable civilizational links between Russia and Ukraine.
Yet the West erred in continuing to dismiss Russia’s objections to NATO’s ongoing enlargement. In the
meantime, NATO’s open door policy encouraged countries in Eastern Europe to lean too far over their
strategic skis. While the allure of joining the alliance has encouraged aspirants to carry out the
democratic reforms needed to qualify for entry, the open door has also prompted prospective members
to engage in excessively risky behavior. In 2008, soon after NATO ignored Russian objections and
promised eventual membership to Georgia and Ukraine, Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili,
launched an offensive against pro-Russian separatists in South Ossetia with whom the country had been
sporadically fighting for years. Russia responded promptly by grabbing control of two chunks of
Georgia—South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Saakashvili thought the West had his back, but he miscalculated
and overreached.
In similar fashion, NATO overreached by encouraging Ukraine to beat a path toward the alliance. The
2014 Maidan Revolution toppled a pro-Moscow regime and put Ukraine on a westward course, resulting
in Russia’s intervention in Crimea and the Donbas. NATO’s open door beckoned, prompting Ukrainians
in 2019 to enshrine their NATO aspirations in their constitution—a move that set off new alarm bells in
the Kremlin. Given its proximity to Russia and the devastation caused by Moscow's further aggression,
Ukraine would have been better off playing it safe, quietly building a stable democracy while sticking
with the neutral status that it embraced when it exited the Soviet Union. Indeed, Ukraine’s potential
return to neutrality has figured prominently in sporadic talks between Kyiv and Moscow to end the war.
NATO has wisely avoided direct involvement in the fighting in order to avert war with Russia. But the
alliance’s unwillingness to militarily defend Ukraine has exposed a troubling disconnect between the
organization’s stated goal of making the country a member and its judgment that protecting Ukraine is
not worth the cost. In effect, the United States and its allies, even as they impose severe sanctions on
Russia and send arms to Ukraine, have revealed that they do not deem the defense of the country to be
a vital interest. But if that is the case, then why have NATO members wanted to extend to Ukraine a
security guarantee that would obligate them to go to war in its defense?
NATO should extend security guarantees to countries that are of intrinsic strategic importance to the
United States and its allies—it should not make countries strategically important by extending them
such guarantees. In a world that is rapidly reverting to the logic of power politics, in which adversaries
may regularly test U.S. commitments, NATO cannot afford to be profligate in handing out such
guarantees. Strategic prudence requires distinguishing critical interests from lesser ones, and conducting
statecraft accordingly.
STRATEGIC PRUDENCE also requires that the West prepare for the return of sustained militarized
rivalry with Russia. In light of the tight partnership that has emerged between Moscow and Beijing—
and China’s own geopolitical ambitions—the new Cold War that is taking shape may well pit the West
against a Sino-Russian bloc stretching from the Western Pacific to Eastern Europe. Like the Cold War, a
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world of rival blocs could mean economic and geopolitical division. The severe impact of the sanctions
imposed on Russia underscores the dark side of globalization, potentially driving home to both China
and Western democracies that economic interdependence entails quite considerable risk. China could
distance itself from global markets and financial systems, while the United States and Europe may
choose to expand the pace and scope of efforts to decouple from Chinese investment, technology,
and supply chains. The world may be entering a prolonged and costly era of de-globalization.
The return of a two-bloc world that plays by the rules of realpolitik means that the West will need to
dial back its efforts to expand the liberal order, instead returning to a strategy of patient containment
aimed at preserving geopolitical stability and avoiding great power war. A new strategic conservatism
should seek to establish stable balances of power and credible deterrence in the European and AsiaPacific theaters. The United States has a playbook for this world: the one that enabled it to prevail in the
first Cold War.
What Washington does not have a stratagem for is navigating geopolitical division in a world that is far
more interdependent than that of the Cold War. Even as it stands up to autocracies, the West will need
to work across ideological dividing lines in order to tackle global challenges, including arresting climate
change, preventing nuclear proliferation and pursuing arms control, overseeing international commerce,
governing the cybersphere, managing migration, and promoting global health. Strategic pragmatism will
need to temper ideological discord.
Washington also lacks a stratagem for operating in an era in which the West faces homegrown threats
to liberal democracy that are at least as potent as the external threats posed by Russia and China.
During the Cold War, the West was politically healthy; liberal democracies on both sides of the Atlantic
enjoyed ideological moderation and centrism, buttressed by broadly shared prosperity. A steady and
purposeful brand of U.S. grand strategy rested on a solid political foundation and enjoyed bipartisan
support.
But the West today is politically unhealthy, and illiberal populism is alive and well on both sides of the
Atlantic. In the United States, the bipartisan compact behind U.S. statecraft has collapsed—as has the
nation’s political center. Ideological moderation and centrism have given way to bitter polarization amid
prolonged economic insecurity and gaping inequality. The war in Ukraine has not helped matters;
Biden’s ambitious agenda for domestic renewal, already scaled back due to gridlock in Congress,
suffered further as a result of Washington’s focus on the conflict. And high rates of inflation, fueled in
part by the economic disruptions arising from the war, are stoking public discontent, likely costing
Democrats control of Congress in the upcoming November midterms.
In Europe, the political center has broadly held. Mainstream center-left and center-right parties have
lost ground to anti-establishment parties, but they have stayed ideologically centrist and, for the most
part, remained in power. Yet illiberal populists continue to govern Hungary and Poland, and their fellow
travelers wield political influence in most European Union (EU) member states. Indeed, Italy's centrist
government collapsed in July and the hard right may well surge in approaching elections. The United
Kingdom has engaged in a stunning act of self-isolation and self-harm by quitting the EU—London
remains tangled up in uneasy negotiations with Brussels over the terms of Brexit. The economic damage
wrought by inflation, skyrocketing energy prices, and potential energy shortages abetted by the West’s
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sanctions on Russia, may end up undermining the continent's political center and weakening European
and transatlantic solidarity.
As the United States and its allies contemplate mounting tension with a Sino-Russian bloc, they must
ensure that they continue to redress the West’s own internal vulnerabilities. It is true that during the
Cold War, the discipline that the Soviet threat imposed on American politics helped mute partisan
conflict over foreign policy. Similarly, the current prospect of a new era of militarized rivalry with Russia
and China is reviving bipartisan cooperation on matters of statecraft.
This return to bipartisanship is, however, likely to be short-lived—just as it was after the terrorist attacks
of September 11, 2001. Americans should not operate under the illusion that a more competitive
international environment will of its own accord restore the country’s political health—especially amid
the highest U.S. inflation rate in forty years. In similar fashion, even though Europe has demonstrated
impressive unity and resolve during the war in Ukraine, it will undoubtedly face renewed political
challenges as it copes with a huge influx of Ukrainian refugees and deals with additional economic
burdens, including weaning itself off of Russian energy.
Both sides of the Atlantic thus have hard work to do if they are to get their own houses in order and
reinvigorate the globe’s anchor of liberal order. Given the potential for the politics of grievance to make
a comeback in the United States, the Biden administration urgently needs to continue advancing its
domestic agenda. Investing in infrastructure, education, technology, health care, climate solutions, and
other internal programs offers the best way to alleviate the electorate’s discontent and revive the
country’s ailing political center. Europe’s agenda for renewal should include economic restructuring and
investment, reform of immigration policy and border control, and more expenditure in and pooling of
sovereignty on foreign and defense policy.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine heralds the return of a more realist world, requiring that the West’s
idealist ambitions more regularly yield to cold strategic realities. Even though the war has certainly
helped revive the West and its cohesion, the homegrown threats to liberal democracy that were front
and center before the war still require urgent attention. It would be ironic if the West succeeds in
turning Putin’s gamble in Ukraine into a resounding defeat, only to see liberal democracies then
succumb to the enemy within.
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 Russia Threat *
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War Impacts
Failure to successfully check Russia causes cascading conflicts throughout Europe --great power war.
Graham 22 — Thomas Graham, Distinguished Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Cofounder of
the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Program at Yale University, 2022 (“Preventing a Wider
European Conflict,” Council on Foreign Relations, March 8th, Available Online at
https://www.cfr.org/report/preventing-wider-european-conflict#chapter-title-0-1)
The large-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine now underway could quite plausibly precipitate a wider
conflict in Europe. The United States is focused primarily on raising the costs to Russia with punishing
sanctions and reassuring North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies neighboring Russia of its
commitment to collective defense. Less attention has been given to containing the war to Ukraine and
preventing its escalation into a broader European conflict.
The stakes are enormous. The ripple effects of a wider conflict in Europe would spread across the globe,
stressing the geopolitical, economic, and institutional foundations of the international order the
United States has fashioned and underwritten since the end of the Second World War. It would test the
resilience of the U.S. global system of alliances, the international financial system, global energy
markets, arms control regimes, and global institutions in the face of ever more violent great power
competition. No region of the world would be spared, although developments on the Eurasian
supercontinent, the other locus of world power and economic might outside North America, would bear
the gravest consequences for U.S. interests.
The Contingency
The Russian military intervention in Ukraine could easily escalate into a larger conflict stretching from
the Baltic to the Black Sea and further west into Europe. Although Russia, wielding massive military
superiority, might overrun Ukrainian forces in a matter of weeks, stabilizing and pacifying the country
will likely prove to be a grueling and costly affair. A significant Ukrainian resistance movement is almost
certain to emerge. With sustained Western support, it could prolong the warfare for months, if not
years. The first wave of sanctions that Washington has levied on Moscow could be followed by others in
a continuing effort to raise the cost to Moscow and force it to yield. A negotiated end to the conflict will
not come easily, since Washington has framed it in Manichean terms as a world historical struggle
between the democratic West and the aggressive, malevolent, and autocratic Russia. Anything short of
“victory” will be decried as surrender or appeasement in the West, while Russia will not capitulate on a
matter it considers vital to its security and prosperity.
The stage is thus set for an escalating cycle of violence, with Moscow seeking to stamp out a Ukrainian
insurgency and retaliate against Western efforts to stop Russia’s advance. If the conflict wears on,
Moscow could be increasingly tempted to expand its military operations further into Europe to achieve
its goals.
As a first option, Russia could intensify pressure on states neighboring Ukraine (e.g., Hungary, Poland,
Romania, and Slovakia) that could provide safe havens for insurgents or the inevitable government-in-
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exile. It will doubtless reinforce its military presence in Kaliningrad and elsewhere in the Baltics and
patrol the Baltic Sea more aggressively. It could deploy hybrid-war tactics—cyberattacks, disinformation
campaigns, and economic sabotage—to destabilize countries providing safe havens. If those actions did
not sufficiently degrade the resistance, Moscow could even launch direct attacks on insurgents and their
supporters outside Ukraine, as well as attempt to assassinate leading figures in the government-in-exile,
akin to the attacks it has made on Chechen rebels and Federal Security Service (FSB) defectors in Europe
in recent years. Such steps could, at a minimum, draw frontline NATO states directly into the military
conflict with Russia, obligating the United States and other allies to come to their defense.
To build up further pressure, Moscow could also “weaponize” the inevitable refugee flows into
neighboring states. Refugees, who would likely number in the millions, would move first into
unoccupied Ukrainian territory but eventually into adjacent European states, which have shown little
tolerance for outsiders. Moscow could use harsh military and police tactics that would increase the
number of refugees and seek to guide them into countries where they would create the greatest
socioeconomic stress, such as Moldova. In addition, Moscow could increase the tension by pushing
Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko to again seek to push thousands of Middle Eastern migrants
across the borders into Poland and Lithuania. That could lead to border clashes, as it almost did on
occasion last fall, with Russia supporting its ally, Belarus, and NATO states coming to the defense of
allies under attack.
A second option Moscow could pursue is opening up a second front in the Balkans. In recent years,
Russia has taken a number of destabilizing actions in the region, seeking to weaken Montenegro after its
accession to NATO, exacerbate tensions between Serbs and Bosniaks in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and
undermine relations between Serbia and Kosovo. As it fought in Ukraine, Russia could encourage
Republika Srpska leader Milorad Dodik to press for separation from Bosnia, threatening to reignite the
bitter wars of the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia. A Balkans war would complicate the security calculus
of all countries in the region, as well as that of Germany and France, which have significant interests
there. To quell the fighting, NATO countries could decide to use military force against Bosnian Serb
forces enjoying Russian support.
A third, riskier, option would be to directly attack the United States, the country that Moscow believes
is orchestrating a larger anti-Russia campaign. In response to Western sanctions designed to crater
Russia’s financial system and undermine critical industries, Moscow could launch major cyberattacks
against U.S. critical infrastructure. If a cyberattack were to take down a major financial institution or
corrupt its records, the ensuing havoc in U.S. markets could prompt overwhelming public and
congressional pressure for a forceful response.
The U.S. and NATO response to Russian actions will impact Moscow’s decisions on the conduct of the
conflict. Both a weak response and an excessively harsh one could lead to escalation. In the first case,
Moscow could be tempted to press militarily even further into Europe to enlarge its sphere of influence.
Vladimir Putin has demanded that NATO withdraw its forces back to the lines they held in 1997, when
the NATO-Russia Founding Act was signed and the first wave of post−Cold War expansion remained in
the future. His remarks announcing the start of hostilities against Ukraine hinted at a broader effort to
restore Russia’s control over all of the former Soviet Union. That could include military action against
the Baltic states, especially Lithuania, through which Moscow could try to carve out a land corridor to
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Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave on the Baltic Sea. NATO would have little choice but to provide military
aid to those states if it did not want to forfeit its role as the central pillar of European security.
Crippling sanctions, meanwhile, could provoke Putin to lash out with greater violence. If Putin felt cornered, he could escalate the conflict
either horizontally to other countries or vertically to the nuclear level in a desperate effort to save himself, his regime, and, in his mind, Russia
itself. And he could find considerable public support for such a reaction. Already, some Russians believe that U.S. and EU sanctions are aimed
not simply at the leaders behind the war but, by cratering the economy, at all Russians.
Warning Indicators
As is the case with the current crisis in Ukraine, Moscow’s intentions will remain ambiguous. The
indicators of an approaching escalation in the conflict beyond Ukraine are likely to fall into three
categories.
The first indicators that political and military conditions are increasing the risk of broader conflict include
a breakdown in channels of communication with Moscow. The absence of active diplomatic ties would
preclude a negotiated resolution of the conflict in Ukraine. An end to U.S.-Russian military-to-military
channels would undermine any effort to avoid direct military conflict between the two countries.
Another indicator would be major insurgent successes that dramatically increase Russian casualties.
Moscow would be tempted to move more aggressively against insurgent safe havens rather than
capitulate on what it considers to be its vital interest in Ukraine.
Second are the indicators that Moscow is preparing for a broader conflict, which it would undoubtedly
argue had been forced by Western actions. Such signs include Kremlin efforts to prepare the Russian
public for a wider conflict, which could entail official statements, greater media focus on escalating
Western “aggression,” an increased pace of civil defense drills, and mobilization of reserves. Another
indicator includes the massing of Russian forces in the Baltic region. It could include such moves as
aggressive hybrid actions to destabilize Poland and the Baltic states, coupled with efforts to rally
indigenous ethnic Russian communities against their governments.
Third are the indicators that Moscow is intentionally seeking to widen the conflict. This could include
greater support for Bosnian Serb leader Dodik, such as diplomatic and financial backing, and provision of
weapons. They could also encourage Serb leaders to more assertively pursue their grievances against
Kosovo.
Implications for the United States
A wider European conflict would pose the stiffest challenge to the global standing of the United States
since the end of the Cold War and to the international system it has built and underwritten for decades
longer. It would test the durability of its global system of alliances and the efficacy of international
regimes and institutions that have guarded world peace, security, and prosperity. The challenge would
come at a time when the United States itself is in immense disarray, as a deeply polarized polity
confronts massive domestic problems—the pandemic, inflation, racial justice, and cultural wars—that
leave less time and fewer resources for foreign matters. The United States will be tested to see whether
it can muster the will, energy, and creativity to execute an effective policy toward the unfolding crisis in
Europe.
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Russian Revisionism
Putin is a revisionist leader committed to conquering Europe; no negotiated peace
agreement is possible
Hill & Stent, July-August 2022, , https://www.foreignaffairs.com/russian-federation/world-putin-wantsfiona-hill-angela-stent, FIONA HILL is Senior Fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe in the
Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. From 2017 to 2019, she was the Senior Director for
Europe and Russia on the U.S. National Security Council. She is the author of There Is Nothing for You
Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-first Century; ANGELA STENT is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at
the Brookings Institution and Professor Emerita at Georgetown University. She is the author of Putin’s
World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest.
Vladimir Putin is determined to shape the future to look like his version of the past. Russia’s president invaded
Ukraine not
because he felt threatened by NATO expansion or by Western “provocations.” He ordered his “special military operation”
because he believes that it is Russia’s divine right to rule Ukraine, to wipe out the country’s national
identity, and to integrate its people into a Greater Russia. He laid out this mission in a 5,000-word treatise, published in
July 2021, entitled, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” In it, Putin insisted that Belarusians, Russians, and Ukrainians are all
descendants of the Rus, an ancient people who settled the lands between the Black and Baltic Seas. He asserted that they are bound together
by a common territory and language and the Orthodox Christian faith. In his version of history, Ukraine has never been sovereign, except for a
few historical interludes when it tried—and failed—to become an independent state. Putin wrote that “Russia was robbed” of core territory
when the Bolsheviks created the Soviet Union in 1922 and established a Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. In his telling, since the Soviet
collapse, the West has used Ukraine as a platform to threaten Russia, and it has supported the rise of “neo-Nazis” there. Putin’s essay, which
every soldier sent to Ukraine is supposed to carry, ends by asserting that Ukraine can only be sovereign in partnership with Russia. “We are one
people,” Putin declares. This treatise, and similar public statements, make clear that Putin
wants a world where Russia
presides over a new Slavic union composed of Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and perhaps the northern part
of Kazakhstan (which is heavily Slavic)—and where all the other post-Soviet states recognize Russia’s suzerainty. He also wants the West
and the global South to accept Russia’s predominant regional role in Eurasia. This is more than a sphere of influence; it is a sphere of control,
with a mixture of outright territorial reintegration of some places and dominance in the security, political, and economic spheres of others.
Putin is serious about achieving these goals by military and nonmilitary means. He has been at war in Ukraine since
early 2014, when Russian forces, wearing green combat uniforms stripped of their insignia, took control of Crimea in a stealth operation. This
attack was swiftly followed by covert operations to stir up civil disorder in Ukraine’s eastern and southern regions close to the Russian border.
Russia succeeded in fomenting revolt in the Donbas region and sparking an armed conflict that resulted in 14,000 deaths over the next eight
years. All these regions have been targeted for assault and conquest since February 2022. Similarly, in Belarus, Putin took advantage of internal
crises and large-scale protests in 2020 and 2021 to constrain its leader’s room for maneuver. Belarus, which has a so-called union arrangement
with Russia, was then used as the staging ground for the “special military operation” against Ukraine. The
Russian president has
made it clear that his country is a revisionist power. In a March 2014 speech marking Crimea’s annexation,
Putin put the West on notice that Russia was on the offensive in staking out its regional claims. To make
this task easier, Putin later took steps that he believed would sanction-proof the Russian economy by reducing its exposure to the United States
and Europe, including pushing for the domestic production of critical goods. He
stepped up repression, conducting targeted
assassinations and imprisoning opponents. He carried out disinformation operations and engaged in efforts to bribe and
blackmail politicians abroad. Putin has constantly adapted his tactics to mitigate Western responses—to the point that on the eve of his
invasion, as Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s borders, he bragged to some European interlocutors that he had “bought the West.” There
was nothing, he thought, that the United States or Europe could do to constrain him. So far, the West’s reaction to the invasion has generally
been united and robust. Russia’s aggressive attack on Ukraine was a wake-up call for the United States and its allies. But
the West must
understand that it is dealing with a leader who is trying to change the historical narrative of the last
hundred years—not just of the period since the end of the Cold War. Vladimir Putin wants to make Ukraine, Europe, and indeed the
whole world conform to his own version of history. Understanding his objectives is central to crafting the right response. WHO CONTROLS THE
PAST? In Vladimir Putin’s mind, history matters—that is, history as he sees it. Putin’s conception of the past may be very different from what is
generally accepted, but his narratives are a potent political weapon, and they underpin his legitimacy. Well before the full invasion of Ukraine
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on February 24, 2022, Putin had been making intellectual forays into obscure periods of the past and manipulating key events to set up the
domestic and international justification for his war. In 2010, at the annual meeting of the Kremlin-sponsored Valdai International Discussion
Club, Putin’s press spokesman told the audience that the Russian president reads books on Russian history “all the time.” He makes frequent
pronouncements about Russian history, including about his own place in it. Putin has put Kyiv at the center of his drive to “correct” what he
says is a historical injustice: the separation of Ukraine from Russia during the 1922 formation of the Soviet Union. The president’s obsession
with Russia’s imperial past runs deep. In his Kremlin chambers, Putin has strategically placed statues of the Russian monarchs Peter the Great
and Catherine the Great, who conquered what are today Ukrainian territories in wars with the Swedish and Ottoman empires. He has also
usurped Ukraine’s history and appropriated some of its most prominent figures. In November 2016, for example, right outside the Kremlin
gates, Putin erected a statue of Vladimir the Great, the tenth-century grand prince of the principality of Kyiv. In Putin’s version of history, Grand
Prince Vladimir converted to Christianity on behalf of all of ancient Rus in 988, making him the holy saint of Orthodox Christianity and a Russian,
not a Ukrainian, Figure. The conversion means that there is no Ukrainian nation separate from Russia. The grand prince belongs to Moscow, not
to Kyiv. Since the war, Putin has doubled down on his historical arguments. He deputized his former culture minister and
close Kremlin aide, Vladimir Medinsky, to lead the Russian delegation in early talks with Ukraine. According to a well-informed Russian
academic, Medinsky was one of the ghostwriters of a series of essays by Putin on Ukraine and its supposed fusion with Russia. As quickly
became clear, Medinsky’s brief was to press Russia’s historical claims to Ukraine and defend Putin’s distorted narratives, not just to negotiate a
diplomatic solution. Putin’s assertions, of course, are historical miasmas, infused with a brew of temporal and factual contradictions. They
ignore, for example, the fact that in 988, the idea of a united Russian state and empire was centuries off in the future. Indeed, the first
reference to Moscow as a place of any importance was not recorded until 1147. BLAMING THE BOLSHEVIKS On the eve of the invasion, Putin
gave a speech accusing Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin of destroying the Russian empire by launching a revolution during World War I and then
“separating, severing what is historically Russian land.” As Putin put it, “Bolshevik, Communist Russia” created “a country that had never
existed before”—Ukraine—by wedging Russian territories such as the Donbas region, a center of heavy industry, into a new Ukrainian socialist
republic. In fact, Lenin and the Bolsheviks essentially recreated the Russian empire and just called it something else. They established separate
Soviet Socialist Republics for Ukraine and other regions to contrast themselves with the imperial tsars, who reigned over a united, Russified
state and oppressed ethnic minorities. But for Putin, the Bolsheviks’ decision was illegitimate, robbing Russia of its patrimony and stirring
“zealous nationalists” in Ukraine, who then developed dangerous ideas of independence. Putin claims he is reversing these century-old
“strategic mistakes.” Narratives about NATO have also played a special role in Putin’s version of history. Putin argues that NATO is a tool of U.S.
imperialism and a means for the United States to continue its supposed Cold War occupation and domination of Europe. He claims that NATO
compelled eastern European member countries to join the organization and accuses it of unilaterally expanding into Russia’s sphere of
influence. In reality, those countries, still fearful after decades of Soviet domination, clamored to become members. But according to Putin,
these purported actions by the United States and NATO have forced Russia to defend itself against military encroachment; Moscow had “no
other choice,” he claims, but to invade Ukraine to forestall it from joining NATO, even though the organization was not going to admit the
country. On July 7, 2022, Putin told Russian parliamentary leaders that the war in Ukraine was unleashed by “the collective West,” which was
trying to contain Russia and “impose its new world order on the rest of the world.” The more that Russia tries to erase the Ukrainian national
identity, the stronger it becomes. But Putin also plays up Russia’s imperial role. At a June 9, 2022, Moscow conference, Putin told young Russian
entrepreneurs that Ukraine is a “colony,” not a sovereign country. He likened himself to Peter the Great, who waged “the Great Northern War”
for 21 years against Sweden—“returning and reinforcing” control over land that was part of Russia. This explanation also echoes what Putin
told U.S. President George Bush at the April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest: “Ukraine is not a real country.” The United States was, of course,
once a colony of Great Britain. So were Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, and numerous other states that have been independent and sovereign
for decades. That does not make them British or give the United Kingdom a contemporary claim to exert control over their destinies, even
though many of these countries have English as their first or second language. Yet Putin insists that Ukraine’s Russian speakers are all Moscow’s
subjects and that, globally, all Russian speakers are part of the “Russian world,” with special ties to the motherland. In Ukraine, however, his
push has backfired. Since February 24, 2022, Putin’s insistence that Ukrainians who speak Russian are Russians has, on the contrary, helped to
forge a new national identity in Ukraine centered on the Ukrainian language. The more that Putin tries to erase the Ukrainian national identity
with bombs and artillery shells, the stronger it becomes. CONJURING NAZIS Ukraine and Ukrainians have a complicated history. Empires have
come and gone, and borders have changed for centuries, so the people living on modern Ukrainian territory have fluid, compound identities.
But Ukraine has been an independent state since 1991, and Putin is genuinely aggrieved that Ukrainians insist on their own statehood and civic
identity. Take Putin’s frequent references to World War II. Since 2011, Putin has enshrined the “Great Fatherland War” as the seminal event for
modern Russia. He has strictly enforced official narratives about the conflict. He has also portrayed his current operation as its successor; in
Putin’s telling, the invasion of Ukraine is designed to liberate the country from Nazis. But for Putin, Ukrainians are Nazis not because they follow
the precepts of Adolf Hitler or espouse national socialism. They are Nazis because they are “zealous nationalists”—akin to the controversial
World War II–era Ukrainian partisan Stepan Bandera, who fought with the Germans against Soviet forces. They are Nazis because they refuse to
admit they are Russians. Putin’s conjuring of Ukrainian Nazis has gained more traction domestically than anywhere else. Yet internationally,
Putin’s assertions about NATO and proxy wars with the United States and the collective West have won a variety of adherents, from prominent
academics to Pope Francis, who said in June 2022 that the Ukraine war was “perhaps somehow provoked.” Western politicians and analysts
continue to debate whether NATO is at fault for the war. These arguments persist even though Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea came in
response to Ukraine’s efforts to associate with the European Union, not with NATO. And the debate has gone on, even though when Finland
and Sweden applied to join the alliance in June 2022, despite months of threats from Russia, Putin told reporters that Kremlin officials “don’t
have problems with Sweden and Finland like we do with Ukraine.” Putin’s problem, then, was not NATO in particular. It was that Ukraine
wanted to associate with any entity or country other than Russia. Whether Ukraine wanted to join the European Union or NATO or have
bilateral relations with the United States—any of these efforts would have been an affront to Russia’s history and dignity. To Putin, Ukrainians
are Nazis because they refuse to admit they are Russians. But Putin knows it will be difficult to negotiate a settlement in Ukraine based on his
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version of history and to reconcile fundamentally different stories of the past. Most modern European states emerged from the ruins of
empires and the disintegration of larger multiethnic states. The
war in Ukraine could lead to more Russian interference
to stoke simmering conflicts in weak states such as Bosnia-Herzegovina and other Balkan countries,
where history and territorial claims are also disputed. Yet no matter the potential cost, Putin wants his past to prevail in
Europe’s political present. And to make sure that happens, the Russian military is in the field, in full force, fighting the regular
Ukrainian army. Unlike the situation in Donbas from 2014 to 2022, when Russia falsely denied that it was involved, this war is a direct conflict
between the two states. As Putin also told his Russian parliamentarians on July 7, he is determined to fight to the last Ukrainian, even though
he purportedly sees Ukrainians as “brothers.” AT ANY COST Putin abhors that the United States and European countries are supporting Ukraine
militarily. In response, he has launched an economic and information war against the West, clearly signaling that this is not only a military
conflict and a battle over who gets to “own history.” Russia has weaponized energy, grain, and other commodities. It has spread disinformation,
including by accusing Ukraine of committing the very atrocities that Russia has carried out on the battlefield and by blaming Western sanctions
for exacerbating famines in Africa when it is Russia that has blocked Ukrainian grain shipments to the continent from the Black Sea. And in
many parts of the world, Russia is winning the information war. So far, the West has not been able to be completely effective in the
informational space. Nevertheless, Western support for Ukraine has been significant. This support has two major elements: weapons and
sanctions, including the High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) from the United States, which have significantly increased Ukraine’s
ability to strike back at Russian targets. Other NATO members have also supplied weapons and humanitarian assistance. But Ukraine’s constant
need to replenish its arms has already begun to deplete the arsenals of donating countries. Western energy, financial, and export control
sanctions have been extensive, and they are affecting the Russian economy. But sanctions
cannot alter Putin’s view of history
or his determination to subjugate Ukraine, so they have not changed his calculus or his war aims .
Indeed, close observers say that Putin has rarely consulted his economic advisers during this war, apart from Elvira Nabiullina, the head of the
central bank, who has astutely managed the value of the ruble. This is a stark break from the past, when Putin has always appeared extremely
interested in the Russian economy and eager to discuss statistics and growth rates in great detail. Any concerns about the long-term economic
impact of the war have receded from his view. And to date, Russia’s economy has weathered the sanctions, although
growth rates are forecast to plunge this year. The real pinch from Western export controls will be felt in 2023, when Russia will lack the
semiconductors and spare parts for its manufacturing sector, and its industrial plants will be forced to close. The country’s oil industry will
especially struggle as it loses out on technology and software from the international oil industry. Europe and the United States have imposed
wide-ranging energy sanctions on Russia, with the European Union committed to phasing out oil imports from Russia by the end of 2022. But
limiting gas imports is much more challenging, as a number of countries, including Germany, have few alternatives to replace Russian gas in the
short term, and Putin has weaponized energy by severely reducing gas supplies to Europe. For 50 years, the Soviet Union and Russia cast
themselves as reliable suppliers of natural gas to Western Europe in a relationship of mutual dependence: Europe needed gas, and Moscow
needed gas revenues. But that calculation is gone. Putin believes that Russia can forgo these revenues because countries still buying Russian oil
and gas are paying higher prices for it—higher prices that he helped provoke by cutting back on Russia’s exports to Europe. And even if Russia
does eventually lose energy revenues, Putin appears willing to pay that price. What he ultimately cares about is undermining European support
for Ukraine. Russia’s economic and energy warfare extends to the weaponization of nuclear power. Russia took over the Chernobyl plant in
Ukraine at the beginning of the war, after recklessly sending Russian soldiers into the highly radioactive “red zone” and forcing the Ukrainian
staff at the plant to work under dangerous conditions. Then, it abandoned the plant after having exposed the soldiers to toxic radiation. Russia
subsequently shelled and took over Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, and turned it into a military base. By
attacking the power plant and transforming it into a military garrison, Russia has created a safety crisis for the thousands of workers there.
Putin’s broad-based campaign does not stop at nuclear energy. Putin’s goal is not negotiation but Ukrainian capitulation. Russia
has also
weaponized food supplies, blockading Ukraine and preventing it from exporting its abundant grain and fertilizer stocks. In July 2022,
Turkey and the United Nations brokered an agreement to allow Ukraine and Russia to export grain and fertilizer, but the implementation of this
deal faced multiple obstacles, given the war raging in the Black Sea area. Indeed, immediately after the official signing of the agreement, Russia
shelled some of the infrastructure at Ukraine’s critical Odessa port. Putin
has fallen back on another historic Russian
military tactic—bogging down opposing forces and waiting for winter. Much as his predecessors arranged for
Napoleon’s armies to be trapped in the snows near Moscow and for Nazi soldiers to freeze to death outside Stalingrad, Putin plans to have
French and German citizens shivering in their homes. In his speech at the June 2022 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Putin
predicted that, as Europeans face a cold winter and suffer the economic consequences of the sanctions their governments have imposed on
Russia and on Russian gas exports, populist parties will rise, and new elites will come to power. The June 2022 parliamentary elections in
France, when Marine Le Pen’s extreme-right party increased its seats elevenfold—largely because of voters’ unhappiness with their economic
situation—reinforced Putin’s convictions. The collapse of Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s government in July 2022 and the possible return
of a populist, pro-Russian prime minister in the fall were also considered results of popular economic discontent. The Kremlin aims to fracture
Western unity against Russia under the pressure of energy shortages, high prices, and economic hardship. In
the meantime, Putin is
confident that he can prevail. On the surface, popular support for the war inside Russia seems reasonably robust. Polling by the
independent Levada Center shows that Putin’s approval rating went up after the invasion began. Nonetheless, there is good reason for
skepticism about the depth of active support for him. Hundreds of thousands of people who oppose the war have left the country. Many of
them, in doing so, have explicitly said that they want to be part of Russia’s future but not Vladimir Putin’s version of the past. Russians who
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have stayed and publicly criticized the war have been harassed or imprisoned. Others are indifferent, or they passively support the war. Indeed,
life for most people in Moscow and other big Russian cities goes on as normal. So far,
the conscripts who have been sent to
fight and die are not the children of Russia’s elites or urban middle class. They are from poor, rural
areas, and many of them are not ethnically Russian. Rumors after five months of combat that the Moscow-linked Wagner
mercenary group was recruiting prisoners to fight suggested that Russia faced an acute manpower shortage. But the troops are urged on by
propaganda that dehumanizes the Ukrainians and makes the fighting seem more palatable. DIVIDE AND CONQUER Despite calls by some for a
negotiated settlement that would involve Ukrainian territorial concessions,
Putin seems uninterested in a compromise that
would leave Ukraine as a sovereign, independent state—whatever its borders. According to multiple former
senior U.S. officials we spoke with, in April 2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a
negotiated interim settlement: Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of
Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of
countries. But as Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated in a July interview with his country’s state media, this compromise is no longer
an option. Even giving Russia all of the Donbas is not enough. “Now the geography is different,” Lavrov asserted, in describing Russia’s shortterm military aims. “It’s also Kherson and the Zaporizhzhya regions and a number of other territories.” The goal is not negotiation, but
Ukrainian capitulation. At any point,
negotiations with Russia—if not handled carefully and with continued strong Western support
for Ukraine’s defense and security—would merely facilitate an operational pause for Moscow. After a time, Russia
would continue to try to undermine the Ukrainian government. Moscow would likely first attempt to take Odessa and other Black Sea ports
with the goal of leaving Ukraine an economically inviable, landlocked country. If he succeeds in that, Putin would launch a renewed assault on
Kyiv as well, with the aim of unseating the present government and installing a pro-Moscow puppet government. Putin’s war in Ukraine, then,
will likely grind on for a long time. The main challenge for the West will be maintaining resolve and unity, as well as expanding international
support for Ukraine and preventing sanctions evasion. This will not be easy. The longer the war lasts, the greater the impact domestic politics
will have on its course. Russia, Ukraine, and the United States will all have presidential elections in 2024. Russia’s and Ukraine’s are usually
slated for March. Russia’s outcome is foreordained: either Putin will return to power, or he will be followed by a successor, likely from the
security services, who supports the war and is hostile to the West. Zelensky remains popular in Ukraine as a wartime president, but he will be
less likely to win an election if he makes territorial concessions. And if Donald Trump or a Republican with views like his becomes president of
the United States in 2025, U.S. support for Ukraine will erode. Domestic politics will also play a role outside these three countries—and, in fact,
outside the West altogether. The United States and its allies may want to isolate Russia, but a large number of states in the global South, led by
China, regard the Russia-Ukraine war as a localized European conflict that does not affect them. China has even backed Russia rhetorically,
refused to impose sanctions, and supported it in the United Nations. (One should not underestimate the durability and significance of Russia’s
alignment with China.) Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar summarized the attitude of many developing states when he said
that Russia is a “very important partner in a number of areas.” For much of the global South, concerns focus on fuel, food, fertilizer, and also
arms. These countries are apparently not concerned that Russia has violated the UN Charter and international law by unleashing an
unprovoked attack on a neighbor’s territory. There’s a reason these states have not joined the United States and Europe in isolating Moscow.
Since 2014, Putin has assiduously courted “the rest”—the developing world—even as Russia’s ties with the West have frayed. In 2015, for
example, Russia sent its military to the Middle East to support Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his country’s civil war. Since then, Russia has
cultivated ties with leaders on all sides of that region’s disputes, becoming one of the only major powers able to talk to all parties. Russia has
strong ties with Iran, but also with Iran’s enemies: particularly Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf states. In Africa, Russian paramilitary
groups provide support to a number of leaders. And in Latin America, Russian influence has increased as more left-wing governments have
come to power. There and elsewhere, Russia is still seen as a champion of the oppressed against the stereotype of U.S. imperialism. Many
people in the global South view Russia as the heir to the Soviet Union, which supported their post-colonial national liberation movements, not a
modern variant of imperial Russia. Not only does much of the world refuse to criticize or sanction Russia; major countries simply do not accept
the West’s view of what caused the war or just how grave the conflict is. They instead criticize the United States and argue that what Russia is
doing in Ukraine is no different from what the United States did in Iraq or Vietnam. They, like Moscow, justify Russia’s invasion as a response to
the threat from NATO. This is thanks in part to the Kremlin’s propaganda, which has amplified Putin’s narratives about NATO and proxy wars
and the nefarious actions of the West. International institutions have not been much more helpful than developing countries. The United
Nations and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe proved incapable of preventing or stopping this war. They seem
increasingly the victims of Putin’s distorted view of the past as well as poorly structured to meet the challenges of the present. DELUSIONS OF
GRANDEUR Putin’s manipulations of history
suggest that his claims go beyond Ukraine, into Europe and
Eurasia. The Baltic states might be on his colonial agenda, as well as Poland, part of which was ruled by Russia
from 1772 to 1918. Much of present-day Moldova was part of the Russian empire, and Russian officials have suggested that this state could be
next in their sights. Finland was also part of the Russian empire between 1809 and 1918. Putin may not be able to conquer these countries, but
his extravagant remarks about taking back Russia’s colonies are designed to intimidate his neighbors and throw them off balance. In Putin’s
ideal world, he will gain leverage and control over their politics by threatening them until they let Russia dictate their foreign and domestic
policies. In Putin’s vision, the global South would, at a minimum, remain neutral in Russia’s standoff with the West. Developing nations would
actively support Moscow. With the BICS organization—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—set to expand to include Argentina, Iran,
and possibly Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, Russia may acquire even more partners, ones that together represent a significant percentage of
global GDP and a large percentage of the world’s population. Russia would then emerge as a leader of the developing world, as was the Soviet
Union during the Cold War. All this underlines why it is imperative that the West (Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, South
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Korea, the United States, and Europe) redouble its efforts to remain united in supporting Ukraine and countering Russia. In the near term, that
means working together to push back against Russian disinformation about the war and false historical narratives, as well as the Kremlin’s
other efforts to intimidate Europe—including through deliberate nuclear saber-rattling and energy cutoffs. In the medium to long term, the
United States, its allies, and its partners should discuss how to restructure the international and European security architecture to prevent
Russia from attacking other neighbors that it deems within its sphere. But for now, NATO is the only institution that can guarantee Europe’s
security. Indeed, Finland’s and Sweden’s decision to join was in part motivated by that realization. As he looks toward a quarter century in
power, Putin
seeks to build his version of a Russian empire. He is “gathering in the lands” as did his
personal icons—the great Russian tsars—and overturning the legacy of Lenin, the Bolsheviks, and the post–Cold War
settlement. In this way, Putin wants Russia to be the one exception to the inexorable rise and fall of imperial states. In the twentieth century,
Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire collapsed after World War I. Britain and France reluctantly gave up their empires after World War II.
But Putin is insistent on bringing tsarist Russia back. Regardless of whether he prevails in Ukraine, Putin’s mission is already having a clear and
ironic impact, both on Europe and on Russia’s 22 years of economic advancement. In reasserting Russia’s imperial position by seeking to
reconquer Ukraine, Putin is reversing one of the greatest achievements of his professed greatest hero. During his reign, Peter the Great opened
a window to the West by traveling to Europe, inviting Europeans to come to Russia and help develop its economy, and adopting and adapting
European artisans’ skills. Vladimir Putin’s invasions and territorial expansions have slammed that window shut. They have sent Europeans and
their companies back home and pushed a generation of talented Russians fleeing into exile. Peter took Russia into the future. Putin is pushing it
back to the past.
Russia is revisionist – only deterrence solves.
Charalambides 6-26 [Yiannos Charalambides, doctorate and head of Ledra College’s International
Relations department, 6-26-2022. “A Russian Revisionist Strategy on the Rise?”, DOI:
10.1080/09700161.2022.2076303. DOA: 07-02-2022
The better we understand why Russia intends to increase its geopolitical and geostrategic position and role in the regional arena, the better we
can realize why and how the
Russian revisionist policy has been developing since 2008, from Europe to the Middle
prevented NATO’s expansionist policy through the wars in
Georgia, Crimea and Ukraine. Russia returned stridently to the international arena; b) Russia has
consolidated its position as a leading and dominant power in the Caucasus region; c) It took action in the
Middle East and defended its strategic interests in Syria.
East, via the Caucasus region. Since 2008: a) Russia
Moscow uses all the necessary factors available to realize its revisionist strategy. Such factors are:
(1)
Military strength. The first level is that of a preventive strategy. The second is that of the Russian
aim to consolidate its strategy either with force—as occurred in the cases of Georgia, Crimea, Syria and Ukraine—
or in the shadow of its power.
(2)
(3)
Gas and oil. Russia uses the pipelines like ‘energy divisions’ to serve its interests and increase its
political influence over states and governments.
Technology. Russia combined conventional and cyber techniques and tactics in the wars that it
led from 2008. Its conventional military forces include sophisticated weapons such as the missile systems of S-300 and S-400
and the hypersonic missiles (3M22 Zircon) that combined with its extended cyberwar capabilities provide Russia with the chance to
attenuate the advantage that the US holds in the sea due to its tremendous war fleet power. 41
(4)
Historical and imperial Russian consciousness.42 Moscow has an imperial identity and
consciousness, military power, national resources and a pivotal geopolitical position in the core
of the Heartland. By combining these factors, Moscow fuels its political machine to accomplish its strategic missions and
targets.
(5)
Russian minorities existing in other states are used by the Kremlin as strategic instruments to
achieve its national goals. This phenomenon is evident in the cases of Crimea and Ukraine.
Minorities also exist in the Baltic States and other countries, which emerged in the regional system after the
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collapse of the Soviet Union. Therefore, this
specific issue of minorities takes wider and more complicated
dimensions. It is also relevant to political and legal motives and the right to self-determination, the exercise of which depends
on conflicting and convergent national interests of the parties involved as well as the uniqueness of each case. Moreover, humanity
experienced tragic implications when Adolf Hitler exploited the Sudeten Germans as a strategic instrument to occupy Czechoslovakia
paving the way for the Second World War. It is not a new strategic practice. Therefore, history repeats itself because the feeling of
national integration cannot be easily suppressed.
The lack of an adequate European and American preventive strategy is a quasi-ally of Russia which
pursues to restructure the international system and promote its revisionist strategy. The American and
European expansionist policy offered Russia the pretext to put forward a preventive and then a revisionist policy in Georgia, Crimea, Syria and
Ukraine. Moscow seized the opportunity to make its case by accusing the US and NATO of following an aggressive strategy that put Russian
security at stake. While
Russia argues that it is in defence, at the same time, it promotes its revisionist, even
partially induces a redistribution of power and the restructuring of the regional and
international system in line with its hegemonic strategic goals.43 Whether this policy will be successful and to what
extent, is something that only time can show. The War on Ukraine seems to be a cornerstone for the future
structural changes in Europe and worldwide. Russia pursues to raise itself as a game-changer. The relevant
belligerent strategy, which
question is the following: What structural changes the Russo-Ukrainian War could bring about?
Unless stopped, Putin will escalate – extinction
Dokoupil 22 – Tony Dokoupil is an American broadcast journalist and author, known for his work as a
co-anchor of CBS Mornings. He was also a news correspondent for CBS News and MSNBC. (Tony
Dokoupil, "Conflict in Ukraine triggers fear of nuclear warfare," CBS, 4-29-2022,
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/conflict-nuclear-warfare-ukraine-russia/, Accessed 6-21-2022, LASASC)
The threat of
a global nuclear war doesn't feel as distant as it did a few weeks ago. A recent CBS News poll found that
70% of adults are worried Russia's invasion of Ukraine could lead to fighting with nuclear weapons. Many
are curious as to what a nuclear war would look like — so Alex Wellerstein, a historian and professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology,
developed a website called "NUKEMAP." It can simulate a detonation anywhere in the world. As in real life, the simulation begins with just the
push of a button. CBS News' Tony Dokoupil and Wellerstein simulated a scenario of what Times Square would look like if it was hit with a bomb
like the one that struck Hiroshima. "There's a sort of zone that's about here, and... which is pretty hopeless, no matter what," Wellerstein said
as he pointed to a large section of midtown Manhattan in the simulation. When larger, more modern bombs were simulated, the website
showed a
single blast could cause heavy damage throughout the entire metropolitan region and kill
millions. Winds can also carry radioactive particles even further. "These are areas where, if you're not taking shelter
several hours after the bomb, you could get enough radiation to die," Welllerstein said when referring to cities downwind of New York in the
simulation. "You could get enough radiation to get significantly sick." There was a time when Americans were prepared for that kind of attack.
In the 1950s and 60s, school children practiced "duck and cover" drills to help survive a blast, and a public campaign educated Americans on
surviving the fallout. Office of Civil Defense teams also spent hundreds of millions of dollars building and stockpiling fallout shelters all across
the U.S., but a visit to the basement of a public library in Passaic, New Jersey, reveals this threat has fallen into the very back of our minds. In a
space that was designed to shelter up to 90 people, decades of dust has settled over the medicine and food — which has long since expired —
in the basement. Building supervisor Gary Salvatoriello told CBS News there are no plans for replenishment. Instead, the one-time fallout
shelter, like so many others, has turned back into an everyday storage space. George Washington University professor Sharon Squassoni said
she's been warning about the risk of nuclear conflict for years. "The
lessons of the Cold War seem to have been
forgotten," she said. The number of nuclear weapons has decreased dramatically since the Cold War. But Russia and the U.S.
each have more than 1,500 weapons deployed and ready to fire. Squassoni said she fears that could happen
eventually, either by accident or an intentional attack. "We know from Russian doctrine that they have a plan or they've been thinking
about using nuclear weapons to escalate the war, to stop it or deescalate it," she said. The big question is: what
would happen after an initial attack? "The world would recoil in horror. And I'm sure there would be a lot of voices
demanding for some kind of similar action. But do you really want to trigger the third world war? A third nuclear war?" Squassoni said. "I don't
think that Vladimir Putin wants to tangle with NATO," she added. "I don't think he wants to tangle with the U.S. But I also think that we've been
misreading him for quite a while. The
truth is there is very little standing in the way of an all-out nuclear war. "The
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only thing that really stands is that... it is not really in the interests of our enemies to have that happen to them either," Wellerstein said. Even
though nuclear weapons haven't been used in battle since 1945, Wellerstein said the threat they post
never really went away. "We have a long list of stuff to worry about. But I think they should be on the
list. I'm not saying they should be the top of the list all the time. But I think if they were on the list, you might get a
somewhat different world as a result," he said. "Future problems are brewing, I guarantee it."
*Russia revisionist.
Natsios 22 [Andrew S. Natsios, Former Administrator of the United States Agency for International
Development, 02-17-2022. “Putin’s New Russia: Fragile State or Revisionist Power?”
https://oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/bitstream/handle/1969.1/195461/natsiosPutins%20New%20Russia.p
df?sequence=1&isAllowed=y. DOA: 07-02-2022 //ArchanSen]
Putin has positioned himself and Russia as a culturally and religiously conservative alternative to
western secular liberal democracies. This world view is described in Project Russia which is a curious, if
alarming, collection of essays published in five-volumes as a semi- official government publication that
describes the political ideology of the State, the Orthodox Church’s religious vision, geographic
determinism, and social analysis shared by Putin and his circle of oligarchs who rule Russia. These essays
form a strange amalgam of anti-democratic, reactionary, ultra-nationalist attacks on western democratic
values, combined with an unhealthy dose of conspiracy theories, paranoia, xenophobia, and a defense
of autocratic government and dictatorship.18 One view of Project Russia is that its publication simply
reflects Putin’s understanding as a former KGB agent that a great power must have an ideology to
defeat and undermine its rivals in propaganda battles. But a more sinister and alarming view is that the
five volumes are Putin’s blue print for Russia’s grand strategy, evidence of a revisionist power seeking to
overthrow the existing international order. If this interpretation of Project Russia is correct, it suggests a
greater level of future conflict with the western democracies and international institutions. If Project
Russia is a blue print and not just a propaganda tool, the risk of an accidental global conflagration
between Russia and the NATO alliance is a real, even if less than likely, possibility.
Vladimir Putin must find ways of explaining to the Russian people why the country is so far behind the
western democracies, as did his predecessors in the Soviet Union. Putin continues to pursue the Soviet
strategy of keeping the memory of World War II alive to stir up Russian nationalism among the
population but also as an explanation for Russia’s underdevelopment. The evidence suggests that this
strategy faces increasing hurdles. Russia’s epic and very real sacrifices during World War II no longer
have much resonance with the younger generation, who know little about the war, and the older
generation, who tire of a war 70 years ago being used to explain Russian inability to match Western
living standards today. Thus, what had been a powerful historical experience of collective suffering and
sacrifice during World War II, has now become a fading memory which lacks the magnetic power it held
over the Russian people during the Cold War.19
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Undoubtedly, one of the motivations behind Putin’s attempt to regain Russia’s lost stature in the world,
expand its sphere of influence, attack western democratic institutions, and annex the territory of its
neighbors is driven by a need to avenge the supposed “secret conspiracy” among the Western
democracies to collapse of the Soviet empire and humiliate Mother Russia.20 The Russian electronic
media and Project Russia continue to propagate this and other conspiracy theories. The Russian
government’s arming of the Taliban, reported by U.S. intelligence sources and by CNN, may be a
response to U.S. military intervention in Syria against the Assad Government, an ally of Russia, but it
could also be payback for the CIA’s arming of the Mujahideen fighting against the Russian military in
Afghanistan during the 1980’s.21 Some in the Reagan Administration saws the arming of the
Mujahideen as U.S. payback for Soviet support for North Vietnam during the Vietnam War.
Some of the history of the Cold War certainly involved the arming of U.S. and Russian client states
against each other, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 U.S. policy changed to one of
facilitating the integration of Russia into the international system and its conversion into a democratic
capitalist system. Both the U.S. and Europe spent billions of aid dollars in programs in Russia from 1991
to 2012 to support these political and economic reforms. If they intended to destroy Russia, why would
they have made these large investments? It is also the case that President George H.W. Bush went to
great lengths to avoid dancing on the grave of the Soviet empire as it collapsed in order to avoid giving
fodder to Mikhail Gorbachev’s critics.
*Russia revisionist.
Malmgren 6-3 [Harald Malmgren, 6-3-2022, "Putin's war is just beginning", UnHerd,
https://unherd.com/2022/06/putins-war-is-just-beginning/, DOA: 7-2-2022 //ArchanSen]
Putin talked at length about the historic tragedy of the collapse of the Soviet Union, but also added that
the Soviet Bloc was the wrong model for what Russia needed. He made an impassioned explanation that
what Russia really needed was a new Peter the Great. He talked almost lovingly about Peter’s attempts
to upgrade Russia’s institutions and education system from 1682 to 1725. He argued that after the total
collapse of the USSR, it had become necessary to rebuild a Greater Russia under the leadership of a new
version of Peter.
Peter, he told me, had set in motion the magnificent strengthening of Russia completed by Catherine
the Great: the establishment of Novorossiya, or Imperial Russia, spanning all of the Baltic Sea, the
Nordics and Poland, as well as the peoples and nations to the west and to the south to the Azov and
Black Sea. He then made it clear he did not think the Soviet Bloc was the right model to achieve this, and
what he longed for was a return of Imperial Russia, not Soviet Russia.
Reflecting on this early interaction with this clearly ambitious young man, I was reminded of Putin’s path
from being Deputy Mayor of St Petersburg to serving under President Yeltsin in Moscow. In 1996 Yeltsin
asked the Mayor of St. Petersburg, Professor Sobchak, to come to Moscow and lead the drafting of a
new Constitution for the new Republic of Russia. Sobchak asked his protégé, Putin, to come along.
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In Moscow, Yevgeny Primakov, Yeltsin’s Prime Minister, had been known for years as “the Soviet
Union’s Kissinger”. I had known him since the Eighties. It was he who first introduced me to Putin in
1992 as a man likely to be important in Russia’s future. Primakov initially appointed Putin as head of the
FSB, but soon after asked him to take on the more comprehensive role of Secretary of the State Security
Council, effectively placing him in charge of shaping the new Russian Republic’s foreign policy. It was
said at the time that Primakov’s proposal filled Putin with a noticeable ecstasy, that fate had gifted him
with the opportunity to live his dream of reshaping Russian history.
Never one to shy away from an opportunity, Putin immersed himself in every aspect of Russia’s standing
in the world. He did, however, pay particular attention to the potential for nuclear weapons to
intimidate other nations. He published a new doctrine of nuclear threats, known as “Escalate to
Deescalate”. The public airing of this doctrine was meant to show that he was seriously considering
selective use of nuclear weapons not only inside Ukraine but in future conflicts with Baltic Sea
neighbours.
By 1999, the time had come for Yeltsin to step down. A new constitution had been approved, and Russia
was ready for a new leader. Several candidates appeared, but Sobchak, father of the constitution, and
Putin, the man designated to deal with foreign leaders, emerged as favourites. I recently asked people
who were there at the time how the competition was resolved, and was told Sobchak made the choice.
He said he was an academic, but not a man who would be good at managing a nation. He admitted he
thought “Vlad” was a man of action, just what Russia needed at that moment. So Putin was appointed
Prime Minister, and four months later elected President.
This elevation was extraordinary. To Putin, who dreamed of a return to Imperial Russia, it must have felt
like fate had chosen him to be a second incarnation of Peter the Great — a 21st-century Tsar, or even
Emperor. This self-perception may well have led him to embrace Xi Jinping, the other self-perceived
21st-century Emperor.
Russia an expansionist threat; we need to increase military readiness, including cyber
capabilities, to deter
Deborah Haynes, Security and Defence Editor, 6-28, 22, Britain and allies face '1937 moment' following
Ukraine war, head of army warns, https://news.sky.com/story/britain-and-allies-face-1937-momentfollowing-ukraine-war-head-of-army-to-warn-12641463
Britain and its allies face their "1937 moment" following Russia's invasion of Ukraine and must do
everything possible to avert another world war, the new head of the army has said. The warning
emerged as Prime Minister Boris Johnson is expected to announce an uplift in UK defence spending this
week, in line with growing security challenges. General Sir Patrick Sanders, the Chief of the General
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Staff, said Russian President Vladimir Putin and his "expansionist ambitions" pose the greatest threat to
sovereignty, democracy and the freedom to live without violence that he has ever known. His
comments, at an annual army conference in London, were made as Mr Johnson and fellow leaders of
the 30-member NATO alliance prepare to meet in Madrid for a landmark summit, dominated by the
West's response to Russia's war. General Sanders, who took over as chief of the army last month, said
his sole focus is "mobilising the army to meet the new threat we face". He said the "British Army is not
mobilising to provoke war, it is mobilising to prevent war" in Europe. He called the scale of the war in
Ukraine "unprecedented". "In all my years in uniform I haven't known such a clear threat to the
principals of sovereignty and democracy and the freedom to live without fear of violence as the brutal
aggression of President Putin and his expansionist ambitions," he said. His warnings will be echoed by
Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, who is also expected to speak at the army conference before he travels
to attend the NATO summit. The defence secretary is set to indicate a desire for greater spending on the
UK's armed forces from 2025, following what has already been a multi-billion-pound boost to defence
spending this parliament. "The defence secretary is expected to emphasise that now that the threat has
changed, governments must be prepared to invest to keep us safe," a defence source said. Another
defence source said: "We do not comment on alleged leaks. The defence secretary and the prime
minister have always said that the government will respond to any changes in threat, which is why in
2020 the Ministry of Defence received a record defence settlement." With Russia's invasion changing
the security landscape in Europe, the head of the NATO alliance has already revealed that allies will
significantly increase the size of a high readiness force to more than 300,000 personnel up from around
40,000. General Sanders gave details of his view on the threat posed by Russia and how his army is
adapting, with a greater focus on urban combat and rebuilding costly stockpiles of weapons - allowed to
be hollowed out to save money since the end of the Cold War. It is a move that will require all ranks
from general to lance corporal to "get ready, train hard and engage", he said. "This is our 1937
moment," the army chief said, referring to the crucial period leading up to World War Two. "We are not
at war - but must act rapidly so that we aren't drawn into one through a failure to contain territorial
expansion… I will do everything in my power to ensure that the British Army plays its part in averting
war." The challenge means the army must modernise, embracing new technologies such as cyber
warfare and long-range missiles, but also retain traditional soldiering skills. General Sanders said if a
battle came "standoff air, maritime or cyber fires are unlikely to dominate on their own - land will still be
the decisive to domain", adding that "you can't cyber your way across a river". He said the army's
mobilisation is "not the rush to war at the speed of the railway timetables of 1914" but is an
"acceleration of the most important parts of Future Soldier's bold modernisation agenda… an increased
focus on readiness and combined arms training." Future Soldier is the name given to the army's plans
for its capabilities. This will mean more training on combining the different domains of warfare - land,
sea, air, cyber and space as well as rebuilding stockpiles. General Sanders also said the army will "review
the deployability of our vehicle fleet". This could be a signal of a decision to be made about a multibillion-pound programme to develop a mini-tank called Ajax that has been beset with problems and has
not yet delivered. The top officer said deterring Russia "means more of the army ready more of the
time" and that he expects "all ranks to get ready, train hard and engage".
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Putin Revisionism
Putin is inherently aggressive and must be stopped. Any impacts of backing him into a
corner are non-unique
Motyl, 8-16, 22, Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A
specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is
the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of
Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative
Perspective.”, The Hill, Why Vladimir Putin must be humiliated, https://thehill.com/opinion/nationalsecurity/3599121-why-vladimir-putin-must-be-humiliated/
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The conventional wisdom has it that Vladimir Putin must not be humiliated, lest he do something crazy. The conventional wisdom is wrong.
Putin requires no humiliation to do something unhinged, and his humiliation is the only way to end the
Russo-Ukrainian War and give Russia a chance of returning to civilization. Humiliation is not about insulting Putin, nor is about exposing his
personal peccadilloes. Humiliation is about handing Putin a complete and total defeat on the battlefield, one that will not enable him to
“save face” and make a semi-plausible case for some form of Russian victory. Anything short of such a defeat will save Putin’s regime — as
well as Putin himself — from collapse, persuade Russians that their faith in Putin was justified and their responsibility for war crimes is nil,
and guarantee the war’s continuation. Putin must be humiliated for there to be a lasting and durable peace — and for Russia to begin its
The genocidal war against Ukrainians is Putin’s war, but it wasn’t just a matter of
his personal choice. Putin sits in the royal core of a highly centralized political system that, like
Adolf Hitler’s, thrives on and needs violence, both to maintain law and order at home
and to intimidate neighbors, acquire territory, power and influence, and justify its
fascist constitution and policies with its domestic supporters among the elites and
masses. Putin announced the start of the “special military operation” on Feb. 24, but it is the fascist, imperialist Russian state that is
long slog back to humanity.
waging hostilities, committing genocide and destroying Ukraine — all with the approval, sometimes enthusiastic and sometimes tacit, of
most Russians. Given these circumstances, if Putin manages to escape the consequences of Russia’s bellicosity by saving face and avoiding
humiliation, the political and social system of which he is the core will continue to exist and its violent policy preferences will continue to
determine Russia’s behavior internally and externally. Putin will remain in power and the fascist system that he has built so assiduously for
The Russo-Ukrainian War may enjoy a hiatus for a few months or
even years — and that will give the Russian military the opportunity to lick its wounds
and revive — but it inevitably will resume as soon as Putin, his system, and its
supporters feel the time is right. A comparison with Hitler is apposite. The Allies understood that Nazi Germany had to
over two decades will survive.
be defeated, completely and totally — that Hitler had to suffer humiliation and not be given the opportunity to save face. Anything short of
a complete and total defeat would have meant a continuation of the Hitler state, the Hitler society, and Hitler himself. It was only after
Hitler committed suicide and Nazi Germany capitulated that German society could be de-Nazified, albeit incompletely, and Germany be
transformed into a decent society. Does that mean invading Russia and reducing its cities to rubble? Of course not. A complete and total
defeat would entail liberating the Ukrainian territory seized by Russia in 2014 and in 2022; even driving the Russian troops to the preinvasion borders would suffice to humiliate Putin. In either case, his legitimacy with elites and masses would be undermined, the forces of
coercion that underpin fascist Russia would be severely weakened, fascist elites would reimagine themselves as democrats-in-hiding, and
the Russian people would be faced with the arduous task of shedding their love affair with power, war, strongmen and violence. Won’t a
Putin has amply
demonstrated already that he is delusional and willing to act on his delusions . It was
humiliated Putin incapable of saving face resort to some deranged action such as employing a nuclear weapon?
delusional to think he could conquer Ukraine in three days. And yet he tried. It is delusional to think that he is winning the war. And yet he
does. It is delusional to think that Russia’s economy can survive the sanctions intact. And yet he does. It was crazy to permit Russian soldiers
to dig trenches in the radioactive ground near the Chernobyl reactor. It is crazy to toy with the safety of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power
plant, Europe’s largest. It is, finally, crazy to embark openly and gleefully on genocide. But the good news is that a humiliated, defeated and
The Russian
führer may, in the depths of his bunker, desperately want to press the nuclear button,
but his manifest humiliation will deter the generals who need to endorse his folly
from doing so. Why follow a has-been into hell when acknowledging defeat can lead to more fortuitous outcomes for them and for
delegitimized Putin is far less likely to do something crazily destructive than a proud Putin who hasn’t lost face.
Russia? A leader who dwells amid delusional fantasies and delights in atrocities cannot be permitted to save face. His army must be
defeated, his regime must be dismantled, and he must be humiliated — completely and totally — for some Russians to come to their senses
and for peace to have a chance.
Putin committed to aggression
Feffer, June 29, 2022, John Feffer, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of the dystopian novel
Splinterlands and the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. Frostlands, a
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Dispatch Books original, is volume two of his Splinterlands series, and the final novel in the trilogy,
Songlands, has only recently been published. He has also written Right Across the World: The Global
Networking of the Far-Right and the Left Response, CHINA WILL DECIDE THE OUTCOME OF RUSSIA
VERSUS THE WEST, https://fpif.org/china-will-decide-the-outcome-of-russia-v-the-west/
Meanwhile, Putin pursued strategies aimed at weakening his perceived adversaries. He ratcheted up
cyberattacks in the Baltics, expanded maritime provocations in the Black Sea, advanced aggressive
territorial claims in the Arctic, and supported right-wing nationalists like France’s Marine Le Pen and
Italy’s Matteo Salvini to undermine the unity of the European Union. In 2016, he even attempted to
further polarize American politics via dirty tricks in support of Donald Trump. Always sensitive to
challenges to his own power, Putin watched with increasing concern as “color revolutions” spread
through parts of the former Soviet Union — from Georgia (2003) and Ukraine (2005) to Belarus (2006)
and Moldova (2009). Around the time of the 2013-2014 Euromaidan protests in Ukraine, he began
shifting domestically to a nationalism that prioritized the interests of ethnic Russians, while cracking
down ferociously on dissent and ramping up attacks on critics abroad. An intensifying sense of paranoia
led him to rely on an ever-smaller circle of advisors, ever less likely to contradict him or offer him bad
news. In the early 2020s, facing disappointment abroad, Putin effectively gave up on preserving even a
semblance of good relations with the United States or the European Union. Except for Viktor Orbán in
Hungary, the European far right had proven a complete disappointment, while his fair-weather friend
Donald Trump had lost the 2020 presidential election. Worse yet, European countries seemed
determined to meet their Paris climate accord commitments, which sooner or later would mean
radically reducing their dependence on Russian fossil fuels. In contrast to China’s eagerness to stay on
good terms with the United States and Europe, Putin’s Russia began turning its back on centuries of
“westernizing” impulses to embrace its Slavic history and traditions. Like North Korea’s Kim Jong-un
and India’s Narendra Modi, Putin decided that the only ideology that ultimately mattered was
nationalism, in his case a particularly virulent, anti-liberal form of it. All of this means that Putin will
pursue his aims in Ukraine regardless of the long-term impact on relations with the West. He’s clearly
convinced that political polarization, economic sclerosis, and a wavering security commitment to that
embattled country will eventually force Western powers to accommodate a more assertive Russia.
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Threat to Europe
Putin is a threat to all of Europe
Katja Hoyer, 6-17, 22, Washington Post, European leaders still can’t shake the urge to appease Russia,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/17/macron-scholz-draghi-kyiv-ukraine-russiaappeasement/
But this realpolitik approach is not only morally wrong, it is also shortsighted. Putin has notoriously
argued that the collapse of the Soviet Union, of which Ukraine was a constituent republic, was “the
greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” He has made it clear that he seeks to undo this
“catastrophe.” If Putin is appeased now, as he was in 2014 when Germany and France failed to freeze
the conflict in Ukraine, he will simply take the time to regroup. Bowing to economic pressures
undermines the entire concept of deterrence. Germany long dismissed warnings that Moscow might try
to leverage its deep dependence on Russian natural gas, thereby emboldening the Kremlin. Now
Germany, Italy and France seem prepared to make the same mistake again. With Poland, the Baltic
States, Finland and Sweden seriously concerned about their security, the soft Western European
approach is also likely to exacerbate tensions within the E.U. The German government, in particular,
remains tone-deaf to their concerns. Russia, meanwhile, shows little sign of concern. During the Kyiv
visit, former prime minister Dmitry Medvedev sneered at the European leaders, calling them “fans of
frogs, liverwurst and spaghetti.” Yet even as Moscow continues its indiscriminate bombing and shelling
of Ukrainian civilians, Russia’s politicians are still treated as rational actors by those who seek peace at
all costs. Putin cannot, and will not, give up his claim on Eastern Europe. The supposed realpolitik of
Europe’s most powerful countries is both shameful and ill-considered. France and Germany, of all
countries, should know that an ambitious dictator can never be appeased.
Russian aggression threatens all former Soviet states throughout Europe
Mark Episkopos, 6-12, 22, Mark Episkopos is a national security reporter for the National Interest, Putin
Invokes Peter the Great as Russia Prepares for Long War, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/putininvokes-peter-great-russia-prepares-long-war-202961
Russian president Vladimir Putin has delivered a stark vision of imperial restoration, drawing the
contours of Russia’s long-term strategic goals at a time of mounting global instability. “Peter the Great
waged the Great Northern War for 21 years. It would seem that he was at war with Sweden, he took
something from them. He did not take anything from them, he returned (what was Russia’s),” Putin said
in remarks delivered after the event. “Yes, that’s exactly how it is … when he established the new capital
[in St. Petersburg], none of the European countries recognized this territory as Russian, they recognized
it as part of Sweden. However, from time immemorial, the Slavs lived there along with the Finno-Ugric
peoples, and this territory was under Russia’s control. The same is true of the western direction, Narva
and his first campaigns. Why would he go there? He was returning and reinforcing, that is what he was
doing.” “Clearly, it fell to our lot to return and reinforce as well. And if we operate on the premise that
these basic values constitute the basis of our existence, we will certainly succeed in achieving our goals,”
Putin added. Putin, whose conception of Russia’s place in the world is deeply steeped in his reading of
his country’s past, has often framed his policies in historical terms. The Russian president has previously
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compared himself with Alexander III, a conservative modernizer who sought to avoid foreign
entanglements in order to focus on building up the Russian Empire’s industrial base and domestic
institutions. Putin has spoken favorably of Pyotr Stolypin, the iron-fisted prime minister of Russia who
ushered in a series of ambitious social, political, and economic reforms aimed at stopping and reversing
the further disintegration of the Russian Empire in the early twentieth century. Peter the Great, who
waged a series of wars to secure the budding Russian Empire’s place as a European great power, is
perhaps better suited as a source of wartime inspiration as Moscow digs in for a grinding conflict of
attrition in Ukraine. Yet there are deeper historical parallels implicit in Putin’s commentary. Peter was
not always and instantly successful in every military endeavor, but he was dogged in his pursuit of what
he defined as Russia’s core strategic objectives. He tempered his vision of Russia’s destiny as a dominant
continental power with a realistic assessment of what he can achieve in the short term, eschewing
maximalist wartime aims in favor of a piecemeal approach centered on gradually partitioning his rivals.
The Great Northern War did, in fact, result in Russia’s undisputed dominance over the Baltics and
propelled the Empire to great power status, but it dragged on for twenty-one years and was marked by
a slate of early battlefield setbacks for the Russian forces. To the extent that he deliberately singled out
the Northern War as an apt analogy for the current moment, Putin appears to be telling Russians to
strap in for a prolonged conflict. Since 2014, Putin has parsed Russia’s forays into Ukraine not as an
annexation, but as the restoration of Russia’s rightful historical borders. Putin has long spoken of a
special historical and spiritual connection between Russians and Ukrainians, whom he sees as essentially
one people. His historical framing of the conflict is the latest indication that the Kremlin is not
considering returning any of the Ukrainian territories that it currently occupies and could control in the
future. Just like it didn’t matter to Peter whether or not the European powers recognized St. Petersburg
as Russian, it doesn’t matter to Putin whether or not the West recognizes Kherson, Melitopol, Mariupol,
and any number of further military acquisitions in Ukraine as Russian. The underlying logic of his
Thursday remarks, which came as the Russian Baltic Fleet conducted military drills in Russia’s central
European enclave of Kaliningrad and the broader Baltic region, potentially applies to any territory that
was previously held by the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union, including Finland, the Baltic States,
and large swathes of Poland. “Today Putin said that Peter the Great wasn’t taking anything, he was
taking it back, and that it is our responsibility also to take back and strengthen. That’s how he sees his
mission - to take back what once was claimed by Russia. It’s a recipe for years of war,” tweeted former
Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt. Indeed, the thrust of the Russian president’s message extends far
beyond the war unfolding in Ukraine. It speaks to the restoration of what Putin sees as Russia’s rightful
place in the international system, supposedly stolen from it in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse
through the loss of empire on the one hand and successive rounds of NATO expansion on the other. For
the sixty-nine-year-old leader who is approaching his twenty-fourth year of rule, it has become a matter
of personal legacy and national destiny to revise Russia’s standing in the post-Cold War global order.
As the war in Ukraine roils on with seemingly no diplomatic offramps, it risks becoming—like Peter’s
Great Northern War—a long and bitter conflict with irrevocable consequences for Europe’s security
architecture.
Russia a threat to NATO
McInnis & Data, 5-20, 22, Kathleen J. McInnis, a senior fellow in the International Security Program and
the director of the Smart Women, Smart Power Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International
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Studies, and Daniel Fata, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense and a nonresident senior
advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Russia Is a Real Threat to NATO,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/05/20/russia-threat-nato-madrid-summit/
Recent events in Ukraine have once again proved that reports of NATO’s death are an exaggeration.
Many leaders across the alliance have been quick to respond to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with aid to
Kyiv, increases in their own country’s defense budgets, or both. But as the war grinds on and the
geopolitical reality of an adversarial relationship with Russia sets in, NATO must once again take the
longer view on what all this means for trans-Atlantic and global security. Conveniently, in less than two
months, NATO leaders will meet in Madrid to endorse the alliance’s new strategy. The key question,
therefore, is whether member states will use the moment to reforge NATO’s raison d’être to meet
current and future challenges—in particular, by naming Russia as a threat to the alliance itself. Given the
implications of Ukraine for European and global order, the stakes could hardly be higher. Some take the
view that Madrid should mark a reprioritization of U.S. efforts away from Europe and back toward Asia.
Their logic goes that not only is European defense spending increasing, but Russia has also
demonstrated ineptitude in the prosecution of its war in Ukraine. That means the longer-term need for
significant U.S. forces in Europe has also therefore declined. And, after all, China is the pacing threat for
Department of Defense planning. In fact, the opposite is true. For starters, Russian President Vladimir
Putin has made it abundantly clear that he views NATO as a strategic threat. Recent events suggest we
should take these statements at face value. In the runup to the current war, some analysts developed
elaborate rationales for why the buildup of Russian forces on the Ukrainian border didn’t mean an
invasion was coming, such as a strengthened negotiating position vis-à-vis Ukraine’s future political
directions. Another Russian invasion of Ukraine was so obviously strategically counterproductive that
there must have been another reason for the buildup. In the event, there wasn’t. And while Russian
military incompetence has been startling, planners shouldn’t leap to conclusions. Russian forces were
not able to capture Kyiv, but they have been able to seize tens of thousands of square miles of
territory along Ukraine’s eastern border—at least for now. Estonia, a Baltic NATO member that
borders Russia, is less than 20,000 square miles in size. Militaries can also reform, especially after
disaster, as Ukraine’s own army did after its failures in 2014.
The United States has good reasons to want to keep NATO vibrant: The strategic benefits of U.S.
leadership are manifold. Not only does American leadership in NATO provide pathways for organizing
military coalitions, but it also affords the United States privileged status on trade partnerships and
access to bases. If Putin achieves his aim of discrediting NATO, this could lead to trans-Atlantic
strategic insolvency: a situation whereby allies, including the United States, are unable to meet their
security obligations and, relatedly, maintain favorable standards of living for their populations. Which
brings us back to Madrid. The last time that NATO agreed on a strategic concept was in 2010. It is a
document that specified that, among other things, defense of allied territory remains a critical mission
for the alliance, but it is silent on naming nation-state threats to NATO. For a variety of domestic and
international political reasons, building formal consensus on threats among 30 allied states is extremely
challenging. Indeed, in the 2010 document Russia is viewed as an aspirational partner for NATO when it
comes to European security—despite the warning sign of Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia. In the
intervening years, Russia has conducted destabilizing disinformation campaigns in NATO states and has
attacked Ukraine twice. And while NATO leaders have condemned Russian aggression, the rhetoric falls
short of formally declaring Russia as a long-term strategic threat to the alliance. Durable consensus
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requires clarity. To prepare NATO to contend with this threat over the long term requires a frank
admission of the strategic realities that Russia poses in the alliance’s new strategic concept, to be
adopted in Madrid. As a practical matter, this will commit NATO members to take budgeting, force
planning, acquisition, and possible troop repositioning seriously—and put teeth into the declaration.
This is needed for NATO planners to determine, for example, whether spending 2 percent of GDP on
defense is sufficient to meet the challenges to the alliance. But the real value of the document is what
the collective members reaffirm as to what NATO continues to stand for, what it calls out as the threats
to the member territory, and what it intends to do to address, deter, and, if necessary, defend against
these threats. By stating up front that Russia is a formal threat, member states—and the alliance as a
whole—will find it harder to backslide from their current cohesion. It is difficult to overstate how
important it is for NATO to ensure its consensus is durable; as the war grinds on and publics begin
feeling the economic effects of the conflict and sanctions on Russia, the temptation to dilute support to
Ukraine will undoubtedly mount. Not to mention, calling it like it is will send an important message to
Putin: NATO will not be deterred.
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Russia Grey Zone
Russia and China exploiting US grey zone vulnerabilities
Starling & Seigel, 6-13, 22, Clementine G. Starling is a resident fellow and deputy director of the
Forward Defense practice at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security; Julia
Siegel is a program assistant with Forward Defense, The Future of U.S. Security Depends on Owning the
‘Gray Zone.’ Biden Must Get It Right,
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2022/06/13/the_future_of_us_security_depends_on_owni
ng_the_gray_zone_biden_must_get_it_right_836998.html
Conventional military superiority once guaranteed the security of the United States and its allies—but
no more. Adversaries like Russia and China have learned that if they cannot compete with the United
States conventionally, they can undermine U.S. security in the cyber, economic, and information
domains through offensive activities in the “gray zone,” or the space between peace (or cooperation)
and war (or armed conflict).
After decades of relying on its conventional power, the United States lacks a comprehensive strategy to
align gray-zone activities with the national goals it aims to achieve. More complicated still, this term is
ill-defined—if even acknowledged—in U.S. and allied strategies, creating an obstacle to further dialogue
and policy action. Current efforts are uncoordinated across the executive branch and relevant
stakeholders, and the desired end state is unclear.
The Biden administration, for its part, acknowledges the strategic imperative to effectively compete in
the gray zone with concepts like integrated deterrence, which is aimed at integrating all instruments of
power “across the spectrum of conflict.” Now, the forthcoming National Security Strategy (NSS),
National Defense Strategy (NDS), and Quadrennial Homeland Security Review (QHSR) provide an
opportunity to unite national efforts to deal with these nonmilitary security challenges.
But those documents must articulate how acting in the gray zone will advance national objectives, and
how U.S. government entities can better coordinate to deter aggression in nonmilitary spaces.
China and Russia have long integrated gray-zone operations into their strategies.
In 1999, for example, two Chinese military strategists penned a paper called “Unrestricted Warfare,”
proposing the continuous use of nonmilitary operations to compensate for U.S. military superiority. That
was followed in 2003 by “The Three Warfares,” which zeroes in on information-related warfare using
psychological, public opinion, and legal means. And in what has been described as the Gerasimov
Doctrine, Russia fuses military and non-military means to spur chaos. This was on display before and
during Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, when Russian hackers targeted Ukrainian government and private
sites with malware and distributed denial-of-service attacks.
It is important to note the different approaches and goals of the United States’ two main adversaries in
the gray zone: While China hopes to make the world safer for its brand of authoritarianism, Russia
aims to weaken NATO and command its former Soviet “near abroad.”
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Yet both routinely leverage many forms of statecraft to undermine the rules-based international order,
setting the tone for future contestation in the gray zone. These activities directly and intentionally strike
pressure points within the target state’s society and across their alliances. When Moscow meddled in
the 2016 U.S. election, for example, it exploited fault lines in American democracy; and when nations
adopt Huawei 5G, they compromise their own physical and digital infrastructure.
More broadly, the gray zone blurs the otherwise clear-cut distinction between threats at home and
abroad, underscoring the reality that the homeland is no longer a sanctuary—at least in non-physical
spaces such as the cyber and information domains. While the United States’ geographic location has
proved historically advantageous—bordered by allies and flanked by international waters that protect
it from attack—digital and physical infrastructure advancements and enhanced global connectivity
have rendered these barriers obsolete when attacked by non-physical means.
Gray zone attacks can (and have) challenged international stability while simultaneously hitting closer
to home, exploiting societal cleavages and domestic vulnerabilities. If the United States continues to
view homeland defense and global interests separately, it leaves a blind spot for competitors to
exploit.
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Need Hard Power to Stop Russia
Only hard power stops Russia; Putin doesn’t care about norms and laws
Boot, 4-3, 22, Max Boot is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations and the author of “The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in
Vietnam., Washingtom Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/04/03/atrocities-arethe-russian-way-of-war/
Russian dictator Vladimir Putin got one thing right: His invasion did lead to Ukrainian civilians greeting
troops as liberators. Only they weren’t greeting Russian troops. They were greeting the Ukrainian troops
who in recent days have entered villages around Kyiv that had been occupied by the Russians for more
than a month. The Ukrainian government proclaimed on Saturday that all of the Kyiv administrative
region had been freed of Russian control. It was as if the Free French forces were entering Paris in 1944.
The reason civilians were so jubilant to be liberated has become grimly apparent. Sickening pictures
from Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, show the corpses of residents who had been bound, shot and left by the
side of the road. The mayor of Bucha said that some 270 people had been found in two mass graves and
another 40 were lying dead in the streets. The atrocities in Bucha were no aberration. There is ample
evidence of other war crimes by Russian troops across Ukraine. Human Rights Watch has documented
Russian troops committing rape, summary execution and looting. In Mariupol, the Russians
bombarded a theater where civilians were sheltering. The word “CHILDREN” was printed in Russian in
huge white letters outside. An effort to discourage aerial attack may have actually invited it. Some 300
people in the building were reported killed by Russian bombs on March 16. But it is one thing to kill
civilians with bombs and missiles. It is another to kill them with bullets to the back of the head. This is a
different level of evil — the kind of organized atrocity that Europe has not seen since the Srebrenica
massacre in Bosnia in 1995. Russia’s “anti-Nazi” operation has led Russian troops to act precisely as the
Nazis once did. If there is any justice in the world, Russian war criminals, from Putin on down, will
someday face the kind of justice that the Nazis received at Nuremberg. This, sadly, is the Russian way of
war. It is how Putin’s forces fought in Chechnya and Syria — and before that, how Soviet forces fought
in Afghanistan and in central Europe during World War II. They commit war crimes to terrorize the
population into surrender. But it hasn’t worked in Ukraine. Russia’s savagery has simply caused the
Ukrainians to resist all the harder because they know they are fighting not just for their freedom but for
their very survival. In the past week, the invaders have been driven out of the Kyiv area, with crippling
losses. The Russians have lost, according to open-source reporting, at least 400 tanks and, according to
the State Department, at least 10,000 troops; by a standard military metric, that means another 30,000
Russian soldiers may have been wounded. So roughly a fourth of the initial Russian assault force —
which included Putin’s best troops — is probably out of action. Some still suggest, incredibly, that the
Russian attack on Kyiv was a feint or a brilliant maneuver by Putin to distract his enemies. History will, in
fact, record it as a catastrophic military blunder. Having failed in their initial objective of regime change,
the Russians are trying to reorganize their battered and depleted forces to capture the Donbas region of
eastern Ukraine. This would have been much easier to do at the outset of the war, without those heavy
losses. Now the Russians will be hard-put to encircle the Ukrainian forces in the east, which have been
fighting Russian-backed separatists since 2014. How will this war end? No one can yet say. The
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Ukrainians are rightly enraged by Russian atrocities and will be less likely to make territorial
compromises with the invaders, knowing that to do so would be to consign their fellow citizens to a
Stalinist hell. But as a former Putin adviser says, “Russia cannot afford to ‘lose,’ so we need a kind of a
victory.” The 1995 Dayton Accords, which ended the war in Bosnia, should remind us that it is possible
to make peace even with war criminals — but only after they have been defeated. There is no
indication yet that Putin feels he has lost this war. That is why it is so essential that Russia suffer a
decisive defeat in the Donbas. The West must continue to ramp up aid to Ukraine, providing it with the
kind of heavy combat systems needed to drive back the Russians in the south and east as they have
already done in the north. It is good to see the Biden administration getting ready to transfer tanks to
Ukraine. Other weapons, including artillery, fighter aircraft and long-range air defense systems, must
follow. The only way to achieve peace at this point is not by negotiating with the Russians but by
defeating them. As for the Europeans: It is time, finally, to stop all oil and gas purchases from Russia.
Germany, in particular, cannot continue paying blood money that subsidizes today’s version of the Nazi
Einsatzgruppen mobile killing squads. Enough is enough.
The US is key to checking Russian aggression and escalation in Ukraine through a
compellence strategy
Hoffman 4/28/22 [Frank G. Hoffman, Dr. Frank G. Hoffman serves on the Board of Advisors at the Foreign
Policy Research Institute and holds an appointment as a Distinguished Research Fellow at the National Defense
University in Washington, D.C., where he has served since 2011. Dr. Hoffman graduated from the Wharton
Business School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1978. He holds Master’s degrees from George Mason
University in Educational Leadership and the U.S. Naval War College in National Security Studies. He earned his
Ph.D. in War Studies from King’s College, London., 4-28-2022, "America Needs a Comprehensive Compellence
Strategy Against Russia," Foreign Policy Research Institute, https://www.fpri.org/article/2022/04/america-needsa-comprehensive-compellence-strategy-against-russia/]//AA
The Biden
administration has formulated an unprecedented response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The
coordination of transatlantic diplomacy, including the condemnation of Russia at the United Nations and
the implementation of a massive sanctions package, is truly impressive. The president’s recent request for an additional
$33 billion from Congress in security, economic, and humanitarian aid for Ukraine demonstrates the seriousness of America’s commitment to European security.
While the White House should be applauded for its response to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, this only tells part of the story. Indeed, none of these diplomatic
initiatives would have been necessary had the United States and its allies successfully deterred Russia from attacking Ukraine in the first place. Deterrence
failed because the United States and its allies signaled, in advance, that it was not prepared to apply
direct military force in Ukraine. It did so because it was afraid of Vladimir Putin’s nuclear threats.
America’s risk calculus was framed by the fear of nuclear escalation and Washington’s overestimation of
Russian military power. While initial efforts to deter Russia have failed, the West should now pursue a different
approach. Rather than deterrence, the United States should focus on compellence. A comprehensive
compellence strategy toward Russia would entail the focused integration of covert and overt military
power, as well as a greater efforts to conduct information operations inside Russia to weaken Putin’s
fragile political control. The goal of such a strategy could be to force Putin to stop the war, not merely help
Ukraine stave off defeat. It strives to achieve this by raising costs to Moscow beyond sanctions and political isolation. The
strategy would help the West coalesce around the objective of ending the war in the near term, but also
forcing a negotiated conclusion to hostilities that would be more advantageous to Ukrainian and
Western interests. The West’s aim should be to ensure Putin suffers an operational failure, not accede to Russia’s subjugation of Ukraine or some
tortured negotiated compromise. The Need for Compellence Ukraine has, thus far, been brilliant in asymmetric tactics with creative
applications of modern tools of warfare. Nevertheless, Russian forces have destroyed much of Ukraine’s infrastructure, while
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roughly 25 percent of the nation’s population is displaced and hungry. Without
support from the United States and the West,
Ukraine may still be unable to prevent Russia from achieving its new goals, which likely include seizing the entire
southern coast of Ukraine, including Odessa. With the opening of the new phase of the war in Donbas and the Black Sea coastline, both sides of the
conflict are now engaged in a race of strategic and operational adaptation. The coming battles will be on different
terrain, and require altered tactics and weapons than the initial fighting around Kyiv. This will be a very different battlefield and the
results are not preordained. Which side learns faster and altered its strategy and force employment best
will determine the course of this war in the second phase. The Elements of Comprehensive Compellence One month before the war started,
FPRI’s Rob Lee argued that Moscow’s compellence strategy would include the use of military force directly against Kyiv or more likely by punitive raids deep into
the eastern half of Ukraine. He argued, “By inflicting heavy losses on the Ukrainian military, taking prisoners of war, and degrading Kyiv’s defense capabilities,
Russia could potentially alter Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s incentive structure sufficiently to induce painful concessions.” Despite Ukraine’s
successful effort to turn back Russian forces around Kyiv, Russia’s
compellence strategy has not yet failed. As a result, it
needs to be undercut by NATO with a more comprehensive approach. A robust U.S. counter to Moscow,
what might be called comprehensive compellence, would build on the administration’s defense
strategy concept of integrated deterrence to get Putin to alter his misguided effort in Ukraine. Compellence
is normally a harder task historically than deterrence, but given Russia’s dysfunctional military effectiveness, the cost-benefit analysis for compellence in this
case augurs for success. Deterrence and compellence share some common elements but are conceptually distinct. Deterrence seeks to persuade an adversary to
not to take some action that it is capable of. On the other hand, compellence is an effort to persuade the opponent to stop some behavior or change its course
due to the threat of coercive force or via incentives. Compellence
is often needed in the wake of deterrence failure. While
America’s efforts to deter a Russian invasion of Ukraine failed, a compellence strategy would have a
greater chance of success. After Russia’s inept military campaign and Ukraine’s effective resistance, the balance of power now
favors the United States and its allies. Russian losses on the battlefield and degraded economic strength due to sanctions make the military
components of a Western compellence strategy even more credible. A strategy of comprehensive compellence in support of Ukraine would have
five elements or lines of effort. Diplomatic and political This element is already being aggressively pursued by the Biden
administration in its political and economic isolation of Russia and its leaders. It has successfully made Putin a
pariah in most circles, although China, India, and some other states are taking a different approach. The European Union and NATO have been
energized and coordinated brilliantly. Efforts similar to the removal of Russia from the U.N. Human Rights Council should be pursued, including the forthcoming
G20 meeting this year. In any event, after a year or two of sanctions, Russia
may be functionally dismissed from the G20 entirely
depending upon the price of oil and natural gas. In terms of a new initiative, Finland and Sweden should be offered swift approval
of their applications for membership in NATO. While their applications are under consideration by NATO’s 30 member states, the
United Kingdom and United States should offer Finland and Sweden immediate security guarantees to protect them from Russian threats. The application
process has historically taken over a year, and Russia will undoubtedly apply coercive pressure against the applicants. Additionally, former Finnish Prime
Minister Alexander Stubb should be made a NATO official with a chance to become the next secretary general when Jens Stoltenberg’s term ends in 2023. The
North Atlantic Council might consider Amb. (ret.) Ivo Daldler’s proposal to admit Ukraine now. However, this would be resisted by key NATO members, and
should be left to the final negotiations. Informational The ongoing war has stressed the importance of strategic communications, and Zelensky
has proven to be extremely effective in the battle of narratives. Moscow has employed its usual
playbook of disinformation and propaganda, but to little discernable effect in Europe and North America. Russia continues to
apply its concept of information confrontation against NATO and Ukraine. It persistently seeks to exploit
identified vulnerabilities of democratic societies using cyber and information operations. Russia’s goal is
to exacerbate existing societal, political, and military divisions. Key targets of this approach are the legitimacy of Ukraine’s government and
NATO cohesion. Putin has been outdone by the determined and savvy Zelenskyy in this dimension of the conflict. However, Putin’s efforts gain more purchase in
China, in democratic states like India, and parts of Africa. Efforts
to pierce the fog of disinformation inside Russia should be
intensified. There are few sources for independent news inside the country, but a few techniques seem to still be working. Ukraine has taken a macabre
approach with facial recognition technology to identify and contact the families of fallen Russian soldiers to inform them of the fate of their loved one. They
have also constructed websites for families to gain information on the status of their family members fighting against Ukraine, and at the same time receive
some perspective on the scale of the war that Moscow hides from its own citizens. In Kyiv, the Information Strategies Council of Ukraine, a coalition of activists
and think tanks, sent emails and social media messages directly to 15 million Russian men of draft age. It has also targeted older Russians with different tailored
messages, using historical references to stimulate a questioning of Moscow-generated news reports and propaganda. NATO
and the European
Union need to create the capacity to design and conduct an information offensive into Russia and
overwhelm Putin’s control of information. Putin seems to be afraid of “fifth columns” at home. That vulnerability should be exploited
more. The U.S. Global Engagement Center has the mission to ‘‘lead, synchronize, and coordinate efforts of
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the Federal Government in countering foreign state and foreign non-state propaganda and
disinformation efforts.” It may be a model to build upon, but it will take a collective effort from European states to establish an ability to project
truth into Russia, and penetrate Putin’s dominance of his domestic information ecosystem. Russian cyber attacks against Ukraine have
not been effective so far. However, Russian intelligence, particularly the GRU-supported Sandworm
team, are persistently threatening Ukraine’s electricity generation capacity and its power grid. The Zelensky
government is facing an ongoing surge in cyber activity at present. The West can do more to support the Ukrainians in this
battlespace with both technical and intelligence support to ensure that their critical infrastructure is
preserved and functional. The Ukrainians seem to be holding their own despite Russia’s presumed cyber dominance. Military The
principal military stick in this strategy is supplied by the Ukrainians themselves, abetted by Western
arms. This will have to be both accelerated and sustained during the next phase which is likely to involve intensive artillery and missile consumption. It will
also require mass quantities of supplies, and enough drones to supplement the limited assets now flown by the Ukrainians. Recently, aid
was increased by another increment. This new tranche of $800 million sounds enormous and the material is being delivered at an unprecedented timeline. Even
with the recent presidential request of $33 billion in aid from Congress, it may be both inadequate and too late. More
covert but direct kinetic
means will be necessary as this is a war of considerable attrition. Indirect modes of conflict via proxy forces are nothing new
(e.g., El Salvador, Angola, and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon). The use of proxy forces has a long history but also a growing salience in an era of strategic
competition. One of the evolving modes of warfare that is suited for comprehensive compellence is “surrogate warfare.” In this mode of warfare, state’s avoid
the use of their own soldiers as the primary bearer of warfare’s grave costs, and delegate it to proxy forces and the use of remotely fielded technological
surrogates to better enable the state to manage the risks of modern conflict. They
may also employ paramilitary forces for
intelligence support for targeting critical nodes of the attacking force. For this conflict, this would mean the a
greater use of allied tools for cyber warfare, greater intelligence sharing, and more unmanned precision strikes on key Russian operational centers
and critical supply links inside Ukraine. Finally, NATO’s posture has been prudently enhanced with the deployment of
four new NATO battlegroups in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. More needs to be done to prepare for cross-border contingencies.
NATO should posture one or two division-plus sized forces outside Ukraine in case peacekeeping or armed humanitarian intervention is needed. One can
anticipate that human security and disaster relief operations may be needed in short order given the scale of the destruction of Ukrainian energy, medical, and
water supplies. Economic
America and its allies have implemented a massive sanctions package against
Russia. As a result, Russian finances may soon be in default and its economy could nosedive. More attention should
be paid to Russia’s energy exports. As FPRI’s Chris Miller notes “if you want to hit Russia hard, you’ve got to go after energy. Everything else is really pretty small
by comparison.” Since there is little support in some capitals for more intensive sanctions, there may be value in defining their duration and the conditions for
tempering them. Some have proposed that the West continue sanctions for as long as Putin remains in power. In essence, this is a call for regime change. Such a
threat may not achieve much in real terms but it carries some risk since it directly challenges the Kremlin’s principal power center. It is highly unlikely to be
accepted by German or French leaders. A more
strategic approach would be to keep sanctions remain in place until
Russian forces have departed all agreed territories and military commanders are turned in to
appropriate authorities. Comprehensive compellence should also include funding for Ukraine’s restoration. The Economist estimates the
reconstruction tab for Ukraine at $200–520 billion. As some scholars have recently written, rather than simply freeze Russia’s hard currency reserves in Western
banks, those currency reserves should be liquidated and put to use. These assets should be collected and transferred to the International Criminal Court in
escrow for reparations. The West should start proceedings to allot reparations to Kyiv from those funds. This would communicate to the Russian leadership that
every day of destruction in Ukraine is simply another day of reconstruction in its future, which Moscow will pay for. Ideally, this might induce them to stop
attacking and terrorizing civilians and operate within the law of armed conflict. Legal
The West should purse indictments at the
International Criminal Court for each division and Army commander whose area of responsibility is
shown to have committed crimes against humanity and other violations of international law. Washington
should also do the same for corporate and unit leaders of the Wagner Group, the mercenaries purportedly behind the Bucha massacre. Judicial proceedings may
be far off, but the intent to prosecute needs to be clear now.
Reimagined U.S. containment has the ability to check Russian aggression
Daalder 3/1/22 [Daalder, Ivo H., Ivo H. Daalder is President of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and host
of World Review with Ivo Daalder. He served as the US ambassador to NATO from 2009 to 2013. Ambassador
Daalder was educated at the universities of Kent, Oxford, and Georgetown, and received his PhD in political
science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is married to Elisa D. Harris, and they have two
sons., “The Return of Containment: How the West Can Prevail Against the Kremlin”, Foreign Affairs,
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2022-03-01/return-containment]//AA
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Russia’s unprovoked assault on Ukraine did not come as a surprise. The United States and its European
allies learned last fall what Russia planned to do, and even publicized the Kremlin’s plans to the world. Even so, they failed to
prevent Russia’s onslaught on its much weaker neighbor. Once they ruled out direct military assistance to Ukraine, deterring
a Russia bent on controlling its neighbors and upending the post-1990 European security order was always going to be a tall order.
The same threats that failed to dissuade Russia from invading before—severe sanctions, military assistance to Ukraine, and beefing up NATO—are
unlikely to compel Russia from changing course now. Instead, Washington and its democratic allies
need to embark on a strategy of containment that increases the cost to Russia and eventually forces
internal political change that brings the brutal regime of Vladimir Putin to an end. The outlines of this playbook are
familiar, first set out in the late 1940s by George F. Kennan, a senior diplomat in the Moscow embassy, and elaborated on in the pages of this magazine. Kennan
argued that the Stalin
regime’s paranoia and insecurities represented a clear danger to the West and called
for steady, forceful counterpressure. But Kennan also believed the Soviet Union was weak and suffered from internal contradictions that would
ultimately undo the regime. Containment took 40 years to succeed and involved plenty of needless mistakes by the United States—including launching the Vietnam
War and backing the violent overthrow of a number of governments. But the policy ultimately unleashed forces inside the Soviet Union that led to the end of the
regime. A
return to a robust policy of containment is now the West’s best option. The fundamental goal
will remain the same as the old policy: to counter Russian expansionism, inflict real costs on the Russian
regime, and encourage internal change that leads to the ultimate collapse of Putin and Putinism. Of course,
it needs to be adapted to the realities as they exist today rather than those that prevailed at the end of World War II. In particular, Russia’s
close ties to a strong and newly assertive China will have to be addressed proactively. Still, Russia isn’t the
Soviet Union, a military and ideological colossus nearly equal to the United States. Although it remains a nuclear power, its military is a shadow of its
former Soviet self, and its economy is smaller than Canada’s, which has a quarter of Russia’s population. Meanwhile, the West has grown stronger.
The United States retains unrivaled military power and has an economy 13 times larger than that of
Russia. Europe, a defeated continent scarred by war and poverty after World War II, has emerged as a cohesive economic giant with a military that, although
underfunded, enjoys significant modern capabilities to defend against a stretched Russian military. As a result, although a policy of containment will not
deliver swift success or victory, its steady application in the months and years ahead should drive the necessary change in Russia
within the next five to ten years. Three Pillars An effective twenty-first century update of containment would
consist of three main pillars: maintaining U.S. military strength, decoupling Western economies from
Russia, and isolating Moscow. Together, these three elements will steadily increase the cost to Russia of continuing its expansionist policies,
foment internal dissent and debate, and ultimately could force a change in governance. To be clear, such change must be driven internally—
although the United States seeks an end to Putinism, this will occur only when the Russian people decide the time has come. Also, a return to
containment will not lead to an immediate end to the war in Ukraine. That will require additional
measures, including providing Ukraine with the military means it needs to defend itself and resist occupation if Russia succeeds in taking over part or all of the
country. And it will require massive economic and humanitarian assistance to help the besieged population in
Ukraine and those who have been forced to flee the country. Although the United States and other NATO countries maintain
significant militaries, two decades of European under-investment and U.S. military engagement in the Middle East and Afghanistan have left NATO profoundly
unprepared for a return to a strong deterrent posture. The subordination of the Belarussian military to Russian command and the invasion of Ukraine mean that a
new front line is being drawn from the Baltic to the Black Sea—with the eastern borders of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania
effectively marking NATO’s new eastern flank. As a result, NATO needs to move swiftly to defend the new front. The
alliance has taken steps to
bolster deterrence in the East, but these moves fall short of what the situation demands. The United States has
doubled its ground presence in Poland, to 9,000 troops, and sent air and naval reinforcements to other countries. France, Germany, and the United Kingdom have
increased their military presence in Romania, Slovakia, and the Baltic states. NATO has activated its 40,000-strong Response Force for the first time, though current
plans do not include full mobilization of the entire force. While
these initial steps have strengthened the forces that were
deployed East in the wake of Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014, they amount to little more than
a tripwire that will be unable to offer a robust defense if Russia attacks NATO territory. NATO’s moves have fallen short of what the
situation demands. That is why a fundamental rethinking of NATO’s forward force posture is now
necessary. NATO needs to deploy tens of thousands of troops, rather than the few thousand that have
so far been committed. The most immediate requirement is to deploy two to three combat brigades to eastern Poland and southern Lithuania to
defend the Suwalki gap, the 60 miles that separate Russian Kaliningrad and Belarus. If Russian or Belarussian forces were to connect these territories, the Baltic
states would effectively be cut off from the rest of NATO. Preparing
for a long-term presence in the East will also require
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making significant investments in ports, rail lines, airfields, roads, fuel supply, and other critical
infrastructure to improve NATO’s capacity to rapidly reinforce its troops. Moreover, given Putin’s threats to use nuclear
weapons, combined with the deployment of nuclear-capable and likely armed missiles in Kaliningrad and other parts of western Russia and possibly in Belarus,
NATO will need to consider the adequacy of its nuclear posture. None of this is to suggest that NATO needs to prepare for
war. The point is that deterrence now requires greater visibility and forward presence than was the case before Russia attacked
Ukraine. Whatever Putin may be thinking about forcefully revising the post-1990 security order in Europe, NATO needs to make clear that he cannot succeed.
That requires a strong deterrent presence East and a major commitment to increase spending for the long run. Germany’s decision
to spend 100 billion euros now and at least two percent of GDP on defense going forward is a big step in the right direction. Beyond Military Might Although military
strength is a core requirement of deterrence, it is not enough. Indeed, the
forward deployment of military forces will initially
reinforce the divisions in Europe—and would leave the peoples of Ukraine, the Caucuses, and indeed of Belarus and Russia, under Putin’s
dominion. The West cannot allow a return of an Iron Curtain dividing Europe. That is why the new containment also needs a policy of
economic decoupling and political isolation—measures that are designed to inflict ever increasing costs
on Russia and force change from within. The sanctions announced by the United States and its allies are an important first
step. Russia has been effectively cut off from credit and financial support, and technology export
controls will severely curtail imports into Russia. Meanwhile, sanctions on Putin, his cronies, and their families will leave them isolated in
their dachas in Russia, unable to gallivant on their yachts in St Tropez or their London duplexes. Though many have criticized these sanctions as too little, too late,
these critiques assume that their purpose is to stop Russia’s military advance. That was never going to happen. Instead, sanctions
are designed to
inflict costs over months and years to force a change of behavior. The effectiveness of sanctions on Russia will depend on two
factors. First, their sting requires that they be applied by as many countries as possible. The Biden administration has been right to walk in lockstep with Europe,
even as it has engaged diplomatically for months to push for the maximum possible sanctions. It may make people in Washington feel good for the United States to
announce a rash of sanctions, but unless others agree to follow, their impact will be limited. As the case of Iran has shown, coordinated sanctions from 2010
onwards produced a real nuclear agreement; the unilateral maximum pressure from the United States since 2018 has only led Iran to accelerate its nuclear
program. Europe gets 40 percent of its natural gas from Russia. Second, energy
is key. Former Senator John McCain once memorably described Russia as “a
gas station masquerading as a country.” But it is a big gas station, especially for Europe, which still gets 40 percent of its natural gas
from Russia. Some countries, including the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Latvia are almost completely dependent for their gas heat and electricity on imports
from Russia. Although restricting Russian oil and gas imports would hit the Russian economy, which is highly dependent on fossil fuel exports, the damage such
restrictions would do to European economies would be grave as well. True decoupling will thus take years, not weeks or months, as Europe finds alternative sources
of gas and reduces its reliance on fossil fuels as part of its climate change commitments. Aside from military strength and economic decoupling, Russia
will
also need to be isolated politically. Its unprovoked attack represented a blatant violation of the UN Charter and international law and runs
counter to Russia’s commitment not to change borders by force—a commitment Moscow repeated numerous times in European security declarations, including the
Helsinki Final Act in 1975, the Charter of Paris in 1990, and the Astana OSCE Declaration in 2010. And Russia
clearly violated its explicit
guarantee in 1994 to respect Ukraine’s borders and territorial integrity in return for Kyiv’s commitment
to give up its nuclear weapons. There can be no return to business as usual with an outlaw regime. To be
sure, diplomatic channels need to remain open, as they were during the Cold War. But Russia’s normal
engagement with the rest of the international community must come to an end. The International Olympic
Committee’s recommendation that sporting competitions ban athletes from Russia and Belarus was the right call, as was the decision by FIFA and UEFA to ban
Russian soccer teams from the World Cup and European championships. The isolation must extend well beyond sports, however. There is no place for Russia in the
G20 and the diplomatic dance of European leaders heading off to Moscow that preceded Russia’s attack on Ukraine needs to cease. Aside from Russia’s complete
and unconditional withdrawal from all of Ukraine—including the territory it has occupied and annexed since 2014—there is nothing to talk about. That
includes suspending the strategic stability talks that were aimed at creating a predictable and stable
relationship with Russia. No such relationship is possible so long as Putin is in power. "We will make sure
that Putin will be a pariah on the international stage," President Biden declared. At the same time, just as during the
Cold War, there needs to be a concerted effort to engage Russian civil society. Inside Russia, opposition to the war is already
surprisingly widespread, as evidenced by the demonstrations that erupted in recent days in more than 50 cities. As Russian soldiers return in body bags and
sanctions begin to bite, that opposition is bound to grow. Russians will need access to accurate information, which Western governments can provide through social
media, the internet, and broadcasting. People-to-people exchanges should continue. The
United States has opened doors to refuseniks
before. It can do so again. Updating the Playbook To succeed, the new containment policy must be embraced by all
Western allies—in Europe, in North America, and even in Asia. Russia, like the Soviet Union before it, is keen to exploit divisions within and between
democracies. It has interfered in elections for years and supported far right politics in Europe and beyond. It has used bribes and Western energy dependence to
divide Europe. Putin
saw the divisions within NATO sown by U.S. President Donald Trump during his four
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years in office, and the disagreements over Afghanistan and submarine sales to Australia that occurred
since, as evidence that the West was weak and divided. Now, he likely thought, was the time to strike.
Putin was wrong. The West has been remarkably unified in its response. Even before Russia’s attack, Western unity within
NATO and beyond had solidified. The Biden administration, perhaps learning from its Afghanistan stumbles, did a superb job of bringing its allies together by sharing
information, consulting frequently, and demonstrating tough, determined leadership. The result has been significant: strong sanctions, bolstered deterrence, and
total political solidarity with Ukraine. To preserve this unity, the
United States, which has once again emerged as a leader of
the West, will need to carefully listen to allies and be willing to change course to keep everyone on
board. There will be times when internal divisions will raise questions about the solidity of the coalition. During the Cold War, NATO seemed to be in perpetual
crisis—except when it mattered most. There is no place for Russia in the G20. An important difference between the Cold War era and today is
the status of China. No longer a bit player on the global scene, Beijing has emerged as the Washington’s biggest competitor and largest geopolitical challenger in the
Indo-Pacific and beyond. The
Ukraine crisis emerged at a moment when the relationship between Russia and
China has become particularly close. Their leaders have met 38 times since Xi Jinping became president of China in 2012, including most
recently at the opening of the Winter Olympics. There, they issued a joint statement noting that their partnership had “no
limits.” Far from condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Beijing has blamed the United States and NATO for taking
insufficient account of Russia’s security interests. Beijing’s pronouncements, however, contained an undercurrent of unease with
Putin’s moves. The joint statement was notably silent on Ukraine, and official statements have consistently stressed China’s principled commitment to sovereignty,
territorial integrity, and noninterference in the internal affairs of other nations. China abstained on a UN Security Council Resolution condemning Russia, rather than
joining Moscow in voting against. And Beijing has never recognized Russia’s annexation of Crimea, suggesting it may keep an open mind on the future of Ukraine.
There is scope, therefore, for quiet diplomacy to gauge whether Beijing might be persuaded to help put pressure on Russia. Even
if Beijing has its
doubts, however, it is hardly in its interest to help the United States against Russia. Indeed, Chinese
leaders no doubt welcome the U.S.’s renewed preoccupation with security in Europe because it gives
Beijing more freedom of maneuver in its own region. China is also likely to help alleviate some of the economic consequences of
sanctions for Russia, though there are limits to how much it can do, especially on the financial side, where transactions largely remain the domain of western
currencies from which Russia has now been banned. Containing
Russia will therefore require paying attention to China. One
way to increase the West’s leverage over Beijing would be to strengthen the political, economic, and military ties between the advanced democracies in Asia,
Europe, and North America. An expanded G-7, for example, could include Australia and South Korea as well as the involvement of the heads of the EU and NATO.
These nations and organizations will need to devise common strategies and policies not only to contain Russia but also to compete effectively with China. February
24 was a turning point in history. Democratic powers of the West are once again called upon to defend a rules-based order that has been violently uprooted.
Fortunately, the
Western powers possess the innate strength necessary to contain Russia and outcompete
China for influence across the globe. The only real question is whether they have the will and
determination to do so in unison.
US heg is key deterring Russia and preventing nuclear war
De Witte 4/20/22 [De Witte, Melissa, Melissa De Witte is the deputy director for social science
communications for the Stanford News Service. She attained an M.A. in Media, Culture, & Communication from
NYU and a B.Sc. in Sociology from LSE. She was previously the digital communications manager for the Division
of Social Sciences at UC Santa Cruz., “The U.S. must do what it can to prevent Russian military from crossing the
nuclear threshold, Stanford scholar says”, Stanford News, https://news.stanford.edu/2022/04/20/u-s-must-canprevent-russian-military-crossing-nuclear-threshold/]//AA
Nuclear weapons are not just a force used to deter another state from attacking – they can also be a shield behind which one
can engage in aggression, says Stanford scholar Scott Sagan. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s reminder of Russia’s
nuclear arsenal at the beginning of its recent invasion into Ukraine is a warning to the United States and
other NATO members that if they get directly involved in the conflict, there could be a risk of nuclear
escalation, said Sagan, the co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). Here, Sagan discusses Putin’s nuclear threat – it is
estimated that Russia’s stockpile includes 4,477 nuclear warheads, according to a report published by the Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists – and what could happen if Russia crosses the nuclear threshold, a line that hasn’t been crossed since 1945, when the U.S. detonated two atomic
bombs in Japan. Sagan’s research examines nuclear strategy, nuclear proliferation, the ethics of war, and public opinion of combat. Back in February, Putin
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publicly ordered his Minister of Defense to put
Russian nuclear forces into “special combat readiness.” He also warned
in a televised statement that if another nation interferes in the operation, “Russia will respond
immediately, and the consequences will be such as you have never seen in your entire history.” Was
Putin threatening a nuclear war? Putin was engaging in nuclear saber-rattling, reminding NATO leaders
that he has a large nuclear arsenal and that Russian military doctrine holds open the option of using
nuclear weapons first if it is losing a war and its vital interests are threatened. However, the order to go into “special
combat readiness” was not part of the Russian military lexicon and U.S. officials saw no actual nuclear alert activities underway. But it’s important to understand
that nuclear
weapons are not just a force used to deter another state from attacking. They can also be a shield behind which one
can undertake aggression. The Pakistanis moved soldiers into Indian-held Kashmir soon after Islamabad first tested nuclear weapons. Saddam
Hussein wanted nuclear weapons and told his senior generals that if he got them, he would order a conventional attack to take back the West Bank and Golan
Heights from Israel. Similarly, Putin
was brandishing his nuclear arsenal to remind the U.S. and other NATO powers
that if they get directly involved in his war of aggression in Ukraine, there could be a risk of nuclear
escalation. Is Putin’s nuclear threat working? Only in part. President Joe Biden did rule out direct engagement when he said the U.S. and NATO would not
enforce a “no-fly zone” over the Ukraine. That policy would have meant that NATO aircraft would be shooting down Russian aircraft, which of course is an act of
war, creating the risk of escalation. But Putin’s threats did not deter Washington and many NATO governments from “interfering” in Moscow’s attempt to
overthrow the Zelenskyy government in many other ways, short of direct combat with the Russians. We
have given the Ukrainian
government millions of dollars’ worth of weapons, including air defense systems and advanced anti-tank
missiles, and have provided intelligence support. Without such rapid resupply of military equipment,
the Ukrainians might well have lost the war already. Now they have turned back the Russian assault on Kyiv and Putin appears to
have shifted his war aims from overthrowing the elected Ukrainian government to “liberating” the Donbas in Eastern Ukraine and possibly annexing it into
Russia as he did with Crimea in 2014. CIA director William Burns recently said, “None of us can take lightly the threat posed by a potential [Russian] resort to
tactical nuclear weapons or low-yield nuclear weapons.” Are you worried about the Russians using nuclear weapons against the Ukrainians if the war continues
to go badly for Moscow? Yes. I recently argued in Foreign Affairs that Putin
is the most dangerous man in the world. Putin could
order the Russian military to drop a single nuclear bomb on a Ukrainian city to try to coerce the
Zelenskyy government into immediately surrendering. This frightening scenario is not fanciful. It is, after
all, effectively what the United States did to Japan in 1945. We can only hope that in this situation, senior Russian officers would
tell Putin that such a strike would be illegal, a violation of the Geneva Conventions, and refuse to comply. Some national security officials are Putin’s cronies, like
Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, but the military leadership is more independent. The
United States must do what it can to reinforce
any reluctance by the Russian military to cross the nuclear threshold. Washington should be prepared
to take further military steps if Moscow crosses the nuclear threshold. Senior officials should not specify exactly what kind
of military response would be ordered, but a clear statement that crossing the nuclear threshold would bring the
gravest consequences for Russia and for Putin might help deter such action. And the U.S. should remind
Russian military leaders that any nuclear use against a Ukrainian city will be treated as a war crime and
that they, not just Putin, will be treated as war criminals. The Russian military may not mind targeting
civilians, as it has shown in its operations in Chechnya, in Syria, and now in Ukraine. But they do care about protecting themselves. Do they really want to
live in a world in which they have broken the tradition of nuclear non-use that has existed since 1945? They may think twice about agreeing to drop nuclear
bombs if they know that they may one day find themselves permanently imprisoned for their actions. And if Putin gives such a reckless, dangerous order, it may
just be the last straw that makes other leaders in Moscow decide that he finally has to go.
US threats of retaliation check Russian aggression
Alcaro 2/2/22 [Alcaro, Riccardo, Riccardo Alcaro is Research Coordinator and Head of the Global Actors
Programme of the Istituto Affari Internazionali. His main area of expertise are transatlantic relations, with a
special focus on US and European policies in Europe’s surrounding regions. Riccardo has been a visiting fellow at
the Center on the United States and Europe of the Brookings Institution in Washington and a fellow of the EUwide programme European Foreign and Security Policy Studies (EFSPS). He holds a summa-cum-laude PhD from
the University of Tübingen., “The Return of US Leadership in Europe: Biden and the Russia Crisis”, Istituto Affari
Internazionali (IAI), https://www.iai.it/en/pubblicazioni/return-us-leadership-europe-biden-and-russia-crisis]//AA
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In dealing with Russia’s aggressive policies towards Ukraine, US
President Joe Biden has put up a powerful display of
competent crisis management. While it may not be enough to stop President Vladimir Putin from escalating, Biden’s policy has
nonetheless re-affirmed US leadership in Europe. Communication strategy Starting last autumn, the Biden
administration kept warning its European allies that Russia’s military mobilisation on the Ukrainian
border was large enough to make the prospect of an invasion technically possible.[1] US officials have
since publicly denounced Russia’s threatening tactics, even going as far as to accuse the Kremlin of planning false flag operations to
give itself a pretext for an armed intervention.[2] President Biden himself has said that he expects Putin to move in, although he (and everybody else) remains
uncertain as to what form Russia’s actions will take.[3] The
Biden administration’s communication strategy is aimed at
persuading European allies to close ranks while also preventing the Russian government from taking
advantage of an information grey zone to spread fake news and foment confusion and divisions.[4] In spite
of Russia’s insistence that it has no hostile intentions, there is little doubt that the risk of a renewed Russian intervention in
Ukraine is higher than it has ever been since the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Diplomatic response The Biden
administration has rejected Russia’s demands for – amongst other things – a written guarantee that
NATO will not expand to include other former Soviet republics and massively reduce (actually, remove) its military
deployments in central and Eastern Europe (else, Moscow has threatened unspecific “technical-military” actions).[5] At the same time, Biden
has agreed to open negotiations on European security, which has unfolded in three separate but related tracks: a bilateral US–
Russia channel, a reactivated NATO–Russia Council, and the pan-European Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, so as to give all parties involved,
starting with Ukraine, formal representation.[6] After
consulting with allies, the Biden administration has presented
Russia with a set of possible arrangements over arms control, missile deployments, military exercises,
transparency and confidence-building measures as well as military-to-military contacts.[7] While these are
secondary issues for Putin, they are still of interest to Russia. Most importantly, they substantiate a US and NATO commitment to
engage in a broad negotiation over European security and start reversing the trend in the abysmal
state of West-Russia relations. Diplomatic exchanges have thus far delivered no result. The US offer has disappointed the Russians, who insist
that NATO’s enlargement fundamentally undermines their national security. They have nonetheless accepted to keep talking, and the two sides have engaged in
a back-and-forth exchange of written proposals for compromise.[8] In the meantime, Russia’s military mobilisation has continued unabated.[9] President Biden,
who has used two virtual summits to warn Putin about the terrible consequences of an intervention, has started preparing a multifaceted response.[10] Defence
and deterrence Biden has ruled out the use of US troops in defence of Ukraine, to which he has nonetheless pledged full political support and continued military
assistance (the US has provided Ukraine with 2.5 billion US dollars’ worth of military assets since 2014, 650 million in 2021 alone).[11] Meanwhile, the
US
has moved 3,000 troops from Germany to Poland and Romania and put further 8,500 soldiers on
heightened alert for a possible deployment to central and eastern Europe.[12] Other NATO member
states have followed suit. The United Kingdom has said it will commit more troops to the Baltic area, naval forces to the Black Sea, air patrolling of
Bulgaria and Romania’s airspace, as well as rocket systems to Estonia.[13] France has offered to send troops to Romania, Denmark has deployed additional
military aircraft to Lithuania and Spain has sent a frigate to the Black Sea.[14] A number of weapons systems would follow NATO and US soldiers, including air
defences, artillery, armoured vehicles, warships and aircraft, thereby bolstering the few thousand troops NATO keeps in central and eastern Europe. Most likely,
these deployments would lose their rotational nature and become fully permanent. Economic retaliation The policy area that has witnessed greater activism on
the part of the United States has revolved around potential economic retaliation.[15] The
Biden administration has worked on a wideranging set of measures that would cut off foreign lending, ban sales of sovereign bonds and blacklist
Russia’s major financial institutions. It is reportedly also considering to ban the export to Russia of
products containing US-made or US-designed semiconductors, which are the essential component of
computers, smartphones and other electronic devices.[16] The US administration has agreed with the UK government to target the
assets (both financial and otherwise) of some of the most prominent Russian oligarchs as well as people belonging to Putin’s inner circle.[17] Further, it has
coordinated with the European Union on a set of restrictions that would strengthen the financial sanctions and ban the export of technologies for critical
industry, most notably for the development of new gas projects.[18] Even though it has so far ruled out an embargo on energy imports from Russia, the
Biden administration has extracted from Germany a pledge to put the activation of Nord Stream 2, the
controversial Russian-German gas pipeline under the Baltic, indefinitely on hold.[19] Sustainability and effectiveness
problems The Biden administration aims to raise the costs for Russia of any intervention against Ukraine,
while also trying to promote a diplomatic way out of the crisis. It remains unclear whether Putin might be content with the
high-level security dialogue the US is offering. It is also uncertain whether anything the US and its allies have put on the table may be enough to dissuade Putin
from “moving in”, not least because the Russian president can pick amongst multiple options.[20] These span a large-scale invasion, a further militarisation and
de facto integration of Donetsk and Luhansk, Ukraine’s eastern regions in which Russia has supported separatist movements since 2014, and a number of hybrid
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actions, including the intensification of the ongoing cyberattacks against Ukraine.[21] A
large-scale attack would make it easier for
Biden to keep the cohesion of the Atlantic front, but would create problems of sustainability.[22] Energy prices
would likely spiral, thus prolonging the inflationary wave that has been mounting since last year (especially in the United States). Sanctions would
wreak havoc on Russia’s economy, but would most likely inflict a heavy cost on Europe too, especially Germany and Italy (the EU’s first and
third largest economies respectively), at a time of sustained but uncertain post-Covid recovery. A more limited intervention by Russia
would engender an equal and opposite problem, whereby effectiveness could be sacrificed on the altar of sustainability. Western
countries hold different views of what the minimum threshold is for them to be willing to absorb the economic pain that comes with the imposition of sanctions
on Russia.[23] The measures they could agree upon would therefore be sustainable over time, but would hardly be as tough as the most strident critics of Putin
deem necessary. Biden’s response has yet to pass the test of Russia’s intervening in Ukraine, if that indeed comes about. However, his
administration has laid solid foundations for continued and intense transatlantic security dialogue. This is all
the more important given that the European Union has provided no alternative to France and Germany’s attempt to have a separate dialogue with Moscow.[24]
Yet the French have admitted that this diplomatic channel is complementary, rather than conflicting, with the transatlantic one.[25] *** In conclusion, the
Biden administration has skillfully used or threatened to use intelligence, diplomatic, defence,
deterrence and economic assets to face Russia’s challenge to Europe’s security. Most notably, it has consulted
extensively with allies, showing regard for their specific sensitivities while organising a coordinated response.[26] With the spectre of interstate war looming on
the continent, history
has indeed come back to Europe. With the Biden administration, so has US leadership.
U.S. involvement is key to deter and prevent nuclear escalation
Wright 5/1/22 [Wright, Robin, Robin Wright, a contributing writer and columnist, has written for The New
Yorker since 1988. Her first piece on Iran won the National Magazine Award for best reporting. A former
correspondent for the Washington Post, CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, and the Sunday Times of London, she
has reported from more than a hundred and forty countries. She is also a distinguished fellow at the Woodrow
Wilson International Center for Scholars. She has been a fellow at the Brookings Institution and the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, as well as at Yale, Duke, Dartmouth, and the University of California, Santa
Barbara., “Ukraine Is Now America’s War, Too”, New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/news/dailycomment/ukraine-is-now-americas-war-too]//AA
America has crossed a threshold in Ukraine, both in its short-term involvement and its long-term intent.
The U.S. was initially cautious during the fall and winter as Russia, a nuclear country with veto power at the U.N. Security Council, amassed more than a hundred
and fifty thousand troops along the Ukrainian border. It didn’t want to poke the Russian bear—or provoke Vladimir Putin personally. Two days after long
convoys of Russian tanks rolled across the border, on February 24th, the U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, still claimed
that America’s
goal—backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid—was simply to stand behind the
Ukrainian people. The White House sanctioned Russia—initially targeting a few banks, oligarchs, political élites, government-owned
enterprises, and Putin’s own family—to pressure the Russian leader to put his troops back in their box, without
resorting to military intervention. “Direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War Three,
something we must strive to prevent,” President Joe Biden said, in early March. Yet in just over nine weeks, the conflict has
rapidly evolved into a full proxy war with Russia, with global ramifications. U.S. officials now frame America’s role in
more ambitious terms that border on aggressive. The goal—backed by tens of billions of dollars in aid—is to “weaken” Russia and insure a sovereign Ukraine
outlasts Putin. “Throughout our history, we’ve learned that when dictators do not pay the price for their aggression, they cause more chaos and engage in more
aggression,” the President told reporters on Thursday. “They keep moving. And the costs, the threats to America and the world, keep rising.” Having basically
run out of appropriated funds, Biden
has asked Congress for thirty-three billion dollars—for new military,
economic, and humanitarian support—in the latest of several packages for Ukraine. “The cost of this
fight is not cheap,” the President acknowledged. (As Politico noted, the new aid is about half the size of the entire Russian defense budget—and also
more than half of the U.S. State Department’s annual budget. Over the next five months, U.S. aid to Ukraine will average more than two hundred million dollars
a day.) The
investment, Biden said, was a small price “to lessen the risk of future conflicts” with Russia. For
Putin, the war in Ukraine always seemed to be, at least in part, a proxy fight with NATO and its U.S. leadership. Ahead of his
invasion, he publicly expressed deep paranoia about the military alliance and its further expansion into countries once aligned with the Soviet Union. He also
brokered a five-thousand-word agreement with the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, to form a de-facto alliance of authoritarian regimes. They jointly opposed
NATO enlargement. Biden tried to resist that framing. At the start of the invasion, the U.S. invoked the principles of sovereignty, a democratically elected
government, and territorial integrity. During the past week, however, Ukraine’s
existential crisis has increasingly appeared to be
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America’s war, too. On April 24th, Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin took a train with blacked-out windows into Kyiv to meet President
Volodymyr Zelensky and symbolically reinforce American support. The stealthy trip reflected the increasingly ambitious U.S. goal. “We
want to see Russia weakened to the degree it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading
Ukraine,” Austin told reporters, near the border in Poland. Blinken said, “We don’t know how the rest of this war will unfold, but we do know that a
sovereign, independent Ukraine will be around a lot longer than Vladimir Putin is on the scene.” On Tuesday, Austin assembled defense
leaders from more than forty countries—well beyond the NATO framework—at Ramstein, a U.S. base in
southwest Germany, to coördinate support for Ukraine. Austin, a retired general involved in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars,
announced the formation of a new coalition of “nations of good will” that will meet monthly to “intensify” an international campaign to win “today’s fight and
the struggles to come.” In appealing for more aid, Biden
said, “We have to do our part as well, leading the alliance.” The
shift may have been inevitable, given the barbarism of the war, which has claimed thousands of civilian lives, and Russia’s challenge to the conventions
and obligations of modern statecraft. “If this is left to stand, if there is no answer to this aggression, if Russia gets away with this cost-free, then so goes the socalled international order,” General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on CNN. “And if that happens, then we’re heading into an era of
seriously increased instability.” On Friday, the Pentagon press secretary John Kirby choked up at a briefing as he discussed Putin’s “depravity.” The
U.S.
has become more deeply engaged for at least four reasons. Diplomacy between Ukraine and Russia has
stalled amid revelations of atrocities committed by Russian troops, notably the execution of civilians in
Bucha. Moscow’s early participation in peace talks never seemed credible anyway; Putin is too greedy
and historically ambitious. Russia has staked claims to southern Crimea, the eastern Donbas region, and
the lands between them along the strategic Black Sea. Putin is not yet ready—or, perhaps, not yet under
enough pressure—to negotiate seriously. The U.S. has also been emboldened by the stunning
underperformance of the Russian military, the largest in Europe. U.S. intelligence had originally feared that Kyiv could fall within seventytwo hours. But Ukraine held the capital, and Russian forces retreated. Washington is no longer hesitant to poke the bear. Yet time still “is not on Ukraine’s side,”
Milley reportedly told the coalition of defense leaders at Ramstein. His concern was reinforced on Thursday, when Russia struck cities across Ukraine just an
hour after the U.N. Secretary-General, António Guterres, speaking at a press conference in Kyiv, described the country as the “epicenter of unbearable
heartache and pain.” Guterres’s trip to Kyiv followed talks with Putin in Moscow. The U.N. leader, who toured Bucha, took a clear side in the conflict. “The
war is an absurdity in the twenty-first century,” he said. “The war is evil.” The growing U.S. involvement
also reflects broader fears—long held among countries on or near Russia’s borders —that Putin’s aggression will not stop
with Ukraine. On April 22nd, a senior Russian military commander announced that Moscow sought “full control” over eastern and southern Ukraine in
part to open the way to neighboring Moldova, a tiny, landlocked country that is supportive of the European Union but dependent on Russian energy. In
congressional testimony on Thursday, Blinken cited the urgent need “to seize the strategic opportunities” and address “the risks that are presented by Russia’s
overreach as countries reconsider their policies, their priorities, their relationships.” Moscow’s flagrant rhetoric about nuclear weapons has also increasingly
alarmed U.S. officials. “Nobody
wants to see this war escalate any more than it already has,” Kirby said, on April 27th.
“Certainly nobody wants to see—or nobody should want to see—it escalate into the nuclear realm.” The Biden Administration
has public support for its expanding role—for now. Despite war weariness after two decades in Afghanistan and Iraq, roughly two-thirds of Americans
believe that the U.S. has a “moral responsibility” to do more to stop the killing of civilians in Ukraine,
according to a Quinnipiac poll published in mid-April. In a country polarized on most other issues, a majority from both parties agreed. Three-quarters of those
polled also fear that the
worst is yet to come. And more than eighty per cent believe that Vladimir Putin is a war criminal. Yet the public’s moral
outrage “stops at the water’s edge when it comes to committing the U.S. military to the fight,” Tim Malloy, a Quinnipiac University analyst, noted. Only nineteen
per cent of Americans believe the U.S. should do more even if it risks getting into a direct war with Russia. That conviction may soon be tested. The
U.S.
role has evolved—from a reactive response to Russia’s unjustified war to a proactive assertion of American leadership and leverage. Perhaps in
desperation, Putin’s rhetoric has become bolder. On Wednesday, he warned that he could launch a “lightning-fast”
response to any nation that intervened to thwart or threaten Russia. “We have all the instruments for this, such that no one can boast of,” he said, in an
apparent reference to Moscow’s nuclear and missile arsenal. “We’re going to use them if we have to.”
The war could now play out in many disparate ways. Each carries its own dangers—for the U.S. as well
as Ukraine.
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U.S. foreign involvement is key to preventing Russian attack
Geller 5/16/22 [Geller, Patty-Jane, Patty-Jane Geller is a senior policy analyst for nuclear deterrence and
missile defense in The Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree
in Government and a minor degree in physics at Georgetown University, and received a Master of Arts degree in
Military Operational Art and Science from the Air Command and Staff College., “Traditional Victory Over Russia
Is Unlikely. Instead, Expect To Manage Competition for the Long Haul”, The Heritage Foundation,
https://www.heritage.org/defense/commentary/traditional-victory-over-russia-unlikely-instead-expectmanage-competition-the]//AA
KEY TAKEAWAYS After
many years of U.S. hegemony following the Cold War, Russia has gained—and is
exercising—the capabilities to threaten the United States and its interests. In addition to modernizing and numerically
increasing existing nuclear capabilities, Russia is building entirely new nuclear capabilities. Managing competition
with Russia will require significant investment and effort that the American public and the current
administration may be reluctant to make. After many years of U.S. hegemony following the Cold War, Russia has gained—and is
exercising—the capabilities to threaten the United States and its interests abroad. Russia invests in military capabilities to confront the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and other neighboring states. Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea
demonstrated its use of hybrid warfare to accomplish its aims and project power across the Black Sea. Moscow is propping up Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad,
defending Iran at the United Nations (UN) Security Council, and amassing military forces in the Arctic. It has authorized multiple cyber-attacks
against the United States and continues to target vulnerabilities in the U.S. defense industrial base. It
uses political warfare to sow discord in the United States, from interfering in U.S. elections to spreading
propaganda about the “dangers” of U.S missile defense. Perhaps most significantly, Russia invests billions of
dollars into adding to its nuclear arsenal and developing new nuclear capabilities, disrupting the nuclear
balance with the United States. Consequently, the current and previous administrations have framed U.S.Russia relations as a competition, which involves two states striving for global power and opposing interests. Such a competition implies that
actors in opposition to each other are pursuing a victory. But what does it look like to win in a competition with Russia? Based on the U.S. history of war and
conflict, Americans typically view winning a competition as a definitive change in status quo, or strategic realignment, that works in the U.S. favor. A model
American victory might look like the outcome of the Revolutionary War, which resulted in the independent American state, or Japan’s transformation to a
democratic ally after it lost World War II. It once appeared that the United States was making progress toward this model of strategic realignment for Russia after
the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union fell. Much of U.S.-Russian policy through the 2000’s was rooted in the idea that with a little more nudging, Russia would
complete the transition from unfriendly autocracy to democratic member of the rules-based international order. Such policy is evidenced by President George W.
Bush’s push for a new era of improved relations with Russia, and President Barack Obama’s attempted Russian “reset.” While the
Russian threat has
worsened in recent years, one school of thought argues that the United States can still achieve this strategic realignment once Russia achieves full
internal political change. Activists like Vladimir Kara-Murza argue such change could occur in the near term. Another camp argues that the United States can end the
competition if it stops antagonizing Russia. This school of thought accepts the premise that U.S.
capabilities like missile defense provoke
Russia to build up its forces and asserts that unilateral concessions will convince Russia to draw back its
forces as well. Others go further to argue that the Russian threat is overblown and Russia is too weak to pose a serious threat, so there is no competition to
“win;” instead, the United States should redirect unneeded resources away from U.S.-Russia competition. This paper argues that Russia’s fundamental
nature and interests will continue to threaten the United States for the foreseeable future and therefore a path
to a traditional concept of victory is unlikely. It rejects the idea that Russia will achieve full internal change and become friendly to the United States due to its
longstanding nature as an aggressive, paranoid, power-seeking, and autocratic state, no matter its leader. Based on this assessment, concessions or attempts at
cooperation with Russia will fail. Indeed, history illustrates that Russia interprets these as weaknesses and exploits the opportunity to advance its position. As a
result, the
closest the United States can come to “winning” is successfully managing competition with
Russia to mitigate the threat it poses and keep Russian aggression at bay. To manage competition, the
United States must strengthen its capabilities and posture required to deter Russian mischief in all
arenas of competition as well as avoid making concessions.
The U.S. has the capacity to deter Russian aggression
Gilliam and Van Wie 22 [Gilliam, John B., Colonel John Gilliam is a chief of staff of the Army senior fellow
at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. In this role, Col. Gilliam facilitates a greater appreciation for the
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role of land power as well as Army missions and priorities at one of the premier think thanks in the United
States., Van Wie, Ryan C., Major Ryan Van Wie serves as an Instructor of International Affairs in the Department
of Social Sciences. Ryan commissioned as an Infantry Officer in 2010. He received his Bachelor of Science in
International Relations from West Point and a Master of Public Policy from University of Michigan’s Ford School
of Public Policy., “Feasible US steps to strengthen NATO deterrence in the Baltics and Poland”, Brookings,
https://www.brookings.edu/research/feasible-us-steps-to-strengthen-nato-deterrence-in-the-baltics-andpoland/]//AA
With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a
renewed assessment of efforts by the United States and the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) to deter Russia from taking military action on NATO’s eastern flank has
become particularly salient. In the coming weeks, NATO leadership will meet to discuss what longer term force
posture adjustments are required to create such a deterrent.[1] This paper proposes several modest policy recommendations
which will help inform the discussion and ultimately strengthen NATO’s conventional deterrence posture. Contemporary academic research on conventional
deterrence highlights clear gaps in the deterrence capacity of the United States and NATO, despite their concerted efforts to strengthen conventional military
capability since Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. For example, studies indicate that the rotational military forces established by the United States’ Operation
Atlantic Resolve and NATO’s enhanced Forward Presence, still lack the requisite conventional capability to prevent a Russian fait accompli in the Baltic states,
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. However, these studies lack a well-defined formula for what constitutes adequate capability and say little about what
adjustments the United States and NATO
must make to strengthen NATO’s deterrence posture in the Baltics and Poland. To
help clarify capability requirements in the region, we reviewed conventional deterrence theories and models from the Cold War. Though long-standing, this
research provides a clearer picture of the ideal defensive force posture and adequate force ratios needed to improve deterrence, compared to recent policy
analyses. Focusing on land-based operations, we then applied these correlation of forces models to analyze the current balance of conventional ground forces in
the Baltics. Through comparing the relative combat power of NATO’s forces in the Baltics with Russia’s forces in its Western Military District and Kaliningrad
oblast, we confirmed that the NATO capability gaps identified in previous studies remain large. We also found that potential NATO high readiness
reinforcements would be incapable of closing the gaps for at least a month in a crisis scenario. These capability shortcomings clearly hinder the United States’
and NATO’s ongoing efforts to conventionally deter Russian aggression in the Baltics or to decisively respond in a crisis. Accounting for U.S. military budget
limitations, force structure constraints, and competing global requirements, the
Department of Defense (DOD) could make several
policy adjustments to strengthen U.S. capabilities and rapidly reinforce security in the Baltics. Specifically,
the U.S. military could increase U.S. armored forces in Central Europe, enhance the operational
readiness of U.S. ground forces, and support upgrades to NATO mobility systems and infrastructure in
Central and Eastern Europe. These modest recommendations, outlined in this paper, represent feasible options to strengthen NATO’s deterrence
against an increasingly aggressive Russia. The ongoing invasion of Ukraine and attempts to coerce NATO members into
making concessions underscore the compelling and urgent need to address critical U.S. and NATO
capability deficits.
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Threat to World
Emboldened by perceptions of US decline, Russia seeking global dominance
Scott Berrier, Lieutenant General, U.S. Army. Director, Defense Intelligence Agency, March 15, 2022,
https://armedservices.house.gov/_cache/files/5/f/5fa65e01-08c0-4b83-97137516a0bc4d62/481DE0F0E64E412E4B1EA9EC9984A1B8.20220317-iso-witnessstatement-berrier.pdf,
WORLDWIDE THREAT ASSESSMENT ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE INTELLIGENCE AND SPECIAL
OPERATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Russia continues to pursue its national security interests and geopolitical ambitions aggressively
across the globe, acting from a position of increased confidence and emboldened by its perception that the United
States is in a period of decline. Russia is steadily expanding its international profile, increasing its
engagement with select countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America and is working to
diminish U.S. influence around the globe. The Kremlin is seeking to establish military bases and air
and naval access agreements with states in these regions to enhance its power projection capabilities
and increase its regional influence. The Kremlin’s engagement with Pyongyang centers on the preservation of regional stability
and promotion of Russia’s status on the peninsula. Russia has advocated for a comprehensive and negotiated settlement and opposes the use
of force. Moscow agreed to UN sanctions against Pyongyang in 2017; however, Moscow sometimes skirts compliance issues because of
business interests and a fear of destabilizing the North Korean regime. In addition, Russia coordinates its North Korea-related diplomacy with
China, including a bilateral “Road Map” for peace, an initiative since 2017 that has aimed 21 to reduce tensions on the Peninsula through a
dual-track approach to advance denuclearization and establish a peace mechanism. In
the Middle East, Moscow continues to
provide Syria with military, diplomatic, and economic support, while seeking to broker an end to the Asad regime’s
international isolation and lobbying for economic aid to assist in Syria’s reconstruction. The Kremlin likely calculates this support along with its
military presence in Syria will ensure its sway over the Asad regime, cement Moscow’s status as Syria’s preeminent foreign partner, and bolster
Russian regional influence and power projection capability. Russia and Turkey continue to downplay their disagreements and compartmentalize
their divergent foreign policy objectives in Syria and elsewhere in the region. Russia
also continues to expand its
involvement in Africa, highlighted by the activities of Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin and his
Private Military Company Vagner. Vagner has conducted combat operations in the Central African Republic since
2017, Libya since 2019, and deployed to Mali in December 2021. More broadly, Russia uses arms sales,
training, and bilateral defense agreements to establish lasting relationships on the continent. To enhance
its power-projection capabilities and increase its regional advantage, Moscow continues to pursue military bases and air and naval access
agreements in Africa, such as the planned naval logistics facility in Sudan. In
Latin America, Moscow is focused largely on
strengthening military ties with its traditional partners Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, offering
training, arms sales, and weapons maintenance support. Russia has also threatened to increase its military presence in
the region in response to U.S. support for Ukraine. Moscow continues to support disputed Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro with military
and economic assistance, largely to protect its economic investments and thwart perceived efforts to remove President Maduro from power.
Russian engagement with other Latin American governments remains minimal, but the Kremlin is open to opportunities for more extensive
engagement. 22 Russia views the Arctic as a security and economic priority , seeking to exploit Arctic natural resources
and develop the Northern Sea Route as a major international shipping lane. Russia is refurbishing Sovietera airfields and radar installations,
constructing new ports and search and rescue centers, and building up its fleet of conventionally- and nuclear-powered icebreakers. Russia is
also expanding its network of air and coastal defense missile systems to strengthen its antiaccess/area-denial capabilities in the region. In May
2021, Russia assumed the two-year rotating Chairmanship of the Arctic Council, an association of the eight Arctic nations intended to preserve
the Arctic as a zone of peace and constructive cooperation. Russia intends to use the platform to attract investment in its Arctic projects and
defend its national interests. Looking ahead,
Russia will continue to pose a multifaceted threat to U.S. national
security and its ability to lead and shape international developments while Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine will have immediate and long-term consequences for European security and stability. Protracted
occupation of parts of Ukrainian territory threatens to sap Russian military manpower and reduce their modernized weapons arsenal, while
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consequent economic sanctions will probably throw Russia into prolonged economic depression and diplomatic isolation that will threaten their
ability to produce modern precision-guided munitions. As this war and its consequences slowly weaken Russian conventional strength,
Russia likely will increasingly rely on its nuclear deterrent to signal the West and project strength to its
internal and external audiences. Russia’s aggression in Ukraine is reviving fears of a more imperial and
militaristic Russia, prompting requests from NATO allies for assurances that U.S. security guarantees will be honored. U.S. partners in
the former Soviet Union will also look to the United States for signs that they are not being abandoned while adjusting their policies to coexist
with a stronger and more emboldened Russia. Russian military modernization efforts will progress even as initial timelines for some programs
may have to adjust to 23 likely new economic realities, and Moscow
will continue to blend traditional displays of
military might with other coercive political, economic, cyber, and information confrontation measures
to achieve its geopolitical interests, delineate its redlines, and compel the United States to take its concerns more seriously.
Moreover, U.S. efforts to undermine Russia’s goals in Ukraine, combined with its perception that the
United States is a nation in decline, could prompt Russia to engage in more aggressive actions not only
in Ukraine itself, but also more broadly in its perceived confrontation with the West.
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Russisa/China Threat
Russian and Chinese revisionism on a double front proves now is critical for the US to
leverage its ample capabilities to hedge back
Brands 22 – Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of
Advanced International Studies and a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (Hal, 2-25-2022,
"The Eurasian Nightmare," Foreign Affairs, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2022-0225/eurasian-nightmare)//KH
The greatest strategic problem the United States faces is the convergence of its two main rivals, China
and Russia—countries that don’t always like or trust each other but nonetheless derive great benefits
from their simultaneous assaults on the existing international order. And as Moscow and Beijing contest the balance
of power at both ends of Eurasia, they are drawing together in ominous ways.
China has refused to condemn Russia's brazen invasion of Ukraine. Instead, on the day of Russia's attack, it
accused the United States and its allies of “fanning the flames.” China’s non-denunciation is part of a broader
pattern of Sino-Russian convergence, as both Beijing and Moscow are using old and new methods to
upend the global status quo. In January 2022, China publicly supported Russia’s intervention in Kazakhstan to thwart a “color
revolution” in the two countries’ shared backyard. In early February, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping issued a
long joint statement endorsing efforts to keep U.S. influence out of their near abroads, attacking the United States’ alliances as Cold War relics,
defending their own autocratic models of government, and declaring that Sino-Russian friendship has “no limits.” All of this follows significant,
sustained upticks in military, economic, diplomatic, and technological cooperation. Expect more in the future: as Russia’s
invasion of
Ukraine crystallizes tensions between Putin and the West, it also underscores his need for support from
Beijing.
The Sino-Russian convergence gives both powers more room for maneuver by magnifying Washington’s
two-front problem: the United States now faces increasingly aggressive near-peer rivals in two separate
theaters—eastern Europe and the western Pacific—that are thousands of miles apart. Sino-Russian cooperation,
while fraught and ambivalent, raises the prospect that America’s two great-power rivalries could merge
into a single contest against an autocratic axis. Even short of that, the current situation has revived the great geopolitical
nightmare of the modern era: an authoritarian power or entente that strives for dominance in Eurasia, the
central strategic theater of the world.
That nightmare traces back to the writings of the political geographer Halford Mackinder, who warned in 1904 that the coming era would
feature high-stakes struggles to rule Eurasia and its surrounding oceans. That prophesy played out in the two cataclysmic hot wars and one
global cold war that followed. Mackinder’s vision has become newly relevant in the twenty-first century: the
United States’ rivals are
working to create a radically revised global order with an autocratic Eurasia at its core.
THE HEART OF THE WORLD
Mackinder is considered by many to be the father of geopolitics, and argued in his famous “heartland” theory of political geography (as well as
subsequent publications) that three revolutions were putting Eurasia at center stage in global affairs. First, the colonization of Africa and much
of Asia meant that possibilities for easy imperial expansion were fading, presaging fiercer fights between great powers in Eurasia, the world’s
geopolitical core. Second, the proliferation of railroads was making it possible to project power across vast territories and creating new
opportunities for conquest on the Eurasian landmass. Third, illiberal states were harnessing rapidly industrializing economies to underwrite
horrific repression at home and dramatic expansion abroad. If such states were able to dominate Eurasia, global supremacy would be within
their reach.
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Eurasia, Mackinder pointed out, controlled most of the world’s population and industrial potential. A
power or coalition that gained control of Eurasia’s resources could then build unrivaled navies and
expand its empire across the seas. The coming geopolitical dramas would thus play out on and around this
vital landmass. Autocratic bids for expansion would trigger fights with coalitions linking offshore
powers—the United Kingdom and later the United States—to onshore allies whose existence would be threatened
by a Eurasian hegemon.
Mackinder got plenty wrong: the big challenges to Eurasian equilibrium initially came not from Russia, as he had expected, but from Germany
and Japan. This led the strategist Nicholas Spykman to argue that the supercontinent’s crucial theaters were its European and East Asian
“rimlands” rather than its Russian “heartland.” But Mackinder
nailed the basic pattern. The three great showdowns of
the twentieth century—World War I, World War II, and the Cold War—were brawls between autocratic
states, which sought to dominate huge swaths of Eurasia and its adjoining oceans, and the amphibious alliances,
anchored by London and then Washington, which sought to contain them.
The contours of these contests changed over time. Germany and Japan pursued outright conquest, often by exploiting new
technologies—tanks and tactical airpower, submarines and aircraft carriers—to project power on an unprecedented scale.
During the Cold War, nuclear stalemate led the Soviet Union to rely mostly on military intimidation, political subversion, and
proxy forces. Yet the stakes remained the same: U.S. policymakers, from Woodrow Wilson to George Kennan, understood that
a hostile, autocratic Eurasia would fundamentally reshape the globe. And after a brief, post–Cold War respite, the United States
confronts a new version of the old nightmare today.
HEGEMONIC GAMBITS
The present
Sino-Russian partnership naturally invites comparison to the Sino-Soviet alliance during the
Cold War. But a better analogy might be Germany and Japan before World War II. Though formally allied, Tokyo and Berlin were
ambivalent, distrustful partners with fundamentally different long-term visions. Nonetheless, each was committed to overthrowing the existing
order, and each profited from the chaos created by the other’s advances.
Presently, neither
China nor Russia has engaged in anything approaching World War II–scale aggression. But
countries fundamentally resent the U.S.-led international order because American influence
obstructs their paths to domination in world affairs, and because the liberal principles enshrined in the
international system are at odds with the illiberal orders that their leaders have constructed at home.
both
China and Russia may be pursuing distinct agendas, but together they present a comprehensive challenge to the geopolitical balance in Eurasia
and beyond.
Moscow and Beijing are drawing together in ominous ways.
China’s capabilities are greater than Russia’s, which makes its efforts more audacious. Beijing aims to
excise U.S. power from maritime Asia in order to consolidate a Chinese sphere of influence
encompassing much of the Western Pacific. China is simultaneously reaching into Eurasia through investment
and infrastructure programs, such as the Belt and Road Initiative and the Digital Silk Road, that cast its
economic, political, and military influence into Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and regions further afield. In short,
Beijing is looking for hybrid hegemony on land and at sea.
China’s gambit intersects with Russia’s efforts to revise the status quo. For years, Putin has been vying to
reestablish Russian primacy from Central Asia to eastern Europe. Putin seems to envision a Europe in
which NATO is effectively rolled back to its Cold War frontiers and its relationship with Washington is badly weakened. As
Russia has recovered its strength after the early post–Cold War era, Moscow has also projected power into
the Artic, North Atlantic, Middle East, and other flanking theaters. Moscow has no hope of building a Russo-centric
global order, but it can weaken the existing system from one direction as China attacks it from others.
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As they have throughout the past century, attempts
at Eurasian expansion reflect the shifting nature of global
power. Beijing’s record-shattering naval buildup, Moscow’s serial aggression against disobedient
neighbors, and both countries’ efforts to fundamentally upend the military balance in key regions such
as eastern Europe and East Asia show that hard power hasn’t gone out of style. And both countries are also
using more novel methods to weaken their rivals and spread their influence: Russian cyberattacks and digital
disinformation campaigns are the counterpart to China’s infrastructure projects, efforts to control the world’s
5G networks, and other non-military measures that extend its global sway.
TOGETHER, AND SEPARATE
Because both
China and Russia seek to break the existing order, it is unsurprising that convergence has
birthed cooperation. The two countries have reportedly swapped tips on how to manage the Internet and
control dissent at home; they have also worked, through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, to fortify friendly
dictators in Central Asia. The bilateral trade, finance, and energy relationship between China and Russia has
broadened, and Beijing and Moscow have lent each other important, if sometimes tacit, diplomatic support in the UN
Security Council. Not least, an expanding military relationship features joint exercises in Central Asia and the
Baltic and South China Seas, transfers of weaponry, and burgeoning defense technological cooperation,
some of which is likely happening in secret.
Yet formal cooperation between Beijing and Moscow is an insufficient measure of their partnership, because the
two help each other
simply by pursuing their individual goals. When China and Russia use disinformation and strategic
corruption to meddle in liberal societies, or work to make international organizations friendlier to illiberal rule, they contribute
to a global autocratic resurgence that benefits both states. And it is at the strategic level where the payoffs of convergence are most
pronounced.
Both Beijing
and Moscow seem to have learned a vital lesson from the Soviet defeat in the Cold War: that
it makes poor strategy to compete with Washington on one front while antagonizing a second enemy on
another. China and Russia have thus resolved to stand “back to back” along their shared Eurasian border, freeing
them to focus on eroding the U.S.-led order.
Washington’s rivals are working to create a revised global order with an autocratic Eurasia at its core.
The Russian Far East, for instance, presently houses fewer military assets than at any time since Nazi forces were at Moscow’s gates in 1941, a
testament to the way that reduced tensions with China enable Russia to concentrate on intimidating the West. By the same token, the
existence of simultaneous threats from China and Russia prevents Washington from concentrating its
power against either rival, and leaves it vulnerable to being whipsawed by two separate competitors.
The Sino-Russian relationship isn’t an alliance, but it doesn’t need to be one in order to cause strategic
migraines for the United States.
To be sure, the partnership suffers from real constraints. China
and Russia are unlikely to come to each other’s defense
in a conflict with Washington, although they might seek subtle ways—such as sharing intelligence or
posturing troops menacingly—to prevent the United States from decisively defeating one opponent and
then homing in on the other. Russia, having invaded Ukraine and facing comprehensive sanctions from the West, won’t find equivalent
economic relief from Beijing, in part because China isn’t eager to bring down the financial wrath of the hegemon by engaging in sanctionsbusting on a massive scale. Tensions lurk in Central Asia, where both countries can’t be preeminent simultaneously; in the Arctic, where Russia
is a resident power and China is an interloper; and in Africa, where Moscow generates instability that hardly improves prospects for repayment
of Chinese loans. Eventually, the overall clash of interests could be severe, because Russia wouldn’t particularly enjoy living in the Sinocentric
world that Xi envisions.
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For the time being, however, Washington’s
Eurasian predicament will only get worse: threats to the existing
order are intensifying, and its opponents’ bellicosity is increasing, on both sides of that landmass at once. Although Xi's and
Putin's ultimate objectives diverge, their intermediate goals can keep them closely aligned for years to come.
BREAKING THE GREAT-POWER TRIANGLE
History suggests a solution to this predicament, but the obvious answer—using concessions and
diplomacy to turn Moscow against Beijing—is the wrong one. Although the idea may tempt observers in Washington and
Europe who hope to improve the strategic geometry of the great-power triangle, Sino-Russian tensions aren’t yet sharp
enough to produce the sort of split that happened in the late 1960s, and any efforts to purchase Moscow’s
cooperation would surely backfire.
Putin has made clear that the price of sustained de-escalation with the West is overturning the post–Cold War settlement in Europe—and if
Putin were offered such a deal, he might well conclude that his strategy of pressure is working and push even harder. There is no diplomatic fix
to the Sino-Russian alignment that doesn’t involve gravely weakening the United States’ position at one end of the Eurasian landmass. And it is
hard to imagine that an effective U.S. global strategy can withstand such a blow.
A more useful lesson from history is that there may be no good alternative to facing challenges on both sides of Eurasia at once. In 1940 and
1941, President Franklin Roosevelt declined the advice of those who argued that he must appease Japan in order to concentrate on Nazi
Germany, because he recognized that both countries posed mortal threats to the United States’ vision for the international order. And later,
throughout the first two decades of the Cold War, the United States sought to contain both China and the Soviet Union after concluding that
there was no acceptable way of separating them for the time being.
The United States confronts a new version of the old nightmare today.
The United States and its allies have the raw power to pursue a similar dual containment strategy today.
As National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan has noted, even a more united Sino-Russian axis would be dwarfed in
economic, diplomatic, and military capabilities by Washington and its allies in Europe and the AsiaPacific.
Granted, the
United States and its friends can’t do this on the cheap. Checking dual challenges would likely
require major rearmament programs and deeper cooperation against political and economic coercion,
all underpinned by a sharper awareness of the threat posed by China and Russia’s autocratic
convergence. Put differently, it won’t work to pursue a Cold War–style strategy with post–Cold War levels of urgency and investment. But
the best way of resisting a familiar challenge—a bloc of autocracies at the heart of Eurasia—is through a familiar remedy: strengthening the
collective resilience of the countries holding the balance along its periphery.
This strategy may initially encourage Sino-Russian cooperation. Yet history also suggests that driving ambivalent partners apart may first require
pushing them together. During the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration wagered that a policy of pressure was more likely to break the SinoSoviet pact than one of inducement, because it would force the weaker party—Beijing—into a position of reliance on the stronger—Moscow—
that would ultimately make both countries quite uncomfortable. Eisenhower reasoned, correctly, that Washington might someday find an
opportunity to exploit tensions between its two enemies, but only after it had shown that their partnership would produce more misery than
profit.
If the United States is to promote an eventual strategic reorientation in Moscow, it first must
demonstrate that Putin’s policy of revisionism and alignment with Beijing is not working—and that the
alternative to decent relations with the West is an ever-greater dependence on a China whose
abrasiveness seems to grow with its power. If that message can be driven home over a period of years, it could have a
constructive effect on Russian thinking, if not under Putin then under his successor. Such an outcome may seem like a distant
aspiration, which implies waging not one but two cold wars along the way. If nothing else, then, the Sino-Russian convergence has
clarified how serious the new Eurasian challenge is—and what will be required to meet it.
China-Russia ties are strong
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Charles E. Ziegler is Professor of Political Science and University Scholar at the University of Louisville, 625, 22, Has Russia Won Over the Rest of the World?, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/has-russiawon-over-rest-world-203177
Still, Russian and Chinese interests align closely. Both are opposed to the Quad grouping of
democracies, the new AUKUS alliance, and indeed the whole Indo-Pacific concept, which they believe
(not without justification) seeks to enlist India in constraining Chinese ambitions in the Pacific while
preserving the liberal international order. Official Washington considers the Sino-Russian partnership a
vital security threat. Biden’s May 2022 visit to South Korea and Japan sought to reinvigorate ties that
had frayed under Trump, mobilize Asian allies against Chinese aggression, and highlight opposition to
Putin’s war in Ukraine. Speaking in Japan, Biden asserted the United States was willing to defend Taiwan
militarily, though his aides denied the president was abandoning the policy of “strategic ambiguity.”
Biden also advanced the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), a watered-down version of the TransPacific Partnership designed to compete with China’s Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership
(RCEP) and its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). China and Russia responded with joint bomber exercises in
the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea during the Quad summit, demonstrating solidarity and joint
opposition to a “free and open” Indo-Pacific dominated by the United States. The Sino-Russian
partnership counters U.S. unilateralism and its dominance in global affairs, opposes American
democracy promotion and support for civil society globally, and complicates planning by forcing
Washington to confront challenges in two different theaters simultaneously. Russia’s military was able
to shift troops from Siberia and the Russian Far East to the Ukraine conflict, confident that its eastern
borders would not be threatened. This is the first time in more than a century that Moscow has been
free from security threats on two disparate fronts. Conversely, there is a chance the West’s
preoccupation with the Ukraine conflict will embolden China to move against Taiwan, or to become
more aggressive in the South China Sea and along its disputed border with India.
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AT: NATO’s Fault
Neither US influence nor NATO expansion are the cause of Russian aggression – Putin
is ideologically revisionist, proven by Russian history
Brands 22 – Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global
Affairs at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the
Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. (Hal, 15 March, 2022, "Putin’s Biggest Lie: Blaming
NATO for His War," https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3532081/hal-brands/putin%E2%80%99sbiggest-lie-blaming-nato-his-war)//KH
The great NATO enlargement debate never ends. In the 1990s, US officials and academics argued about whether pushing the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization into Eastern Europe was likely to sustain the post-Cold War peace or prematurely end it. More recently, critics have
charged that Russia’s war in Ukraine is a natural response to the aggressive expansion of America’s most powerful alliance.
Now Russian officials, and even President Vladimir Putin himself, have echoed — and sometimes directly cited — American scholars such as
political scientist John Mearsheimer, who argues that the current crisis “is the West’s fault.”
The “blame NATO” argument tells a story of hubris, arrogance and tragedy. It holds that there was a
golden chance for lasting peace in Europe, but the US threw it all away. Rather than conciliating a defeated rival,
Washington repeatedly humiliated it by expanding a vast military alliance up to Russia’s borders and even into the former Soviet Union. This
pursuit of American hegemony in a liberal-democratic guise eventually provoked a violent rebuke.
In this telling, Putin’s wars against Georgia and Ukraine are just the natural response of one great power whose vital interests are being
heedlessly threatened by another.
The argument isn’t wholly wrong. Putin’s
wars are indeed meant, in part, to push Western influence back from
Russia’s frontiers. But the idea that NATO expansion is the root of today’s problems is morally and
geopolitically bizarre.
Far from being a historic blunder, NATO expansion was one of the great American successes of the post-Cold War era. Far from being the act of
a domineering superpower, it was part of a long tradition of vulnerable states begging to join America’s liberal empire. And far from posing a
mortal threat to Moscow, NATO enlargement actually provided Russia with far greater security than it could have provided itself.
NATO was founded in 1949 with 12 members in Western Europe and North America. It gradually added additional states — Turkey, Greece,
West Germany, Spain — over the course of the Cold War. But the big bang of enlargement came once the superpower conflict ended. NATO
incorporated the former East Germany into the alliance in 1990; it then added three Eastern European countries (Poland, Hungary, the Czech
Republic) in 1999; then seven more, including the Baltic states, in 2004.
To understand why NATO grew so rapidly, we have to remember something that nearly everyone has now forgotten: There was no guarantee
that Europe would be mostly stable, peaceful and democratic after the Cold War. In fact, many of the analysts who now view NATO expansion
as a catastrophe once warned that a post-Cold War Europe could become a violent hellscape.
It wasn’t an outlandish scenario. A reunified Germany might once again try to dominate its neighbors; the old enmity between Moscow and
Berlin could reignite. The collapse of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe could liberate those states to pursue long-suppressed territorial claims
and nationalist agendas. Ethnic tensions and nuclear proliferation might explode as the Cold War order crumbled.
If the US pulled back once the Soviet threat was gone, there would be no extra-European superpower to
put out fires on a continent with lots of geopolitical kindling. “The prospect of major crises, even wars, in Europe is likely
to increase dramatically,” Mearsheimer predicted in 1990.
NATO enlargement was the logical answer to these fears. Expansion was a way of binding a reunified
Germany to the West and surrounding it with democratic allies. Joining NATO required new members to lay aside any
revanchist designs, while allowing them to pursue economic and political reforms rather than investing heavily in military capabilities to defend
their newly won autonomy.
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NATO’s move to the east also ensured that Poland and other states that easily could have built nuclear weapons didn’t need to, because they
had American protection. Most important, enlargement kept the US firmly planted in Europe, by preventing the centerpiece of the transatlantic
relationship from becoming obsolete.
No other initiative could have accomplished these objectives. Partnership for Peace — a series of loose security cooperation agreements with
former Soviet-bloc states — didn’t offer the ironclad guarantees that came with NATO membership. (If you want to understand the difference
between “security partner” and “NATO ally,” just look at what is happening today to Ukraine, one of the former.)
The idea of creating a pan-European security architecture (one that included Russia) had the same defect; plus, it would have given Moscow
veto power over the security arrangements of the countries the Soviet Union had so recently dominated.
Only American power and promises could provide stability in Europe, and NATO was the continent’s
critical link to the US. Since 1949, Washington had tamped down rivalries between old enemies such as
France and Germany, while also protecting them from external threats. After 1991, NATO expansion took this zone of
peace, prosperity and cooperation that had emerged in Western Europe and moved it into Eastern Europe as well.
The revolutionary nature of this achievement seemed obvious not so long ago. “Why
has Europe been so peaceful since
1989?” Mearsheimer asked in 2010. The answer, he acknowledged, was because “America has
continued to serve as Europe’s pacifier,” protecting the continent from dangers within and without.
Today, of course, the critics don’t buy this account. They argue that NATO expansion represented crude power politics, as the US exploited the
Soviet collapse to engorge its own empire. What resulted, pundits such as Thomas Friedman contend, was a sort of Weimar Russia — a country
whose dignity was affronted, security imperiled and democracy undermined by a harsh, humiliating peace.
There is a kernel of truth here, too. Once Russian democracy began to wobble in 1993-94, officials in the Bill Clinton administration saw NATO
expansion — in part — as a way of preventing a potentially resurgent, aggressive Russia from rebuilding the Soviet sphere of influence. Russian
leaders of all stripes griped about NATO expansion from the early 1990s onward, warning that it could jeopardize the peace of the continent.
In hindsight, NATO expansion was one of several issues — including disputes over the Balkans and the collapse of the Russian economy in the
late 1990s — that gradually soured Russia’s relationship with the West. Yet this story omits three vital facts.
First, all policies
have costs. The price of NATO expansion was a certain alienation of Russian elites —
although we often forget that Clinton softened the blow by continually courting Russian President Boris
Yeltsin, bringing Russia into elite Western institutions such as the Group of Seven, and making Moscow a partner in the intervention in
Bosnia in 1995-96. Yet the cost of not expanding NATO might have been forfeiting much of the stability that initiative provided. Trade-offs
are inevitable in foreign policy: There was no magic middle path that would have provided all the
benefits with none of the costs.
Second,
if NATO expansion was a manifestation of American empire, it was a remarkably benign and
consensual form of empire. When Clinton decided to pursue enlargement, he did so at the urging of the
Poles, Czechs and Hungarians. The Baltic countries and others were soon banging at the door. The states of Eastern Europe and the
former Soviet Union were desperate to join America’s sphere of influence, because they were desperate to leave Moscow’s.
This, too, was part of an older pattern: The US
has often extended its influence by “invitation” rather than
imposition. The creation of NATO in 1949 was mostly a European idea: Countries that were terrified of Moscow
sought protection from Washington. One reason Putin’s wars to keep countries from escaping Moscow’s empire are so abhorrent to Americans
is that the US empire has trouble keeping members out.
Putin may not see it that way. All that matters to him is that the mightiest peacetime alliance in history has crept closer to Russian soil. But here
a third fact becomes relevant: Russia was one of the biggest beneficiaries of NATO’s move east.
Open terrain has often left Russia vulnerable to invasion and instability emanating from Europe. Napoleonic France, Imperial Germany and Nazi
Germany all swept through Eastern Europe to wreak havoc on Russian or Soviet territory. This is one reason why the great strategist George
Kennan opposed NATO expansion — because it would surely re-activate this fear of encroachment from the west.
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Yet this
was a red herring, because NATO posed no military threat. The alliance committed, in 1997, not
to permanently station foreign troops in Eastern Europe. After the Cold War, America steadily withdrew most of its troops
and all of its heavy armor from the continent. US allies engaged in a veritable race to disarm.
The prospect that NATO could invade Russia, even had it wanted to, was laughable. What the alliance could do was tame the perils that might
otherwise have menaced the Russian state.
Germany could hardly threaten Russia: It was nestled snugly into an alliance that also served as a strategic straitjacket. NATO, Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev had candidly said in 1990, could “play a containing role” vis-à-vis Berlin. Moscow didn’t have to worry about a nuclear
Poland — Warsaw didn’t need nukes because it had the protection of the United States. Aside from the Balkan wars of the 1990s, Eastern
Europe was comparatively free of the geopolitical intrigues and military quarrels that might have made Russia jumpy.
NATO expansion hadn’t just alleviated Europe’s security problems; it had protected Russia’s vital interests as well. Moscow might have lost an
empire, but it had gained remarkable safety from external attack.
Part of the answer is that NATO
expansion wasn’t really the problem, in the sense that Russia didn’t need that
pretext to seek renewed hegemony in its near-abroad. The Soviet Union, and the Russian empire before it, had
traditionally sought to control countries along their frontiers and used brutal means to do it. To say that NATO expansion caused Russian
belligerence is thus to
make an extremely dubious assertion: that absent NATO expansion, Moscow would
have been a satisfied, status quo power.
And this is exactly why a bigger NATO has posed a real problem for Putin. After all, safety
from external attack isn’t the only
thing that states and rulers want. They want glory, greatness and the privileges of empire. For 20 years,
Putin has been publicly lusting after the sphere of influence that the Soviet Union once enjoyed. NATO
expansion stood athwart that ambition, by giving Moscow’s former vassals the ability to resist its pressure.
NATO also threatened a certain type of Russian government — an autocracy that was never secure in its
own rule. A democratic Russia wouldn’t so much have minded being neighbors with Western-leaning democracies, because political liberty
in those countries wouldn’t have threatened to set a subversive example for anti-Putin Russians.
Yet, as Russia became more autocratic in the early 2000s, and as Putin’s popularity declined with the Russian economy after 2008, the
imperative of preventing ideological spillover from a US-backed democratic community loomed large.
So Putin began pushing back against NATO’s eastward march. In 2008, he invaded Georgia, a country that was moving — too slowly for its own
safety — toward the West. Since 2014, he has been waging war against Ukraine, in hopes of rebuilding the Russian empire and halting Kiev’s
westward drift. America’s vision of Europe has now run into Putin’s program of violent coercion.
To be sure, US officials made mistakes along the way. Because Russia was prostrate, militarily and economically, during the 1990s, Washington
acquired a bad habit of issuing security guarantees without really considering how it would fulfill them in a crisis. The Pentagon has thus been
scrambling, since 2014, to devise a credible defense of NATO’s eastern flank.
As Russia regained its strength,
US officials also failed to grasp the danger of provoking Putin without adequately
deterring him. When, in 2008, NATO declined to endorse membership for Georgia and Ukraine but
issued a vague statement saying that they would someday join the alliance, it created the worst of all worlds —
giving Putin both the pretext and the time to pre-empt future expansion by tearing those two countries apart.
Yet there
is a curious morality in accounts that blame the West, which sought to protect vulnerable states
in Eastern Europe, for the current carnage, rather than blaming Putin, who has worked to dismember
and intimidate those countries. It is sloppy thinking to tally up the costs of NATO expansion without considering the historic
achievements of a policy that served American, European and even certain Russian interests remarkably well.
And if nothing else, NATO
expansion pushed the dividing line between Moscow and the democratic world to
the east after one Cold War — a factor of great significance now that a second cold war is underway.
The legacy
of NATO expansion isn’t simply a matter of historical interest. Americans’ understanding of the
past has always influenced their view of what policies to pursue in the future. During the 1920s and 1930s, the
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widespread, if inaccurate, belief that America had entered World War I to serve the interests of banks and arms manufacturers had a paralyzing
effect on US policy amid the totalitarian aggression that set off World War II.
Today, the US faces a long, nasty struggle to contain Putin’s imperial project and protect an endangered world order. Introspection is an
admirable quality, but the last thing America needs is another bout of self-flagellation rooted in another misapprehension of the past.
Europe doesn’t have the capacity to prevent a Russian invasion.
Meijer and Brooks 21, professor of government at Dartmouth College; CNRS Research Fellow at
Sciences Po and Center for International Studies, director of the European Initiative for Security Studies,
4-20-2021, (Hugo, Stephen, "Illusions of Autonomy: Why Europe Cannot Provide for Its Security If the
United States Pulls Back," International Security, 45 (4), pp. 7–43,
https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00405, *charts removed*, kav)
European Defense Capacity Shortfall
European national assessments thus diverge profoundly regarding the prioritization among different threats. Significantly, Europe's
strategic
cacophony greatly exacerbates a second overarching constraint on Europe achieving strategic
autonomy: severe military capacity gaps that cannot be closed anytime soon.
Since the end of the Cold War, Europe's defense capacity has markedly decreased.88 Operationally, the 2011
European military action in Libya revealed a severe shortage of key enablers for offensive military operations: the United States had to provide
critical capabilities that the Europeans otherwise lacked, such as air-to-air refueling; suppression of
enemy air defenses; and intelligence, target acquisition, and reconnaissance.89 Indeed, a recent systematic study by the
International Institute for Strategic Studies ( IISS) and the German Council on Foreign Relations found that, because their capability
shortfalls are so significant, Europeans would struggle to autonomously undertake operations even at the low end
of the spectrum of conflict (such as peace enforcement missions).90
In this section, we focus on Europeans' capacity for conventional warfare because it is indispensable for defense and deterrence vis-à-vis Russia and because this
allows us to directly address the argument of restraint scholars who maintain that the Europeans could autonomously balance Russia with ease. We
identify
four major challenges that are likely to hinder the capacity of Europeans to develop an autonomous
conventional defense capacity.
Lack of weapon systems for conventional deterrence and defense
During the Cold War, Europeans invested heavily in the kind of conventional capabilities required for conventional deterrence and defense. But after
the
Cold War, European defense spending plummeted, and a great proportion of these limited resources
were directed toward out-of-area operations.91 As a result, Europeans are lacking in even the most basic conventional deterrence and
defense capabilities. A key reason for this situation is Europe's strategic cacophony. The five economically largest European countries—the UK, France, Germany,
Spain, and Italy—are all located in Western or Southern Europe, which collectively have greatly de-emphasized the territorial defense mission since the end of the
Cold War. In contrast, states in Central and Northern Europe have tended to focus relatively more on territorial defense, especially after Russia's 2014 invasion of
Crimea; yet, these parts of Europe contain only small to medium-sized countries.92
Until now, there has been no long-term examination of the year-to-year shift across all of Europe of the kinds of core capabilities needed for conventional
deterrence and defense. To address this gap, we
systematically gathered data from the IISS Military Balance for the
1990–2020 period on three core military systems for conventional warfare: main battle tanks (MBTs),
armored personnel carriers (APCs), and artillery. To be sure, conventional warfare requires more than simply land capabilities. Yet,
Russia's A2/AD capacity is aimed at eroding, or nullifying, NATO's local control of its airspace, thus compelling NATO forces, in the case of conflict, to operate in an
environment of land warfare with contested air support.93 In this context, land resistance—and thus land capabilities—become key, which is why we focus on these
three specific systems (they constitute a sample of the needed land warfare capabilities). The data for MBTs of Europe's major powers are displayed in figure 1.94
(Online appendix C shows the data on MBTs of medium and smaller European countries as well as the data for APCs and artillery for all European countries.)
These data underscore the marked decline of European conventional warfare capabilities in the past
three decades. From 1990 to 2020, the combined European total number of MBTs plunged by 85 percent; APCs fell by 64 percent; and artillery declined by
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56 percent. As Sven Biscop concludes, “Europe's
capability shortfalls are such that it can neither meet its NATO
obligations for territorial defense, nor achieve strategic autonomy with regard to the protection of
Europe.”95
In reality, the
situation is even worse than these data indicate, because most European militaries have
significant readiness deficiencies. For example, an analysis by the German Parliamentary Commissioner for the Armed Forces concluded in 2018
that the “readiness of the Bundeswehr's major weapons systems is dramatically low in many areas,”96 noting that only 39 percent of Germany's Leopard
2 battle tanks were available for use given a lack of spare parts; the operability of only a quarter of its
PUMA infantry combat vehicles; the nonavailability of any of its six submarines; and the ability of less
than half of its Eurofighters and Tornado combat aircraft to fly.97 Significantly, Europe's readiness problems,
such as the obsolescence of its MBTs, are projected to become even more challenging in the decades ahead.98
the complexity of employing modern weapons systems
As dramatic as these weapons shortfalls are, European defense spending—if allocated properly—could eventually secure the needed systems. Yet, not
only is
the efficient allocation of resources a major challenge because of Europe's strategic cacophony (as detailed
below), but securing the needed weapons systems would only be the first step.
The effective employment of modern weapons systems is far more challenging than in past eras for a
variety of reasons. A key consideration is the immense premium put on command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and
reconnaissance (C4ISR). C4ISR—often referred to as the “nervous system” of modern militaries—is crucial for
gathering information about the combatants, for effectively processing that information, and for
disseminating and using that information to develop and implement complex plans.99 NATO's 2011 mission in Libya
shows the heavy reliance of Europeans on the United States' C4ISR capacity. Europeans would therefore need to develop their own
C4ISR capacity to be able to autonomously balance Russia, which would not be an easy undertaking given
that Russia is no Libya. They would need large amounts of new C4ISR systems (e.g., reconnaissance and communication satellites;
early warning and control aircraft; sensor systems; air, naval, and land command and control platforms), the most complex of which have very long development
times. Notably, the already significant difficulty of Europeans assembling the needed systems would be made even more acute if the UK's exit from the EU ends up
meaning that British capabilities also need to be replaced: at present, the UK detains, among other capabilities, 53 percent of the EU's combat intelligence,
surveillance and reconnaissance heavy unmanned aerial vehicles (CISR UAVs), 42 percent of airborne early warning and control aircraft, and 38 percent of
electronic-intelligence aircraft.100
In addition, European
countries lack the kind of specialized personnel needed to operate modern weapons
systems effectively. Redressing this weakness would be a significant undertaking, as they have reduced their number of military personnel drastically
since the end of the Cold War. As figure 2 shows, the size of the total active militaries of the large European powers
declined by 57 percent during the 1990–2020 period.101 Furthermore, beyond the difficulty of securing the financial resources to pay
the needed personnel, recruiting sufficient specialized personnel would be a major challenge, as demonstrated by the difficulties faced by many European militaries
in attracting personnel for skilled positions.102 Notably, a
recent study has shown that the employment of advanced
weaponry calls for highly skilled and highly trained military personnel, which are now more difficult to
recruit and retain in the military.103 Obtaining specialized military personnel to operate modern weaponry is only the beginning; they must also
be trained to effectively use modern weapons, which is extremely challenging and time consuming, partially because these weapons need to be used as part of a
It has taken U.S. military
personnel an extraordinarily long time to develop the skills required for effectively using today's
weapons systems: as Posen stresses, the United States' “development of new weapons and tactics depends on decades of expensively accumulated
technological and tactical experience.“105 It would likely take Europeans even longer to develop the needed skills,
given differences across countries regarding operational cultures, levels of ambition, languages, and so
on.106
cohesive package that places a premium not just on information gathering, but also on coordination and delegation.104
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Finally, the
effective use of modern weaponry in the European theater depends on European forces being
able to move quickly and securely over large distances within Europe. Yet, as a UK parliamentary report puts it, “NATO
has difficulty moving large forces” across Europe.107 In recent years, the Europeans have sought to bolster military mobility through a
variety of initiatives dispersed across different institutions (within both the EU and NATO).108 Yet, the movement and training of military
personnel and assets in Europe remain severely hampered by a combination of capability shortfalls,
legal/procedural hurdles, and infrastructural deficiencies that will not be easy to resolve.109
the difficulty of institutionalized military cooperation
An additional challenge is institutional. Europe's
strategic cacophony has prevented Europeans from developing an
autonomous, military-planning, command and control (C2) structure.110 Indeed, a report by the European Parliamentary
Research Service explains that one of the greatest challenges of European defense is “the lack of integration of the
military structures of the Member States.”111 Although an effective and autonomous European defense would require the creation of a
permanent planning and C2 infrastructure, the question of developing an autonomous Operational Headquarters (OHQ) has proven highly
divisive.112 An OHQ was never established because of conflicting national interests and priorities among
Europeans, in particular France, Germany and the UK. Whereas Paris has long supported the establishment of a military OHQ to
bolster the EU's strategic and operational planning structures and its contingency planning and C2 capacity, London has strongly resisted, seeing it as a duplication
of NATO's assets. Germany has stood somewhat in between, though closer to the UK, favoring a focus on civilian-military planning and C2, not least to avoid
duplicating structures already existing at NATO.113 As
a result, the EU remains entirely dependent on NATO or national
assets for the planning and conduct of major executive operations, for which it has no autonomous
military structures.114
If the United States were to pull back from Europe, it remains to be seen whether the Europeans could
rely on a “Europeanized” NATO, in which the integrated structures would stay in place but without the
United States.115 Military planning and C2 require a clear chain of command. When NATO was created, Europeans agreed to
be under U.S. military command, rather than attempting the far more difficult task of agreeing to be
under the command of another European country or group of European states. More generally, as the
hegemonic power in NATO, the United States has facilitated institutionalized cooperation among
Europeans and helped partly contain Europe's strategic cacophony.116 For decades, a U.S.-led NATO has been
the overarching shaper of national defense policies and military transformation in Europe, helping
overcome coordination and collective-action problems.117 In light of Europe's deep-seated strategic divisions, a U.S.
disengagement would amplify these coordination and collective action problems (assuming NATO
survived) and would further hinder institutionalized, intra-European defense cooperation at all levels:
strategies and doctrines; training; operational learning; interoperability; and joint capability
development. Likewise, without the United States, the persistent and profound divergence of threat perceptions and strategic priorities among Europeans is
likely to impede their capacity to agree on shared C2 structures for conducting operations, except for the lowest end of the spectrum of conflict (e.g., peace support
operations).118
As a result of strategic cacophony, the EU has, in fact, struggled mightily to create even the most minimal C2 structure. As Luis Simón underscores, “It has taken
nearly 20 years of allegedly significant steps for the European Union to establish a ‘Military Planning and Conduct Capability’ composed of up to 25 staffers, devoted
to assisting with the planning and conduct of so-called non-executive (i.e., training and assistance) missions,” with an advisory role only.119 Ultimately, given
Europe's deep-seated divergences, there is no basis for optimism that Europeans will be able to agree being under the permanent command of another European
country for deterrence and defense or to consistently undertake effective institutionalized military cooperation without the enabling role played by the United
States within NATO.
the fragmentation of europe's defense industrial base
If Europeans want to be strategically autonomous, they will have to produce the defense systems they
need without being reliant on the United States. The entrenched fragmentation of Europe' defense
industrial base, however, would make this a daunting task.
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On the demand side, European
states have consistently privileged domestically procured defense equipment
over European arms cooperation. According to data from the European Defense Agency, from 2006 to 2015, collaborative defense procurement
in Europe accounted for less than one quarter of total procurement.120 For example, a mere 7 percent of the European surface vessels currently in use have been
built through European armament cooperation.121 As for fighter aircraft—where
the economic incentives for European-wide
collaboration are especially powerful given the immense cost and complexity of these systems—there
has been relatively limited defense cooperation: less than a third (32.6 percent) of combat aircraft used
by EU militaries come from European collaborative production.122 Similarly, European states spend more than 80 percent of
their military research-and-development budgets within national borders.123
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AT: Retrenchment Solves
Retrenchment causes Russia-Europe-invasion.
Meijer and Brooks 21, professor of government at Dartmouth College; CNRS Research Fellow at
Sciences Po and Center for International Studies, director of the European Initiative for Security Studies,
4-20-2021, (Hugo, Stephen, "Illusions of Autonomy: Why Europe Cannot Provide for Its Security If the
United States Pulls Back," International Security, 45 (4), pp. 7–43,
https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00405, kav)
Europe is characterized by profound, continent-wide divergences across national defense policies, particularly threat perceptions, as well as by a fundamental
defense capacity shortfall that cannot be closed anytime soon because of a series of overlapping challenges. Given
the combination of strategic
cacophony and capacity gaps, which are mutually reinforcing, Europeans are currently not in a position
to autonomously mount a credible deterrent and defense against Russia. This situation would likely
continue for a very long time, even if there were a complete U.S. withdrawal from the continent, and all
the more so in the event of a partial U.S. withdrawal, a much more likely counterfactual. If a U.S.
pullback were to occur, it would leave Europe increasingly vulnerable to Russian aggression and
meddling, allowing Russia to exploit Europe's centrifugal dynamics to augment its influence. A U.S.
withdrawal would also likely make institutionalized intra-European defense cooperation appreciably
harder. Accordingly, a U.S. pullback would have grave consequences for peace and stability on the
continent.
These findings have major implications for both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, scholars and policymakers need to be realistic. The strong desire for strategic
autonomy is justified and understandable, but it is necessary to discern between distant hopes and present realities. Ultimately, the
barriers to
strategic autonomy are so substantial that the achievement of this goal would require a long-term,
sustained and coordinated effort. Sound European defense policymaking needs to reflect this: working under an unrealistic assumption that
Europeans can quickly achieve strategic autonomy is both unwarranted and unwise. Pursuing unrealistic goals can, in fact, undermine the achievement of realistic
ones. Instead, European
policymakers should focus on a manageable, affordable set of initiatives for
augmenting military capacity in the short term that the United States would see as valuable—and thus
would help consolidate the transatlantic alliance—but that would nevertheless also prove useful if the
United States does someday pull back. Such an approach could gradually and cumulatively create the foundations for greater commonality
and cooperation in the future and, over time, help mitigate the centrifugal dynamics at play in Europe.
In the United States, restraint scholars—virtually all of whom are self-described realists—also need to be realistic. Far from portraying the world as it is, their
assessment of Europe is guided by an unfounded optimism that Europeans can easily balance Russia if the United States pulled out. Currently, Europe
is
presented by restraint scholars as the “easy” case for a U.S. withdrawal, with Asia being the “hard” case.169 Although
China is rising fast and already has much more latent power than Russia, the latter is a greater threat to the United States' European
allies than the former based on the other three components of the balance of threat: geographic
location, offensive military capabilities, and aggressive intentions.170 The assessment of restraint scholars that pulling back
from Europe is an easy call ultimately rests on a wholly unsubstantiated assumption: that an effective European balancing coalition would emerge quickly if the
United States pulled back. What our analysis shows is that Europeans would for a very long time be unable to effectively confront Russia on their own if the United
States were to withdraw, and thus if America does want stability in Europe, it should retain a presence on the continent.
To be clear, this analysis does not mean that the United States should never pull back from Europe: in an ideal world, Europeans would and should develop the
institutional and material capacity to defend themselves without needing to rely on the United States. But until
Europeans can come together
effectively in the political and foreign policy realms—a process that will take a very long time to
emerge—it is important to be realistic and recognize that a U.S. departure would be destabilizing.
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AT: Losing in Ukraine
Russia will remain a threat despite sanctions and will remain so even if it loses in the
Ukraine
George Beebe,Director of Grand Strategy, Quincy Institute, 8-11, 22, NATO’s Tunnel Vision,
https://quincyinst.org/report/natos-tunnel-vision/
None of these developments are unimaginable, but none look very likely right now. Opinion polls
suggest that Putin is more popular than he was prior to the war.5 Although Russia is taking a sizable
economic hit from sanctions, the ruble is trading higher than it was before the war, and Russian
energy earnings have gone up even as its export volumes have declined, thanks to rising oil prices and
reluctance outside the West to join in sanctioning Russia.6 Western sanctions and military aid have
reinforced perceptions in Russia that the war is not against Ukraine but with the West, which is intent
on Russia’s demise.7 So far, Russia’s battlefield losses seem to be producing a patriotic, rather than an
anti-Putin, response.8 That might change if Russian forces suffer outright defeat in the war. But how
the West might orchestrate Putin’s battlefield defeat without escalation into a direct – and possibly
nuclear – war with Russia is not at all clear. Those advocating doing whatever is necessary to vanquish
Russian forces altogether suppose that the Kremlin would accept defeat rather than risk a direct
confrontation with a NATO member state.9 But this supposition is at odds with what both Russian
officials and the U.S. Intelligence community say.10 In any event, there is little reason for confidence
that Russia’s reaction to a defeat, should it occur, would echo Germany’s post-Nazi acceptance and
national contrition, rather than its post-Versailles resentment and revanchism. These scenarios are
all premised on a key assumption: that Putin’s successor would be intent, like Gorbachev in the waning
days of the Cold War, on democratizing Russia and making amends with the West. But this is perhaps
even more unlikely than Putin’s near-term ouster. Certainly, there are many Russians, particularly in
elite circles in Moscow and St. Petersburg, who are unhappy about the rupture in relations with the
West and would like to see efforts to repair them.11 Some privately believe that Putin’s decision to
invade Ukraine was unnecessary and counterproductive, and they are horrified by the brutality of the
war. That said, in contrast to the late Soviet and early post-Cold War periods, many of these same
people are quite disillusioned with what they see as an increasingly decadent and illiberal West.12 And
after the fiasco of Western reforms in the 1990s, many of those who would like to see Russia become
more democratic believe that its form of governance should evolve gradually in consonance with
Russian traditions, culture, and history, rather than by forced imitation of American or West European
models.13 Russians across the political spectrum agree that NATO expansion is a threat to Russian
security, as Gorbachev himself has long believed.14 There is little reason for confidence that Russia’s
reaction to a defeat, should it occur, would echo Germany’s post-Nazi acceptance and national
contrition, rather than its post-Versailles resentment and revanchism. In sum, Putin’s departure might
solve a problem of political optics, allowing Western leaders an opportunity to re-engage with Russia
under a Kremlin leader untainted by the blood of Ukrainians. But the likelihood that his successor
would resurrect the late Soviet days of perestroika at home and “new thinking” in foreign policy is
slight. The West cannot count on regime change to solve its Russia problem. The perils of prolonged
conflict If it is difficult to envision how the West might make Europe peaceful and whole by bringing
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about Russia’s incorporation into a NATO-centric Europe, then how might the standoff between Putin
and NATO develop? One possibility is all too likely, but highly undesirable: that Russia fails to resubjugate Ukraine, but succeeds in creating its de facto territorial division, hoping that an unsettled
state of economic ruin, humanitarian disaster, and political dysfunction will render Ukraine incapable of
joining NATO for decades.15 This is not a path toward a Europe that is whole, free, and at peace. Rather,
it is a path toward multi-faceted, long-term conflict between NATO and Russia, one that is in perpetual
danger of escalation into a direct — and possibly nuclear — military clash.16 NATO’s admission of
Sweden and Finland, together with its plans to deploy new American forces in Poland, Romania, and the
Baltic states, and expand its quick reaction force more than seven-fold to some 300,000 troops, will
greatly reassure “frontline” states that the alliance can and will come to their defense if attacked by
Russia. But given the state of undeclared indirect warfare between Russia and NATO, not to mention the
practical difficulties of defending a new 1,300-kilometer border with NATO in the north, Moscow is
likely to compensate for the growing imbalance of conventional capabilities by relying much more
heavily on its nuclear arsenal.17 This could include deployments of non-strategic nuclear weapons
systems pointed at Europe, resurrecting dangers of hair-trigger warning and response times that were
posed by contending Soviet and NATO theater missile deployments in the early 1980s. Unlike during
that period, however, the prospects for any arms control dialogue under present circumstances appear
remote. Moscow is likely to compensate for the growing imbalance of conventional capabilities by
relying much more heavily on its nuclear arsenal. Beyond the dangers of an East-West military
confrontation and a looming re-nuclearization of European security, there are other significant dangers
posed by the belief that the West must break Putin’s hold on power — or perhaps even break up Russia
— to unite Europe into a NATO-centric community of like-minded democracies.18 One is that a longterm state of sub rosa warfare with Russia — including both proxy war in Ukraine and economic and
political warfare more broadly — will have damaging knock-on effects inside the West itself. The war in
Ukraine and the fallout from onerous Western economic sanctions on Russia are threatening to choke
Europe of energy supplies as winter approaches, raising the prospect of a significant economic
recession.19 High gas and food prices in the United States are already prompting questions among
Americans about how long they must endure hardships to sustain Ukraine’s war effort. Over time,
popular support for the West’s aid to Ukraine and sanctions on Russia may erode, exacerbating preexisting political strains between elites focused on defending the “liberal international order” and
working and middle classes uncertain of how that concept matters to their own wellbeing.20 Russia
will be sorely tempted to deepen and exploit such strains.
Russia’s limitations in the Ukraine don’t prove it’s weak, as it hasn’t mobilized its full
forces
Simes, 6-21, 22, Dimitri K. Simes is president of The Center for the National Interest and publisher & CEO of the
National Interest, Is a Military Conflict Between America and Russia in the Making?,
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/military-conflict-between-america-and-russia-making-203144
So far, Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine has been limited, and not only in name. From the very
beginning, there were simply not enough troops for a wholesale invasion, particularly for an ambitious attack on
Kyiv which the Russian military initially undertook. This fact was one reason why the Zelenskyy government
expressed skepticism at the time that Russia was planning a full-scale invasion. While Russia today remains superior
in most categories of military hardware, as far as manpower is concerned, many experts believe that Ukraine—after
several military mobilizations—has more soldiers in the field than the Russian Army. Russia has so far
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commenced no military mobilizations; the new conscripts sent to Ukraine early in the invasion have proven to
be the exception. There is a long list of actions that Moscow has not taken which were initially anticipated by
NATO in the event of a full-scale invasion. While Russia has not hesitated to proceed with indiscriminate
bombardment when it lacked enough precision-guided munitions and intelligence information, it has acted
overall with considerable restraint—for instance, not attacking major government buildings, power and TV
stations, and presidential residences in Kyiv. Foreign leaders have even visited Zelenskyy, coming to Kyiv by
train without any evident effort on the part of Russia to block their movement or, even more so, target them
with missiles or air power. Despite multiple rhetorical threats from Moscow, Russian forces have not attacked
warehouses, airfields, train stations, and highways outside Ukraine, through which neighboring countries
have delivered military aid to Kyiv. Major cyber-attacks and sabotage operations, which are considered a part of
Russian operational code, have also failed to materialize.
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AT: Sanctions Solve
Sanctions fail
Kupchan, 6-29, 22, CHARLES A. KUPCHAN is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and
Professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University. He is the author of Isolationism: A History of
America’s Efforts to Shield Itself From the World, NATO’s Hard Road Ahead: The Greatest Threats to
Alliance Unity Will Come After the Madrid Summit,
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2022-06-29/natos-hard-road-ahead
The West’s sanctions against Moscow, even as they take a toll on the global economy, have so far failed
to have the intended effect in Russia. Because of the soaring price of crude, Russia continues to enjoy
ample oil revenues. And even though the value of the ruble plunged when Russia launched its invasion
in February, it has rebounded and recently hit a seven-year high against the dollar. The United States
and its G-7 partners agreed earlier this week to pursue further measures to restrict trade with Russia
and also discussed putting a price cap on purchases of Russian oil to ease inflationary pressures and
lower Russia’s revenues. The potential impact of these next steps remains uncertain.
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AT: Can’t Fight NATO
Russia has enormous strength relative to the Ukraine and Europe
English, 8-18, 22, Robert English is Associate Professor and Director of Central European Studies at the
Univ. of Southern California. A former Pentagon analyst, he specializes on the end of the Cold War and
post-Soviet politics., https://nationalinterest.org/feature/western-unity-ukraine-fragile-and-russiaknows-it-204308
The West’s key achievements in confronting Russia—swiftly rallying in solidarity with Ukraine, hitting
Moscow with crushing sanctions and supplying Kyiv with billions in armaments—may be at risk. Even as
politicians reaffirm Western unity and pundits hail the impact of weapons sent to Ukraine, economic woes are poised to fracture
that solidarity where it matters most—in the European Union. Paradoxically, the rising costs of war appear less
sustainable for wealthy, democratic EU countries than they do for poor, isolated Russia. The bill is coming due, and Europeans are shocked at
the privations they face to pay it: soaring energy costs, rationing, reduced aid for the poor, and looming recession. Disagreement
over
Ukraine aid triggered the recent collapse of Italy’s ruling coalition, a bad omen for other centrist
European governments. The transatlantic unity that diplomats worked so hard to forge might soon unravel. Such pessimism surprises
Americans, for whom the costs of war are minimal and whose media remain optimistic about the prospects of a Ukrainian victory. Most
commentary focuses on Russian weakness—economic crisis, military failure, political isolation—and those who argue for a negotiated end to
the war often meet with derision. Yet insistence that Russia must be decisively defeated grows increasingly unrealistic as the balance of
economic and political perseverance shifts in Moscow’s favor. As
tactically effective as Javelin missiles and HIMARS
artillery have been, they have not transformed the strategic landscape in Ukraine—a brutal war of
attrition in which Russia’s advantages in resources and resilience allow it to grind steadily on. Over and
Underestimating Russia Weren’t we told that Russia could not stand up to the West’s economic might, that its economy is smaller than Italy’s?
But Russia
is not in a contest to match Western economies, but rather one to produce enough weapons
and soldiers to match Ukraine’s Western-backed military. Weren’t we also told that sanctions would
devastate Russia and collapse its currency? Yet the ruble is now stronger than before. And while
Russia’s economy will contract by 6 percent or more in 2022, this is dwarfed by Ukraine’s implosion of
45 percent. More to the point, autocratic Russia’s ability to weather 6 percent negative growth is
stronger than that of many democratic European governments to survive negative growth of 3
percent. Such a contraction is foreseen in the latest gloomy forecasts: punishing recession, caused by gas shortages and soaring
commodities prices, resembling what the EU suffered in the pandemic of 2020-21 or the financial crisis of 2008-09. What matters is not some
absolute measure of economic or military strength, but the balance among Russia, Ukraine, and Europe relative to their ability to continue the
sacrifices of war. And Russia has shown resilience that few foresaw. Underestimating Russia—and overestimating our influence over it—is
nothing new. We credit ourselves for ratcheting up an arms race in the 1980s that bankrupted the USSR and won the Cold War, dismissing the
perestroika reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev that actually ended the Cold War two years before the USSR’s collapse. In the 1990s we hailed the
triumph of capitalism under Boris Yeltsin even as hasty adoption of Western-promoted policies fueled an orgy of oligarchic corruption that
drove tens of millions into poverty. In the 2000s, Vladimir Putin’s success in reviving Russia was written off as luck—high global oil prices—
ignoring key reforms that liberalized the economy while bringing key sectors back under state control. Underestimating Russian resentment
over the unilateralism of U.S. foreign policy, few foresaw that annexing Crimea in 2014—Putin’s response to a push to bring Ukraine into the EU
and NATO—would cause his popularity to soar above 80 percent despite the harsh economic sanctions it triggered. Instead, Western analysts
predicted that those sanctions would crush the Russian economy, particularly the petroleum sector vital to Moscow’s budget revenues. Thus,
most were surprised by what followed: Russia’s swift completion of major pipelines to China and Turkey, the building of a new liquified natural
gas (LNG) terminal in Siberia, and rapid construction of a critical road-and-rail link with Crimea. With this record of underestimating Russian
resilience, it’s no surprise that many succumbed to hubris in expectation of a swift strangling of Russia after it invaded Ukraine. In fairness, the
measures taken have been unprecedented in severity. More than 1,000 individuals and their assets have been sanctioned. From high-tech to
luxury, exports of numerous goods to Russia have been halted and hundreds of firms have shuttered operations there. Critically, Russian banks
were expelled from the SWIFT system of international payments and over $600 billion in Russian reserves were frozen. These were meant to
strangle Russian trade, yet it turned out that Moscow was prepared. An alternative payments system for exports, and massive cash reserves,
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enabled it to weather sanctions far better than expected. After briefly crashing, the ruble bounced back strong thanks to the skillful use of
interest rates and capital controls. The
ruble also benefited from soaring oil prices and Moscow’s insistence on
ruble payments for its gas, boosting demand for the currency. Some customers balked, but big importers such as Germany
and Italy quickly complied. How can the weaker party, while being punished, dictate terms of trade to its punishers? As Europe sought to bash
Russia with the stick of Moscow’s dependence on oil and gas revenues, it turned out that Putin held the other end of that stick. You’re Fired!
No, I Quit First! Historians will look back on the Euro-Russian energy war as an example of how not to exploit politico-economic leverage. As the
EU imposed ever-tougher sanctions on Moscow, plans to halt imports of Russian crude oil and natural gas were announced. Defense hawks had
long advocated this, and centrist Europeans now agreed as a way to cripple Russia’s economy and strangle its war effort by denying it lucrative
export earnings. “Fine,” the Russians replied, “We can speed up your transition to new energy sources by reducing the gas we ship you right
now.” To which the EU’s panicked reply was “Wait, we won’t be ready to cripple you by halting gas imports until 2026! You’re blackmailing us!”
Never pick up a grenade and brandish it at your enemy until you’re ready to use it—it just might blow up in your hand. Again, the key lies in
each side’s relative vulnerability to an interruption in trade. It’s a foolish policymaker who doesn’t assess the collateral damage of sanctions on
their own country, just as it’s a poor poker player who doesn’t consider that an adversary might see their bet and raise it. Europeans were
prodded into this bet by U.S. leaders, who have long argued for substituting American LNG for Russian pipeline gas—even though neither side
has anywhere near the export (United States) or import (EU) terminal and tanker capacity necessary. And now Europe is like the boss who wails
“Wait, you can’t quit, I wanted to fire you first!” As the EU scrambles to find alternative gas sources and prepares for rationing this winter,
observers in China and India scoff at the lament that Moscow is practicing “energy blackmail.” Chinese
and Indian views matter
not only because they are among the majority of the world’s countries that have not joined in
sanctioning Russia, but because they are the two biggest countries that are buying more Russian oil
and gas instead. This helps Moscow make up for lost sales in Europe, with some of the Russian oil
purchased by India actually being resold in EU markets. Similarly, some countries that proudly announced an end to
imports of Russian gas are still importing it—only indirectly, via Germany, Italy, or France. Stranger still are paeans to the EU’s new mandatory
gas-storage targets as an “historic” step toward “weaning itself off Russian gas” when those targets can only be met by importing more Russian
gas. In the months since EU leaders announced a policy of reducing dependence on Russian oil and gas to slash the revenues financing Russia’s
war, the
EU has merely highlighted its dependence on Russian oil and gas while soaring prices have
increased Moscow’s revenues. Worse to come may be the impact on Europe itself. In March, when those steps were proclaimed,
EU officials celebrated transatlantic cooperation and mocked Putin for unwittingly strengthening European unity. Five months later, Putin is
mocking Europe’s growing desperation. The Summer of Europe’s Discontent In recent days, millions of European consumers received notice of
massive rate hikes for heating and electricity while the EU agreed to cut the use of natural gas by 15 percent. But proclamations of EU leaders
do not ensure compliance by member states, many of whom balk at such austerity measures that analysts say are critical to making it through a
winter of privation. Some are stretched too thin to keep gas-powered factories running if supplies are cut further, or too politically fragile to ask
their beleaguered citizens to sacrifice more. Some worked hard to diversify their energy sources and resent being told to slash consumption to
help those who did not. And some have already served notice that they will not share supplies with neighbors, regardless of need. These
divisions cleave along familiar East-West and North-South lines, rekindling resentments that smolder from earlier debt and refugee crises.
Several factors will combine in the coming weeks to inflame this discord. One source of heat is, literally, the heat—record high temperatures
that spark wildfires and desiccate agriculture—the bill for which had topped $30 billion by June. Intense heat also increases the demand for gas,
both to power a proliferation of air conditioners and to replace hydropower lost to drought. Europe’s dwindling rivers also interrupt nuclear
power generation (due to lack of cooling water) and leave cargo as well as cruise ships high and dry (costing the transport industry billions).
Another economic hit comes from coronavirus lockdowns in China that disrupt supply chains. Meanwhile, illegal immigration to Europe is
surging again–up some 80 percent over last year. Many migrants from Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and other North African countries are driven by food
insecurity exacerbated by grain shortages caused by war. The potential for renewed friction between migrant-friendly North European and
Islamophobic East European states—with the latter already overwhelmed by Ukrainian refugees—is great. Most American coverage of the
war’s burdens ignores the energy- and conflict-related costs slamming Europe, focusing more on military aid to Ukraine where the United
States outspends the EU two-to-one. But if all types of economic aid for Ukraine are counted—including indirect costs, such as supporting over
five million war refugees—then the European contribution is much greater. Europeans also recently learned that their bill for Ukraine’s
eventual reconstruction will be at least $1 trillion. All told, Europe’s Ukraine burden could approach 10 percent of the EU’s entire annual GDP.
This would cause major economic and political disruption, even absent a severe energy crisis. Can Western Solidarity Weather a War of
Attrition? European public opinion had shifted toward an “antiwar” majority even before Russia began cutting gas
deliveries. A region-wide poll in May showed that while most blamed Moscow for the conflict, a majority also thought it was more important to
negotiate a settlement than continue efforts to defeat Russia. While no similarly authoritative EU-wide polls have been published since,
evidence from individual countries—Greece, Spain, Italy, and even Germany—suggests that growing numbers disagree with their governments’
policies of arming Ukraine instead of pushing Kyiv toward a ceasefire. To date, EU and NATO officials mostly ignore these fissures and urge
patience in efforts to defeat Russia. What’s rarely considered is that these policies have never been put to an electoral test. Many grumble that
they were imposed by well-paid “Brussels bureaucrats” answerable to no popular constituency, creating a “fake solidarity“ likely to crumble
under more economic pressure. A test will come when Italy votes for a new parliament in September, an election necessitated by the collapse
of the previous government because of a split over funding for Ukraine. Polls predict victory for a right-wing coalition whose leaders have a long
record of Putinophilia. It is easy to mock Silvio Berlusconi or Matteo Salvini as “Putin’s puppets,” but this distracts from the economic hardships
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that are propelling them into office. It is vital to study the impact of sanctions on Russia, yet inadequate as a basis for exhorting “increase
pressure on Putin” absent similar scrutiny of sanctions’ collateral impact on Europe. It is true that Russian efforts to replace European with
Asian buyers for its petroleum are hampered by a shortage of pipeline and port facilities, but is also misleading as grounds for optimism without
similar recognition of Europe’s shortage of tankers and terminals required to replace Russian gas with other sources. Who can build the missing
infrastructure fastest—the democratic West and its profit-based private companies, or autocratic Russia and China via state-directed projects?
Perhaps Russia’s resilience is illusory—with Putin’s hold on power less secure and his army more fragile than they appear—so that if Europe can
just hang on through a tough winter it will be rewarded with a Ukrainian triumph. But it
seems equally likely that, even with
battlefield reversals, Russia will retain a major swath of Ukrainian territory while squeezing Europe through
months of high inflation with severe energy and commodity shortages. Angry workers have already staged
disruptive strikes from the UK and Norway to Germany and Spain, and mounting hardships could lead to a wave of social unrest exceeding even
that caused by Covid-19 shutdowns. Aggravated by immigrant tensions, surging nationalism and fights over burden-sharing could undermine
some European governments and sour relations among others, fraying transatlantic ties and eroding support for Ukraine. This may be a worstcase scenario, but not so unlikely as it seemed just weeks ago. While we focus on Russia’s weaknesses, it is vital to appreciate the West’s own
vulnerabilities and threats to the EU’s political as well as economic health. As recognition grows that war will only end with a negotiated
settlement, a proactive policy could maximize Western leverage before months of turmoil erode it. More and more weapons might lead to a
Ukrainian victory, or they might cause more and more destruction that imposes devastating burdens not only on Ukraine, but on a fragile
European Union as well.
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AT: Cooperation Solves
Putin committed to unseating the global political order
Vas Shenoy, 6-25, 22, Jerusalem Post, The four horsemen of the apocalypse – opinion,
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-710365
The powerful Old Testament image of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse has been repeatedly brought back into discussion when humanity
has faced peril and war. Ezekiel and Zachariah have often been interpreted as describing the four horsemen as plague, war, famine and finally
death. When I woke up this past week on the morning of 120 days of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, it struck me that we
were nearing death: Death of the old geopolitical system and of the world order that has kept
repeating itself from the medieval ages. Despite much that has happened, Europe and Russia have risen as powers and then
crumbled repeatedly. It seems,finally, that this cycle of plague, war and famine will be the last of Western hegemony
and the birth of a new world order, a new world order which will probably bring back the balance of power to Asia and Africa,
which were the centers of global wealth and power long before the industrial revolution. CNN and other news outlets recently condensed
Putin’s endgame in Ukraine as the re-establishment of Russia’s imperial, nationalistic identity. However, the
Ukraine war seems to
be a step in Putin’s plan of global dominance. Western intelligence agencies have often stated that Putin is terminally ill and
has nothing to lose. While war in Ukraine can be explained as a dying man’s desperate bid at carving out a legacy, the actual actions do not
really marry this desperation. Despite
losing men, weapons, generals and being under extreme sanctions, Putin
continues to soldier on. The question must be asked, what if Ukraine was not the endgame, what if Ukraine was a long game toward
weakening the West? When we analyze biblical predictions, we should also analyze a lot of what-if’s. Usually, what-iffery is a dangerous sport
and leads you down paths that are slippery and often without fundamental logic. However, reading tarot cards or tea leaves is easier than
reading the intentions of a man such as Vladimir Putin’s. This man is
a veteran spy, former head of one of the world’s
most determined and resourceful spy agencies, who has not only brought Russia back to power from
its days under Yeltsin, but also been a field operative during the Soviet era. Before Russia’s Ukraine invasion,
Putin’s Russia had filled the gaps in conflicts worldwide and almost become a global arbiter in key
geopolitical theatres where the US had lost control. Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, Mali, Chad and Libya: Putin’s
Russia was counted as a voice heard on every major decision. Russia had also become the big brother and tried to play peacemaker in South
Asia, between India-Pakistan and China. Weeks before the Ukraine invasion, Russia had intervened in a bizarre coup attempt in Kazakhstan and
assisted the Kazakh government in pacifying a revolt. So, what has happened in the past weeks and months that suddenly made Putin risk all
that capital built up over the past 20 years to take on Ukraine. Is it national pride or is it a longer-term strategy against the West? Dragonbear:
China/Russia alliance The dragonbear alliance, of the Chinese dragon and the Russian bear, has not always been a love affair. Historically, Russia
has always supported India over China and there has been strong animosity between these neighbors, who share a 4,250 km. land border.
Henry Kissinger’s strategy of empowering China was, in fact, to weaken Russia and now it seems after 50 years, this may have created a beast: a
dragonbear that the US may not be strong enough to control. Since Chinese President Xi Jinping’s
rule, the Chinese strongman
and the Russian autocrat have developed a strong bond. Both China and Russia have resented the US dominance in global
affairs and during former president Donald Trump’s rule, Russia celebrated the fact that China bore the brunt of the erratic president’s ire.
Trump’s withdrawal from the international arena allowed Russia’s and China’s global power to grow
unchecked. Then came the first horseman, the plague. The rapid spread of COVID-19 into a global pandemic can be firmly attributed to
China’s negligence, lack of transparency and will to cover up. It also brought to light China’s control of international organizations, such as the
World Health Organization (WHO), which were as much to blame for the cover-up and spread as the Chinese government was. Western
democracies suffered far more economically and socially than China, a single-party-controlled dictatorship. While western markets were
decimated by public perception, China used this time to take firm control of Hong Kong, eliminate the one country-two systems pledge and
destroy the power of billionaires who had started challenging Xi Jinping’s authority. As the West grappled with vaccinations and tried to balance
democracy and its citizens’ liberties with the need to protect the lives of their citizens, China stuck to a plan of lockdown and achieving
complete political and social control of Chinese society. What damage COVID did to China, we will never know. How many advocates of liberty
disappeared, how many people really died and what really happened will probably be a mystery for generations to come. On February 4, two
men met under
the umbrella of the Winter Olympics in Beijing. Putin and Xi announced a no-limits
friendship between their two countries. Just when Europe had achieved some sort of control on the pandemic
and as inflation surged, Russian missiles rained on Kyiv. While Mario Draghi and his colleagues in Europe had declared
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“whatever it takes” to save the European economy, it seems that Putin had declared “whatever it takes” to ruin it. Oil prices hit a historic high
and inflation become even steeper. Stock exchanges globally, which had just started recovering to pre-pandemic levels, started crashing again.
The second horseman, war, had made his mark. Famine and death In October 2021, with heads of states meeting in Rome, at the G20 supply
chain resilience was often discussed as a key point to combat Chinese aggression. Most heads of state were worried about electronics and
chips, which were China’s domain. No one was alarmed about food, except the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food
Programme’s (WFP) often ignored warning of drought and famine in Afghanistan, Yemen and the Horn of Africa. We are almost at the third
horseman, famine. The world and Europe are on the brink of probably the toughest summer they have faced in generations. Russia
won
against Nazi Germany using a scorched-earth policy. It would seem Putin’s strategy to tame Europe is
similar. Curiously, the Chinese have been buying grain and stockpiling food since 2021. According to the
report of Al Jazeera from February 2022, Russia and Ukraine together produce over 25% of the world’s
wheat. Most of the produce of last year’s wheat is either in Russian control or out of Ukraine’s ability to export. As well, China is hoarding
maize, soya and other calorie crops, while the supply lines of food to Europe are limited. Another worrying fact is that while hunger may impact
Europe relatively less, due to the EU’s financial resilience, there
is a large risk that hunger in Africa will force increased
mass migration to Europe by sea. Whether food is available in Africa or not, rising costs will create economic or natural famines in
what seems to already be a very hot summer, forcing Africans to head to Europe in unprecedented numbers. Between China and Russia, both
control African politics enough to incentivize this. African Union’s President Senegal’s Macky Sall appealed to the West after his meeting with
Putin in early April, to lift sanctions to facilitate wheat and fertilizer exports. Depending on how this summer will progress, the
sanctions
on Russia may have to weaken to reduce pressure on the price of oil and gas to reduce inflation and to
keep southern Europe’s governments from collapsing from unchecked migration from Africa, due to
hunger. Putin may, with his friend Xi, achieve global dominance through one relatively small war in
Ukraine. Death and a new global order Ukraine just seems to be the first chapter of the death of the old world
order. Russia seems confident it will bring the West to its knees by making oil more expensive in a hot
summer where heatwaves will make it impossible to keep air conditioning off. If that isn’t enough, it will by pushing Africa to act on its behalf
by creating hunger. After all,
if the democracies can’t check inflation and enforce border security,
governments in southern Europe will collapse. Russia is not short of political allies it has developed in
European countries, who may return to power on the platform of illegal migration, unchecked price
rises, security and unemployment. “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and hell
followed with him.” While we may be prepared for death, what we now need to understand is how we deal with the hell that follows.
Russia is an aggressive power that does not want cooperation
Nausdea, 6-23, 22, Gitanas Nauseda is the president of Lithuania, Lithuanian President Gitanas
Nauseda: Now is the time to make NATO even stronger, Washington Post,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/23/lithuanian-president-gitanas-nausedastrengthen-nato-russia-war-ukraine/
“Never again” was the oath most widely pledged after the end of World War II. Yet for more than 100 days now, Russia’s
brutal war of
aggression has been raging in Ukraine. The war has fundamentally challenged the security architecture of the West. NATO’s
initial response was admirable. But now we must go further — by making urgently needed adjustments to the alliance and its structure. NATO
must adapt to a radically changed security environment. Russia
has been publicly challenging the West for at least the
past 15 years. It has tried to gain the upper hand through aggressive action, first in Georgia in 2008,
then in Ukrainian Crimea and Donbas in 2014. Despite all this, some Western countries have continued business as usual with
Moscow, some even expanding their cooperation. For decades, the West has failed to understand what Russian
President Vladimir Putin’s regime is about — namely expansionism, revisionism, violence, rule by fear
and coercion. Russia is not interested in creation or cooperation, but rather in destruction and rule by
force. Feb. 24, 2022, was the day when the rose-tinted glasses fell off. Now the countries of the West have imposed stringent sanctions on
Russia and are delivering heavy weapons to Ukraine. Europe has started moving toward energy independence from Russia. It might seem as
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though a lot has been done, but this is not enough to stop the war in Ukraine. And are we really doing enough to stop Putin from continuing his
aggression elsewhere? The time has come to understand that Russia
cannot be stopped by persuasion, cooperation,
appeasement or concessions. Russia takes such gestures as a sign of weakness, as permission to
expand and intensify its onslaught. When Putin hears Western leaders talk about the need to negotiate, the need for a cease-fire,
the need to avoid “humiliating” Russia, he is only encouraged to increase his gamble for world conquest. Recently Putin even
compared himself to Peter the Great and openly declared his determination to take back lands
previously occupied by the Russian Empire. Such rhetoric clearly demonstrates his contempt for one
of the most fundamental pillars of the rules-based international order: the principles of sovereignty
and territorial integrity. Putin is clear in his desire to subvert Western values, cut the links between North America and Europe, and
subdue Europe to Russia’s will. He knows that he can achieve these aims by confronting NATO. We can prevent this from happening by
ensuring that the transatlantic community has a clear plan for defense. We are at a crucial moment in history, one where we must show
decisiveness and determination. The NATO summit scheduled to start on June 29 in Madrid will be our chance to do so. First, we must clearly
define Russia as an explicit long-term threat to the entire Euro-Atlantic area. NATO policies must be adjusted accordingly. There is no place for
passive hesitation and appeasement. Second, we must scale up our defenses. We can no longer place our faith in the policy of
tentative reinforcement. We need to make sure that NATO has no weaknesses. It is crucial that no potential adversary should be tempted to
attack the alliance. The three Baltic states are already on the front line if Putin decides to test NATO’s boundaries, strength and commitment. In
this situation, there is no credible alternative for NATO but to invest more in the defense of the Baltic countries. We must quickly move to
modern forward defense by upgrading NATO’s battalion-scale enhanced forward presence to brigade level and by building regional air-defense
capabilities. This would send the strongest signal yet to Russia that it will not be allowed to set the parameters for the security of NATO’s
eastern flank. Failure to do so would invite further trouble. Third, we must make sure Ukraine wins. We must provide every form of support to
Ukraine, including (and most especially) heavy weapons, quickly and in significant quantities. Time and numbers matter in this war. We must
understand that every centimeter of Ukrainian land occupied by Putin’s forces brings Russian terror closer to our door. We must understand
that this war is about the world we and our children are going to live in. Values cannot defend themselves. If left undefended, they will perish,
and democracy will be replaced by authoritarianism. We need to choose between succumbing or standing up for our values. We need to
choose Ukraine And finally, NATO’s “open door policy” must be officially maintained as the most effective tool in expanding security and
providing peace for millions of Europeans. We should wholeheartedly welcome Sweden and Finland into the alliance. This decision will have a
wide-ranging positive impact on the Baltic region and NATO as a whole. To be truly safe and stable, Europe must be whole and free, united in
peace, democracy and prosperity. For this future to become a reality, the
success of NATO as the backbone of collective
defense spanning the whole transatlantic area is crucial. This also means that the alliance will have to reinvent itself.
Only by being more proactive, investing more in our indivisible security and making it more difficult for adversaries to wreak havoc can we hope
to achieve the return of a lasting peace in Europe.
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AT: Humiliation Turn
Crushing Russia is good – the squo is the worst of all worlds – future Russian attacks,
China invades Taiwan, collapse of the LIO, and middle power attacks.
Mongrenier 6-10 [Jean-Sylvestre Mongrenier, Professor of History and Geography and researcher at
the French Institute of Geopolitics, 6-10-2022, "Why do we Want Ukraine to Win?", Desk & Russie,
https://en.desk-russie.eu/2022/06/10/why-do-we-want-ukraine-to-win.html
The political-media system is prone to cyclothymia. After having feared the collapse of Ukraine in the days following the Russian offensive of
February 24, the resistance and the affirmation of a “nation in arms” gave rise to the greatest optimism. The question now was how far to
support the Ukrainian counter-offensive. Shouldn’t
Vladimir Putin’s Russia be spared “humiliation” by offering it a
“way out”? Even if it means rewarding the aggressor, humiliating the aggressed and sanctifying ethnic cleansing with bombs?
It is first of all a question of principle and of the prevalence of the general norms of law: the sovereignty, territorial
integrity and inviolability of the borders of a national state fully recognized on the international scene and a member of the UN since its
foundation! An independent state since the dissolution of the USSR, a decision not imposed by the West but desired by the Russian, Belarusian
and Ukrainian presidents at the time. The Ukrainian borders were recognized by Russia itself. Let us recall the signing of the Budapest
Memorandum (1994) and the Russian-Ukrainian friendship treaty (1997). On a general level, the Helsinki Final Act (1975) excludes the
modification of borders by force, a principle taken up in the Charter of Paris (1990), which marked the end of the Cold War.
Turning a blind eye to such a violation of the law, in the name of “pragmatism”, i.e. of a cynical attitude, would
stimulate the geopolitical revisionism and historical revanchism of the master of the Kremlin and the
Chekist structure that serves him. After a strategic pause, necessary to digest its territorial gains, reconstitute its
forces and play in the interstices of the Western front, Russia, driven by the cult of power (derjavnost), would set
out again to attack the borders of Europe. In the meantime, an intensified “hybrid war” would have
tested the resistance in Northern Europe, on the borders of the Baltic States and Poland as well as in the
Black Sea basin.
It is necessary to underline here the youth and fragility of the geopolitical structure of Europe, an “old continent” whose borders date back only
to the 20th century. It would be easy for one or the other state to write a historical dissertation and to exhibit maps of the past to justify claims
and coups de force. In short, the running gag about Francis Fukuyama, less read than quoted, the disillusioned talk about the revenge of History
and the resignation in front of the fait accompli would announce the return to the happy warmongering and without borders of other times.
The end of peace in Europe and the
collapse of the international order which, for all that, contained the
aggressiveness of the revisionist powers, would have repercussions on a global scale. As an ally and supporter of
Russia-Eurasia, the Chinese Communist Party-State and its “little helmsman”, Xi Jinping, would be encouraged in their
enterprise to destroy Western hegemony. The pressure on the Taiwan Strait, the islands and archipelagos of the
“Asian Mediterranean” (South and East China Seas) would be accentuated. Not to mention the Himalayan borders of the
Indian Union. In the wake of Sino-Russian Eurasia, small and medium-sized “troublemakers” would be
tempted.
For all these reasons, the West must show moral clarity, unity of purpose and resolve in its support for Ukraine.
Notwithstanding game theory and clever developments on the gradation of retaliation, interspersed with appeals for peace, it must be
understood that Putin
wants to take Ukraine, no longer at once but in tranches, and that he will destroy what he cannot
conquer. His armies and his police machine will advance until they are stopped. He himself sees himself at war with the “collective West”,
which brings us back to the great political lesson of Julien Freund: “It is not I who designate the enemy, it is he who designates me as such”. It is
as simple as that.
So there is no real and honorable alternative to the victory of Ukraine. One can already hear the false metaphysical questions about the
meaning of such a term: what is victory in the 21st century? Is not the war dead? Doesn’t everything just flow? On the pretext that nothing is
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eternal here below, the sophists dismiss the being and withdraw into the domain of representations. Let us simply refer to the definition that
the Larousse gives of victory: “Favourable outcome of a battle, of a war”. “Opposites: debacle – rout – discomfiture – rout”. More or less, this
corresponds to what strategists call the “desired end state”, assuming that one does not seek defeat.
The question remains as to the terms of a Ukrainian victory in the present war. The outcome of the battle of Kiev has already prevented the
worst: the collapse of the Ukrainian state. The battle of Kharkiv has shown the ability to conduct local counter-offensives. In the Don River
basin, resisting the bombardments and stopping the advance of Russian units on the ground would be other successes. Further deliveries of
Western weapons will contribute to this (see the forthcoming delivery of US multiple rocket launchers).
The situation in the Don River Basin cannot overshadow that in southern Ukraine. Of course, the front line is hardly moving and Mykolaiv has
not fallen. Nevertheless, the territories conquered to the north of the Crimean peninsula are important, and Ukraine is deprived of part of its
coastline. As for the port of Odessa, it is the object of a naval blockade which asphyxiates Ukraine and paralyses all movement in the Black Sea,
at the risk of the world food balance.
In this part of the territory, the most important thing is to free Odessa, a port without which Ukraine would become a geographically
landlocked state, deprived of access to the “greater Mediterranean” (including the Black Sea) and thus to the World Ocean. As things stand and
for fear of a rise to extremes, a naval operation by NATO or a Western coalition to force the blockade seems hardly conceivable.
Failing that, the possibility of an international fleet under the UN flag, with a mandate voted by the UN General Assembly, is being considered.
From a diplomatic point of view, such a project could allow a certain number of emerging and non-aligned countries, which have cautiously
stayed away from votes condemning the Russian action, to “come on board”. From an operational point of view, one has to have doubts: is the
Russian will to power inhibited by the colors of the UN? Come on!
Another response would be to deploy coastal batteries and long-range anti-ship missiles on the Ukrainian coast and along the Black Sea coast,
in order to keep Russian ships at bay. Grain ships could evacuate grain from the port of Odessa to the Turkish Straits and the Mediterranean
Sea. Let us not forget, however, that Russia has very long-range strike capabilities.
Let’s summarize. To hold on to the Don River basin, the geohistorical border of Europe since Antiquity, and to preserve the opening of Ukraine
to the Black Sea; to maintain the existing Western diplomatic front on the principle of sovereignty and territorial integrity, including Donbass
and Crimea: these are the terms of a Ukrainian victory, keeping in mind that this war is part of a much larger conflict.
It is in this perspective that Ukraine should be integrated into the Euro-Atlantic bodies: the European Union and NATO. In fact, simple
membership in the former, a commonwealth rather than a commonwill, would not be enough in terms of defense and security. If this were the
case, would Finland and Sweden be knocking on NATO’s door? The comparative advantage of NATO is explained by the hegemonic leadership
of the United States and the means it mobilizes for the defense of Europe.
Those who clumsily refer to the “peace camp” (a sad reminder of Soviet propaganda) will object that we have to live with Russia, which implies
that we must give priority to diplomacy. Sophism. Putin is not a “man-of-effect” who would be satisfied with reacting to “man-causes” (the
West): he wants to conquer territories formerly under Russian-Soviet domination and claims to assert his domination over Europe.
“Concessions” and “compromises” will encourage him to move forward. In reality, diplomacy is governed by the balance of power on the
ground.
In short, submissive
behavior will not save us from danger. It is important to understand that the Russian
threat to Europe cannot be explained by a misunderstanding, regrettable blunders or a technical-institutional problem.
This threat is structural — it is a geopolitical fact that the policy of appeasement of the last fifteen
years has not been able to modify — and it must be countered.
Peace by force, therefore, in the order of the flesh, not evangelical peace and the eschatology of the last ends, which are of a
different order. To realize this and to change our mental maps accordingly would be a great victory. It would mean breaking out
of the impolitic behavior that Western governments have been indulging in for too long.
Russia won’t lash out against America – he knows he’ll lose.
Sanger et al 22 [David E. Sanger, Eric Schmitt, Helene Cooper and Julian E. Barnes, 3-23-2022, "U.S.
Makes Contingency Plans in Case Russia Uses Its Most Powerful Weapons", No Publication,
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/23/us/politics/biden-russia-nuclear-weapons.html, DOA: 7-3-2022
//ArchanSen]
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If Mr. Putin did strike a NATO country intentionally, he would not only bring the force of the military alliance to
bear on Russia, but also probably find himself facing NATO troops inside Ukraine, Artis Pabriks, Latvia’s defense minister,
told reporters traveling in his country this month with Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“He
will get Article 5,” Mr. Pabriks said, in a reference to the NATO pledge that an attack on one alliance member is an attack on all.
“If he gets that, basically that
would also make us involved in Ukraine,” Mr. Pabriks said, adding: “He has no way out of
that. So I don’t think he should be so stupid.”
Nuclear deterrence theory – Putin will only lose a nuke if he barely wins – a crush
means he’ll be deterred.
Geist 22 [Edward Geist, policy researcher with a PhD in history, 03-8-2022, "Is Putin Irrational? What
Nuclear Strategic Theory Says About Deterrence of Potentially Irrational Opponents", No Publication,
https://www.rand.org/blog/2022/03/is-putin-irrational-what-nuclear-strategic-theory-says.html, DOA:
7-3-2022 //ArchanSen]
As nuclear strategists recognized decades ago, deterrence is
necessary—but it isn't always sufficient. The analysts and
theorists who worked on these issues were bedeviled, in particular, by the problem of nonrational opponents. As the
nuclear strategist Herman Kahn put it in 1962, “We want to deter even the mad.”
Kahn took comfort in his conclusion that “irrationality
is a matter of degree,” so scaling up nuclear deterrence
might still impress a “need for caution” upon irrational adversaries. Furthermore, “if the irrationality is
sufficiently bizarre, the irrational decisionmaker's subordinates are likely to step in.”
Theorist Patrick Morgan preferred the term “sensible” over “rational” to make it clear that an adversary doesn't have to be perfectly rational to
be understood and his actions anticipated. Sensible
actors may have goals that are anathema to our own, but they
pursue them in ways that appear likely to attain those objectives. They also may commit human errors. But even
Morgan acknowledged that not every opponent will be “sensible” enough to respect a deterrent threat.
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Abandoning GPC Means Russia Invasion
Their ev is wrong – Europe’s major powers underestimate Russia.
-
France, Germany, and the UK
Meijer and Brooks 21, professor of government at Dartmouth College; CNRS Research Fellow at
Sciences Po and Center for International Studies, director of the European Initiative for Security Studies,
4-20-2021, (Hugo, Stephen, "Illusions of Autonomy: Why Europe Cannot Provide for Its Security If the
United States Pulls Back," International Security, 45 (4), pp. 7–43,
https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00405, kav)
Russia is uninmportant or not a threat
Most smaller powers in Western and Southern Europe prioritize as their main sources of concern
transnational terrorism, WMD proliferation, and instability across the Middle East and Northern Africa
(MENA) and the resulting flows of migrants (see table 1).46 By contrast, ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was perceived as the overarching
conventional and nuclear threat during the Cold War, Russia has little, if any, significance in their national threat assessments.47 Indeed, some of these countries,
such as Italy or Spain, have long advocated for sustained engagement with Moscow.48
Likewise, two countries that do not share the same level of anxiety held by most Central and Eastern European countries vis-à-vis Russia are Hungary
and
Bulgaria. Considering the threat of conventional war to be minimal, and given their strong ties with
Moscow, they instead prioritize terrorism, migration flows, WMD proliferation, and cyberattacks.49
Russia is a threat, but other threats are more significant
Other countries also prioritize transnational terrorism, regional turmoil around Europe and the MENA,
cyberattacks, and illegal migration, but display higher threat perceptions of Russia than do states in the
first category (see table 1). They perceive Russia as a threat, but nonetheless see other threats as relatively
higher sources of concern.50
Croatia's threat assessment, for instance, focuses largely on challenges such as terrorism, regional instability, migration, and the proliferation of WMD.51 Still, in a
veiled yet clear reference to Russia's influence in the Western Balkans, Croatian policymakers put greater emphasis than the first group of countries on threats such
as “non-conventional, asymmetric, and cyber actions” that are “planned, permanent and systematic activities supported by state bodies.”52
France is the only major power in this group. Its threat perceptions revolve, foremost, around transnational terrorism
and regional instability in Europe's southern periphery. French policymakers consider jihadist terrorism
as “the most immediate” threat,53 especially in light of the steep rise in the number of terrorist attacks on French soil since the mid-2010s.54
France is also concerned with the proliferation of conventional and WMD-related technology,55 as well as with regional instability in Northern Africa and the Middle
East.56 The
French government puts particular emphasis on sub-Saharan Africa, where, partly because of its postcolonial
history, France retains “a direct security and economic interest” in the stability of the region.57 Accordingly,
although France has displayed growing concerns vis-à-vis Russia's assertiveness after the Ukrainian crisis,58 other threats remain more significant.
Russia and other threats have roughly equal significance
The United Kingdom and Germany—together with less powerful Western European states (Belgium and
the Netherlands) and Denmark—consider Russia and other security challenges to be equivalent threats
(see table 1).
British policymakers include both Russia and terrorism in the UK's “Tier One“ category of risks (in terms of
probability and impact).59 In light of Russia's increasingly assertive behavior, they assess that the ”risks from state-based threats have both grown and
diversified,“60 which is why the UK ”cannot rule out the possibility that [Moscow] may feel tempted to act aggressively against NATO Allies.“61 According to a UK
former senior defense official, the main areas of concerns vis-à-vis Moscow are (1) Russia's military modernization, including the development and deployment of
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weapon systems that can threaten the UK's NATO allies; (2) Russia's gray-zone activities (e.g., subversion, use of proxies, cyberattacks, use of military-grade nerve
agents for targeted killings); and (3) Moscow's activities outside Europe, such as in parts of Africa, but, most notably, in the Middle East.62
Yet, at the same time, the
UK sees transnational terrorism as an equally substantial threat. British policymakers have
perceived a rising threat from terrorism since at least the 2005 London bombings and the subsequent wave of terrorist attacks that swept across Europe and the UK
in the 2010s.63 In their eyes, “ISIL [the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant], Al Qa'ida, and affiliates remain committed to attacking UK and Western targets” and
continue to be “the most direct and immediate threat” to the UK's “domestic security.”64 In 2015,
the British government therefore
decided to increase its counterterrorism spending by 30 percent, including £2 billion of new investment
in the capabilities of UK special forces.65
Germany, too, considers terrorism and Russia to be threats of roughly equal significance. German
policymakers view terrorist attacks as “the most immediate challenge” to their country's domestic
security.66 In 2018, Germany's minister of interior stated that the security situation concerning terrorism continued to be “very threatening.”67 For
Germany, transnational terrorism is tied closely to regional stability in the MENA and to the existence of
failing states in which terrorist organizations can thrive.68 Accordingly, it seeks to bolster cooperation with partners in Africa and the
Middle East to train their security forces so as “to create a bulwark against international terrorism.”69
At the same time, Germany
sees Russia as “openly calling the European peace order into question with its
willingness to use force to advance its own interests and to unilaterally redraw borders guaranteed
under international law, as it has done in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine.”70 According to the ministry of defense, “this has
far-reaching implications for security in Europe and thus for the security of Germany.”71 A comparison of Germany's 2006 White Paper and of the subsequent
strategic documents (i.e., the 2011 Defense Policy Guidelines and the 2016 White Paper) highlights the enhanced focus of the German armed forces on territorial
defense since the Russia-Georgia war and Moscow's landgrab in Crimea.72
Interviews with current and former German officials reveal that the foreign affairs, interior, and defense ministries have different threat assessments. Whereas the
first two consider terrorism to be Germany's main security challenge, the latter prioritizes Russia as the main threat.73 Across the German government, terrorism
and Russia ultimately emerge as being roughly equally significant threats.
Smaller Western European powers such as the Netherlands and Belgium similarly consider Russia and
other threats to be largely equivalent.74 Likewise, in Northern Europe, Danish policymakers rank terrorism and regional instability in the
MENA—which can provide fertile ground for terrorists—relatively higher than do their Nordic neighbors in their threat assessments.75 At the same time, Russia is
seen as posing “a significant security challenge,”76 and its military buildup and increased military exercises in the region, as well as its use of gray-zone operations,
are considered “a clear challenge” to Denmark.77 The Danish government thus sees Russia, terrorism, and regional instability in the MENA as equally significant
threats.
Russia is the highest threat; other threats are also significant
Several Northern and Eastern European states have displayed mounting threat perceptions of Russia—which they see as their major threat—especially since the
Russo-Georgian War and, increasingly, the Ukrainian crisis (see table 1). Yet, they continue to share security concerns vis-à-vis terrorism, regional instability in the
MENA, and illegal migration.
In Northern Europe, Norway and Sweden emphasize both the “long belt of instability” to the south of Europe and terrorism as significant national security
concerns.78 Yet, most notably since the 2010s, Russia has returned to the top of their national security concerns. In particular, they highlight the development of
Russia's anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities, its numerous military exercises in Northern Europe, and its activities in the Arctic as amplifying the risk of an
accident or a crisis resulting in unintended escalation to war.79 The Norwegian government, for example, considers that “Russia's overall military capacity is the
most significant security challenge for Norway and NATO.”80
Likewise, in Central and Eastern Europe, although the Czech Republic, Romania, and Slovakia also emphasize other security challenges (e.g., instability in the
Southern Mediterranean and terrorism), their threat assessments prioritize Russia's assertiveness.81 While refraining from officially labeling Russia a threat, the
Romanian government argues that Russia's naval buildup—and the ensuing “destabilization of the security situation in the Black Sea Extended Region”—“represent
the most important factor of military risk against national security.”82
Russia is the dominant threat by far
The Baltic states, Finland, and Poland exhibit the highest threat perceptions of Russia in Europe. The former Soviet-controlled states in the Baltic region (i.e.,
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) prioritize Russia's conventional and gray-zone military threats as their core national security concern.83 Likewise, given Finland's
geographical proximity to Russia and their shared border, policymakers in Helsinki have viewed Russia as their dominant national security threat throughout the
post–Cold War period.84 Finland considers that the “use or threat of military force against Finland cannot be excluded.”85
Given its history of recurrent invasion by foreign powers, Poland has also consistently put Russia at the center of its security concerns since the end of the Cold
War.86 Moscow's “aggressive policy”—through which it aims to “destabilize the internal order of other states and to question their territorial integrity”—is seen as
“a threat mainly for Poland and other countries in the region.”87
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Retrenchment leads to varying threat perceptions that block European unity in the
face of Russia.
Meijer and Brooks 21, professor of government at Dartmouth College; CNRS Research Fellow at
Sciences Po and Center for International Studies, director of the European Initiative for Security Studies,
4-20-2021, (Hugo, Stephen, "Illusions of Autonomy: Why Europe Cannot Provide for Its Security If the
United States Pulls Back," International Security, 45 (4), pp. 7–43,
https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00405, kav)
Assessing the Counterargument: Can Europeans Balance Russia?
Together, Europe's
strategic cacophony and its defense capacity shortfalls feed and reinforce each other. For
one thing, many of the needed steps to make up for Europe's defense capacity shortfalls will require prolonged cooperation; Europeans would thus need to
overcome their entrenched strategic cacophony not just for a short time, but over a very long period. Moreover, because diverging interests hamper defense
industrial cooperation among Europeans, this—coupled with major capability shortfalls—deepens their technological dependency on the United States, further
reinforcing the challenges to addressing Europe's capability shortfalls.
Restraint scholars arguing for a U.S. pullout would undoubtedly respond that, even if Europe is currently split by strategic divisions and has severe defense capacity
shortfalls, a
U.S. withdrawal would result in heightened European threat perceptions of Russia and thereby
lead Europeans to bolster their defense investments—thus prompting them to come together to
balance Russia (through a balancing coalition or through the EU, or both). For restraint scholars, it is the U.S. presence in Europe that affords Europeans the
luxury of low threat perceptions of Russia and thereby drives them to underinvest in defense. Below, we assess the validity and robustness of this counterargument.
european threat perceptions after a u.s. withdrawal
We now evaluate how European threat perceptions would likely evolve if the United States were to pull back, focusing first on Europe's three major powers (France,
the UK, and Germany) and then on its medium and lesser powers.
Given its geographical location, colonial past, and continued engagement in Africa, France tends to look south rather than east for the defense of its core strategic
interests.131 Furthermore, France's
strategic outlook remains shaped partly by its Cold War, Gaullist foreign policy legacy,
which was based on the willingness to carve out a “third way” between the Soviet-led and the U.S.-led
blocs through some form of accommodation with Moscow while maintaining an independent nuclear
force and a French area of influence in Africa.132
The UK, as an offshore seapower, has since the early Cold War concluded that the only way to deter the
Soviet Union (and later Russia) is to use the United States as a counterweight.133 Accordingly, the “special relationship” with the
United States, both bilaterally and through NATO, has been the center of gravity of the UK's defense policy—as illustrated by its heavy reliance on U.S. military
technology.134 Indeed, NATO
has been the main vehicle through which Britain has sought to entrench U.S.
power in Europe and deter external threats.135
Likewise, Germany,
because of its history and location in the heart of the European continent, has strategic
priorities different from those of France. The defeat and subsequent occupation of Germany in World War II, including by the Soviet Union,
was followed by the division of the country in two, with one side under Soviet influence—thus making Germany the geostrategic epicenter of the Cold War. After
its reunification and the end of the Cold War, as well as its self-imposed stringent parliamentary
constraints on the use of military force, Germany has opted for a combination of economic and political
integration with the EU and military reliance on NATO, with the United States as the ultimate guarantor
for its security and the stability of the continent.136
Idiosyncratic historical legacies, geography, and distinctive local security environments have thus
profoundly shaped the threat assessments of the three major European powers. To be sure, these differences existed
during the Cold War, too, but they were muted by the overwhelming, common Soviet threat.137 By contrast, in light of the diversification of the post–Cold War
threat environment, if the United States withdrew from the continent, the threat perceptions of these major powers would be unlikely to converge around
Russia.138
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UK and Germany would be prone to exhibit heightened threat perceptions vis-à-vis
Russia. Given their historical reliance upon NATO as their ultimate security guarantee, if the United States were to remove its conventional and nuclear forces,
the credibility of NATO's deterrent vis-à-vis Russia would founder in the eyes of British and German
policymakers. As a result, there is every reason to expect they would raise the significance of Russia and
of territorial defense in their defense planning. At the same time, they would still have to reckon with
other significant threats (e.g., transnational terrorism and regional stability in the MENA).
By contrast, France's
threat assessment would most likely remain unchanged if the United States withdrew.
Although France might view Russia with greater concern, it would continue to prioritize terrorism and,
crucially, threats on Europe's southern periphery (i.e., regional instability in the greater Mediterranean area, in general, and in Africa, in
particular). As a senior current French defense official put it in an interview, “If the United States withdrew, the risk represented by Russia would ostensibly be
greater but, at the same time, it would be greater only if France considered that the threat posed by Russia to the Baltic states, Poland, etc. constitutes a threat to
our vital interests, which is far from sure.” This is because threats to Europe's southern periphery, such as “the destabilization of Africa or the Middle East are
considered to be a much higher priority than Russia. … Our vital interests are not threatened by Russia.”139
In sum, in the case of a complete U.S. pullback from the continent, London and Berlin would likely move rightward into the second column from the right in table 1
(Russia is a higher threat, but other threats are also significant), while France would not shift from its current position. Given their differing threat prioritizations, the
United Kingdom, Germany, and France would be very unlikely to reach agreement on a common position vis-à-vis Russia. Germany
and the UK might
lean more toward balancing and expand bilateral defense cooperation to that end. However, unlike countries that
view Russia as the dominant threat by far (i.e., the Baltic states and Poland), they would face important trade-offs in their allocation
of resources—between territorial defense and power projection capabilities, between Europe's eastern
and southern periphery, and so on—given that they would continue to grapple with other significant
threats. For its part, because France would likely continue to prioritize threats on Europe's southern periphery, it would be unlikely to provide a substantial (if
any) contribution to a balancing coalition. In fact, it might opt for accommodation with Russia to develop a sphere of influence in Western/Southern Europe or,
potentially, even see some strategic advantages to band-wagoning with Russia.
This predicament would be further compounded by fundamental divergences in threat perceptions
among Europe's medium and small powers. Except for lesser powers in Northern and Eastern Europe (i.e., the Baltic states and Poland),
which would consistently see Russia as their overriding threat, the other medium and small European states would likely
display profoundly different reactions to a U.S. pullback, depending on their geographic location,
history, and strategic priorities. While some countries would undoubtedly perceive a higher threat from Russia and thus revise their threat
assessments (moving one column to the right in table 1), o thers would likely maintain their existing threat hierarchization given
the equivalent or higher priority they assign to other threats or regions, or both. In fact, there is every indication that most medium and small European countries
that currently perceive threats other than Russia to be more significant or dominant would be highly unlikely to revise their threat assessment. Several
of
these countries might even become neutral or bandwagon with Moscow. It is therefore extremely implausible that all
European states would move Russia up in their ranking of threats. And even if they did, the cacophony of threat perception would remain, with only a few lesser
powers in Northern and Eastern Europe perceiving Russia as their dominant threat.
Restraint scholars might reply that the above discussion is excessively pessimistic about the chances for European defense coordination because it neglects the role
the EU can play in bringing Europe together in the security realm if the United States leaves.140 The
EU is not an effective institutional
platform for overcoming Europe's strategic divergence, however. There are many reasons for this, with the most notable being that
the EU is a kaleidoscope of countries with diverging interests that operates on the basis of consensus in the field of foreign and defense policy—thus making the
Common Security and Defense Policy a “structurally limited undertaking.”141 If the United States were to pull back, rather
than work to overcome
European divisions, the EU would be prone to inaction because of such divisions. Thus, only an effective
institutional structure could probably overcome, or at least mitigate, Europe's divisions, but strategic
cacophony would prevent the EU from being enabled to perform this function.
how easily can europeans balance russia's military strength?
A complete U.S. withdrawal would thus not mitigate Europe's strategic cacophony and could exacerbate
it. Restraint scholars might argue, however, that, even if threat perceptions did not converge across Europe, balancing
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Russia would not require much effort because it is so weak. Yet, Russia is a much tougher adversary to
match than restraint scholars now assess it to be—both in the conventional and the nuclear realms.
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Answers to: GPC Caused Ukraine Invasion
The idea that US power in Europe leads Russia to lash out is illogical and incompatible
with realism
Gunitsky ‘22 – Professor of Political Science [Seva; Seva Gunitsky is an associate professor of
political science at the University of Toronto.; 1-24-22; "There’s Plenty of Blame to Go Around on
Ukraine”; https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/24/ukraine-us-russia-stephen-walt/; Foreign Policy;
accessed 7-1-2022; AH]
Focusing on U.S. idealism ignores Russia’s own agency. In his latest article, FP columnist Stephen Walt traces the sources of
the Russia-Ukraine crisis to a single cause: American arrogance. The conflict would not have happened, he writes, “had
the United States and its European allies not succumbed to hubris, wishful thinking, and liberal
idealism.” By overplaying its hand, the United States has now put Russia in a position where it has no
choice but to defend its interests. Realists are sometimes criticized for ignoring weaker states’ agency,
but Walt takes the argument to its absurd conclusion by denying the agency of everyone but U.S.
policymakers. It’s U.S. officials who make the choices that matter—bad ones—while the rest of the world, Russian President Vladimir Putin
included, are simply enacting the eternal laws of history. This is not just an academic dispute about isms. It’s a question about how Russia and
the United States got into this situation and what to do about it. During the Cold War, debates raged about who was to blame for starting the
conflict between the superpowers. To simplify a complex set of arguments, answers fell into three categories: traditionalists, who blamed the
Soviet Union; revisionists, who blamed the United States; and post-revisionists, who blamed not a particular side’s actions but the uncertainty
and mutual suspicion created by the anarchy of international politics. Policymakers are now rehashing these debates, but instead of asking who
started the Cold War, the question has become who reignited it. Walt
takes the equivalent of the revisionist side—
America did it, period. Doing so makes sense as a counterargument to conventional Washington wisdom—that Putin did it, period. This
view—while refusing to treat the United States as anything but a force of good—has contributed to foreign-policy blunders in Afghanistan and
Iraq, so it’s understandable that Walt would push against it. It would be nice to have more voices in the foreign-policy establishment doing the
same. But
by placing blame on one state, Walt has robbed his argument of the strategic context that
realists themselves correctly love to emphasize. As a result, focusing on the United States doesn’t just
ignore the role played by others but contradicts Walt’s own theory. Realists argue that regional powers always seek
primacy in their neighborhood. According to this logic, a recovering Russia would seek to reestablish regional
hegemony regardless of U.S. actions. Western accommodation would have only sped up the process. It’s incoherent for
Walt to claim that liberal illusions caused the Russia crisis while also arguing that regional powers
naturally seek control over their neighborhood. The rise in tensions would be expected unless
Washington abandoned all interest in the region. This incoherence extends to explaining Putin’s
motivations. A key realist principle is that states should not go to war unless it serves their national
interests. This is why realists have admirably opposed U.S. adventurism in Vietnam, Iraq, and elsewhere, noting that none of these places
ever posed a threat to the United States. If you want to invade, you better have a good reason. But such high standards for
starting a conflict disappear when applied to other regimes. What national interest do realists think
Putin is defending by escalating this crisis? What is the existential threat he faces that justifies war and
tens of thousands of casualties? Even if NATO is a worry, it’s hard to credibly portray it an as immediate
danger, especially since Russia’s concerns center on an expansion that hasn’t happened and doesn’t
look likely to happen. If you argue that Putin is merely reacting to Western pressures and his reaction is
understandable and expected, you are also arguing that his decision to wage war is justified on realist
grounds. Which is, sorry to say, a questionable way to explain a war of choice, fabricated and pursued
for reasons unknown.
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Heg doesn’t embolden Russia
Kagan, 2022 - [Robert. Ph.D. in American History from American University, M.P.P. in Government from Harvard University, B.A. in History
from Yale University, Senior Fellow with the Project on International Order and Strategy in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings
Institution, former State Department Policy Planner. May/June “The Price of Hegemony: Can America Learn to Use Its Power?”
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2022-04-06/russia-ukraine-war-price-hegemony Acc 6/21/22 SM]
So in what way might the United States have provoked Putin? One thing needs to be clear: it was not by
threatening the security of Russia. Since the end of the Cold War, the Russians have objectively enjoyed
greater security than at any time in recent memory. Russia was invaded three times over the past two
centuries, once by France and twice by Germany. During the Cold War, Soviet forces were perpetually
ready to battle U.S. and NATO forces in Europe. Yet since the end of the Cold War, Russia has enjoyed
unprecedented security on its western flanks, even as NATO has taken in new members to its east.
Moscow even welcomed what was in many ways the most significant addition to the alliance: a
reunified Germany. When Germany was reunifying at the end of the Cold War, the Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev favored anchoring it in NATO. As he told U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, he believed
that the best guarantee of Soviet and Russian security was a Germany "contained within European
structures."
Late Soviet and early Russian leaders certainly did not act as if they feared an attack from the West.
Soviet and Russian defense spending declined sharply in the late 1980s and through the late 1990s,
including by 90 percent between 1992 and 1996. The once formidable Red Army was cut nearly in half,
leaving it weaker in relative terms than it had been for almost 400 years. Gorbachev even ordered the
withdrawal of Soviet forces from Poland and other Warsaw Pact states, chiefly as a costsaving measure.
It was all part of a larger strategy to ease Cold War tensions so that Moscow might concentrate on
economic reform at home. But even Gorbachev would not have sought this holiday from geopolitics had
he believed that the United States and the West would take advantage of it.
Ukraine is not America’s fault – American hegemony in Europe has ensured stability,
prevented nuclear proliferation, and provided protection.
Brands 3/15 – Professor of Global Affairs [Hal; Hal Brands is the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished
Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a
scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He is the
author or editor of several books regarding foreign policy and grand strategy; 3-15-22; " Putin’s Biggest
Lie: Blaming NATO for His War”; https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3532081/halbrands/putin%E2%80%99s-biggest-lie-blaming-nato-his-war; Asharq Al-Awsat; accessed 6-22-2022; AH]
Now Russian officials, and even President Vladimir Putin himself, have echoed — and sometimes directly cited — American scholars
such
as political scientist John Mearsheimer, who argues that the current crisis “is the West’s fault.” The “blame
NATO” argument tells a story of hubris, arrogance and tragedy. It holds that there was a golden chance for lasting peace in Europe, but the US
threw it all away. Rather than conciliating a defeated rival, Washington repeatedly humiliated it by expanding a vast military alliance up to
Russia’s borders and even into the former Soviet Union. This pursuit of American hegemony in a liberal-democratic guise eventually
provoked a violent rebuke. In this telling, Putin’s wars against Georgia and Ukraine are just the natural response of one great power whose vital
interests are being heedlessly threatened by another. The argument isn’t wholly wrong. Putin’s wars are indeed meant, in part, to push
Western influence back from Russia’s frontiers. But the
idea that NATO expansion is the root of today’s problems is
morally and geopolitically bizarre. Far from being a historic blunder, NATO expansion was one of the great
American successes of the post-Cold War era. Far from being the act of a domineering superpower, it
was part of a long tradition of vulnerable states begging to join America’s liberal empire. And far from posing a
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mortal threat to Moscow, NATO enlargement
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actually provided Russia with far greater security than it could
have provided itself. NATO was founded in 1949 with 12 members in Western Europe and North America. It gradually added additional
states — Turkey, Greece, West Germany, Spain — over the course of the Cold War. But the big bang of enlargement came once the superpower
conflict ended. NATO incorporated the former East Germany into the alliance in 1990; it then added three Eastern European countries (Poland,
Hungary, the Czech Republic) in 1999; then seven more, including the Baltic states, in 2004. To understand why NATO grew so rapidly, we have
to remember something that nearly everyone has now forgotten: There
was no guarantee that Europe would be mostly
stable, peaceful and democratic after the Cold War. In fact, many of the analysts who now view NATO expansion as a
catastrophe once warned that a post-Cold War Europe could become a violent hellscape. It wasn’t an outlandish scenario. A reunified Germany
might once again try to dominate its neighbors; the old enmity between Moscow and Berlin could reignite. The collapse of Soviet influence in
Eastern Europe could liberate those states to pursue long-suppressed territorial claims and nationalist agendas. Ethnic tensions and nuclear
proliferation might explode as the Cold War order crumbled. If
the US pulled back once the Soviet threat was gone, there
would be no extra-European superpower to put out fires on a continent with lots of geopolitical kindling.
“The prospect of major crises, even wars, in Europe is likely to increase dramatically,” Mearsheimer
predicted in 1990. NATO enlargement was the logical answer to these fears. Expansion was a way of binding a reunified
Germany to the West and surrounding it with democratic allies. Joining NATO required new members to lay aside any revanchist designs, while
allowing them to pursue economic and political reforms rather than investing heavily in military capabilities to defend their newly won
autonomy. NATO’s move to
the east also ensured that Poland and other states that easily could have built
nuclear weapons didn’t need to, because they had American protection. Most important, enlargement
kept the US firmly planted in Europe, by preventing the centerpiece of the transatlantic relationship
from becoming obsolete. No other initiative could have accomplished these objectives. Partnership for Peace — a series of loose
security cooperation agreements with former Soviet-bloc states — didn’t offer the ironclad guarantees that came with NATO membership. (If
you want to understand the difference between “security partner” and “NATO ally,” just look at what is happening today to Ukraine, one of the
former.) The idea of creating a pan-European security architecture (one that included Russia) had the same defect; plus, it would have given
Moscow veto power over the security arrangements of the countries the Soviet Union had so recently dominated. Only
American
power and promises could provide stability in Europe, and NATO was the continent’s critical link to the
US. Since 1949, Washington had tamped down rivalries between old enemies such as France and
Germany, while also protecting them from external threats. After 1991, NATO expansion took this zone of peace,
prosperity and cooperation that had emerged in Western Europe and moved it into Eastern Europe as well. The revolutionary nature of this
“Why has Europe been so peaceful since 1989?” Mearsheimer asked
in 2010. The answer, he acknowledged, was because “America has continued to serve as Europe’s
pacifier,” protecting the continent from dangers within and without. Today, of course, the critics don’t buy this
achievement seemed obvious not so long ago.
account. They argue that NATO expansion represented crude power politics, as the US exploited the Soviet collapse to engorge its own empire.
What resulted, pundits such as Thomas Friedman contend, was a sort of Weimar Russia — a country whose dignity was affronted, security
imperiled and democracy undermined by a harsh, humiliating peace. There is a kernel of truth here, too. Once Russian democracy began to
wobble in 1993-94, officials in the Bill Clinton administration saw NATO expansion — in part — as a way of preventing a potentially resurgent,
aggressive Russia from rebuilding the Soviet sphere of influence. Russian leaders of all stripes griped about NATO expansion from the early
1990s onward, warning that it could jeopardize the peace of the continent. In hindsight, NATO expansion was one of several issues — including
disputes over the Balkans and the collapse of the Russian economy in the late 1990s — that gradually soured Russia’s relationship with the
West. Yet this story omits three vital facts. First, all policies have costs. The price of NATO expansion was a certain alienation of Russian elites —
although we often forget that Clinton softened the blow by continually courting Russian President Boris Yeltsin, bringing Russia into elite
Western institutions such as the Group of Seven, and making Moscow a partner in the intervention in Bosnia in 1995-96. Yet the cost of not
expanding NATO might have been forfeiting much of the stability that initiative provided. Trade-offs are inevitable in foreign policy: There was
no magic middle path that would have provided all the benefits with none of the costs. Second, if
NATO expansion was a
manifestation of American empire, it was a remarkably benign and consensual form of empire. When
Clinton decided to pursue enlargement, he did so at the urging of the Poles, Czechs and Hungarians. The Baltic countries and others were soon
banging at the door. The
states of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union were desperate to join
America’s sphere of influence, because they were desperate to leave Moscow’s. This, too, was part of an older
pattern: The US has often extended its influence by “invitation” rather than imposition. The creation of NATO in
1949 was mostly a European idea: Countries that were terrified of Moscow sought protection from Washington.
One reason Putin’s wars to keep countries from escaping Moscow’s empire are so abhorrent to Americans is that the US empire has trouble
keeping members out. Putin may not see it that way. All that matters to him is that the mightiest peacetime alliance in history has crept closer
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to Russian soil. But here a third fact becomes relevant: Russia
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was one of the biggest beneficiaries of NATO’s move
east. Open terrain has often left Russia vulnerable to invasion and instability emanating from Europe. Napoleonic France, Imperial Germany
and Nazi Germany all swept through Eastern Europe to wreak havoc on Russian or Soviet territory. This is one reason why the great strategist
George Kennan opposed NATO expansion — because it would surely re-activate this fear of encroachment from the west. Yet this was a red
herring, because NATO posed no military threat. The alliance committed, in 1997, not to permanently station foreign troops in Eastern Europe.
After the Cold War, America steadily withdrew most of its troops and all of its heavy armor from the continent. US allies engaged in a veritable
race to disarm. The prospect that NATO could invade Russia, even had it wanted to, was laughable. What the alliance could do was tame the
perils that might otherwise have menaced the Russian state. Germany could hardly threaten Russia: It was nestled snugly into an alliance that
also served as a strategic straitjacket. NATO, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had candidly said in 1990, could “play a containing role” vis-à-vis
Berlin. Moscow didn’t have to worry about a nuclear Poland — Warsaw didn’t need nukes because it had the protection of the United States.
Aside from the Balkan wars of the 1990s, Eastern Europe was comparatively free of the geopolitical intrigues and military quarrels that might
have made Russia jumpy. NATO expansion hadn’t just alleviated Europe’s security problems; it had protected Russia’s vital interests as well.
Moscow might have lost an empire, but it had gained remarkable safety from external attack. Part of the answer is that NATO expansion wasn’t
really the problem, in the sense that Russia didn’t need that pretext to seek renewed hegemony in its near-abroad. The Soviet Union, and the
Russian empire before it, had traditionally sought to control countries along their frontiers and used brutal means to do it. To say that NATO
expansion caused Russian belligerence is thus to make an extremely dubious assertion: that absent NATO expansion, Moscow would have been
a satisfied, status quo power. And this is exactly why a bigger NATO has posed a real problem for Putin. After all, safety from external attack
isn’t the only thing that states and rulers want. They want glory, greatness and the privileges of empire. For 20 years, Putin has been publicly
lusting after the sphere of influence that the Soviet Union once enjoyed. NATO expansion stood athwart that ambition, by giving Moscow’s
former vassals the ability to resist its pressure. NATO also threatened a certain type of Russian government — an autocracy that was never
secure in its own rule. A democratic Russia wouldn’t so much have minded being neighbors with Western-leaning democracies, because
political liberty in those countries wouldn’t have threatened to set a subversive example for anti-Putin Russians. Yet, as Russia became more
autocratic in the early 2000s, and as Putin’s popularity declined with the Russian economy after 2008, the imperative of preventing ideological
spillover from a US-backed democratic community loomed large. So Putin began pushing back against NATO’s eastward march. In 2008, he
invaded Georgia, a country that was moving — too slowly for its own safety — toward the West. Since 2014, he has been waging war against
Ukraine, in hopes of rebuilding the Russian empire and halting Kiev’s westward drift. America’s vision of Europe has now run into Putin’s
program of violent coercion. To be sure, US officials made mistakes along the way. Because Russia was prostrate, militarily and economically,
during the 1990s, Washington acquired a bad habit of issuing security guarantees without really considering how it would fulfill them in a crisis.
The Pentagon has thus been scrambling, since 2014, to devise a credible defense of NATO’s eastern flank. As Russia regained its strength, US
officials also failed to grasp the danger of provoking Putin without adequately deterring him. When, in 2008, NATO declined to endorse
membership for Georgia and Ukraine but issued a vague statement saying that they would someday join the alliance, it created the worst of all
worlds — giving Putin both the pretext and the time to pre-empt future expansion by tearing those two countries apart. Yet there is a curious
morality in accounts that blame the West, which sought to protect vulnerable states in Eastern Europe, for the current carnage, rather than
blaming Putin, who has worked to dismember and intimidate those countries. It is sloppy thinking to tally up the costs of NATO expansion
without considering the historic achievements of a policy that served American, European and even certain Russian interests remarkably well.
And if nothing else, NATO expansion pushed the dividing line between Moscow and the democratic world to the east after one Cold War — a
factor of great significance now that a second cold war is underway. The legacy of NATO expansion isn’t simply a matter of historical interest.
Americans’ understanding of the past has always influenced their view of what policies to pursue in the future. During the 1920s and 1930s, the
widespread, if inaccurate, belief that America had entered World War I to serve the interests of banks and arms manufacturers had a paralyzing
effect on US policy amid the totalitarian aggression that set off World War II. Today, the
US faces a long, nasty struggle to
contain Putin’s imperial project and protect an endangered world order. Introspection is an admirable quality, but
the last thing America needs is another bout of self-flagellation rooted in another misapprehension of
the past.
Russian lashout is Putin’s fault, not America’s fault
Hamid ‘22 [Shadi; Shadi Hamid is a senior fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings and
an assistant research professor of Islamic studies at Fuller Seminary.; 3-8-22; " There are many things
worse than American power”; https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2022/03/08/thereare-many-things-worse-than-american-power/; accessed 7-1-2022; AH]
Blaming America first became all too easy. After September 11, U.S. power was as overwhelming as it was uncontested. That it
was squandered on two endless wars made it convenient to focus on America’s sins, while underplaying Russia’s and
China’s growing ambitions. For his part, Putin understood well that the balance of power was shifting. Knowing what he
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knew, the Russian president wasn’t necessarily “irrational” in deciding to invade Ukraine. He had good
reason to think that he could get away with it. After all, he had gotten away with quite a lot for nearly 15
years, ever since the Russian war against Georgia in 2008, when George W. Bush was still president. Then
he annexed Crimea in 2014 and intervened brutally in Syria in 2015. Each time, in an understandable desire to avoid an escalatory spiral with
Russia, the United States held back and tried not to do anything that might provoke Putin. Meanwhile, Europe became more and more
dependent on Russian energy; Germany, for example, was importing 55% of its natural gas from Russia. Just three weeks ago, it was possible
for Der Spiegel to declare that most Germans thought “peace with Russia is the only thing that matters.” The narrative of a feckless and divided
West solidified for years. We, as Americans, were feeling unsure of ourselves, so it was only reasonable that Putin would feel it too. In
such a
context, and after four years of Donald Trump and the domestic turmoil that he wrought, it was
tempting to valorize “restraint” and limited engagements abroad. Worried about imperial overreach,
most of the American left opposed direct U.S. military action against Bashar Assad’s regime in the early
2010s, even though it was Russian and Iranian intervention on behalf of Syria’s dictator that bore the
marks of a real imperial enterprise, not just an imagined one. Russia’s unprovoked attack on a sovereign
nation, in Europe no less, has put matters back in their proper framing. The question of whether the
United States is a uniquely malevolent force in global politics has been resolved. In the span of a few
days, skeptics of American power have gotten a taste of what a world where America grows weak and
Russia grows strong looks like. Of course, there are still holdouts who insist on seeing the United States as the provocateur. In its
only public statement on Ukraine, the Democratic Socialists of America condemned Russia’s invasion but also called for “the U.S. to withdraw
from NATO and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict.” This
is an odd statement considering
that Russia, rather than the United States, has been the world’s most unabashedly imperialist force for
the past three decades. But many on the anti-imperialist left aren’t really anti-imperialist; they just have
an instinctive aversion to American power. America’s low opinion of its own capacity for good — and the resulting desire to
retreat or disengage — hasn’t just been a preoccupation of the far left. The crisis of confidence has been pervasive, spreading to the halls of
power and even President Barack Obama, whose memorable mantra was “Don’t do stupid sh*t.” Instead of thinking about what we could do,
or what we could do better, Obama was more interested in a self-limiting principle. For their part, European powers — content to bask under
their U.S. security umbrella — could afford to believe in fantasies of perpetual peace. Europe’s gentleness and lethargy — coaxing Germany to
commit even 2% of its GDP to defense seemed impossible — became something of a joke. One popular Twitter account, @ISEUConcerned,
devoted itself to mocking the European Union’s propensity to express “concern,” but do little else, whenever something bad happened.
Suddenly, the EU has been aroused from its slumber, and the parody account was rendered temporarily speechless. This is no longer tepid
concern, but righteous fury. Member states announced that they would send anti-tank weapons to Ukraine. Germany, for the first time, said
that it would ramp up its military budget to 100 billion euros. On the economic front, the EU announced some of the toughest sanctions in
history. My podcast co-host, Damir Marusic, an Atlantic Council senior fellow, likened it to a “holy war,” European-style. Sometimes, unusual
and extreme events mark the separation between old and new ways of thinking and being. This week, the Berlin-based journalist Elizabeth
Zerofsky remarked that the current moment reminded her of the memoir “The World of Yesterday,” written by the Austrian novelist Stefan
Zweig as World War II loomed. In it, he recalls the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with an almost naive fondness. On the first day of
the Ukraine invasion, I happened to be speaking to a group of college students who had no memory of September 11. I told them that they may
be living in history. Those students, like all of us, are bearing witness to one of those rare events that recast how individuals and nations alike
view the world they inhabit. The coming weeks, months, and years are likely to be as fascinating as they are terrifying. In a sense, we knew that
a great confrontation was coming, even if we hadn’t quite envisioned its precise contours. At the start of his presidency, Joe Biden declared that
the battle between democracies and autocracies would be the defining struggle of our time. This was grandiose rhetoric, but was it more than
that? What does it actually mean to fight such a battle? In
any number of ways, Russia’s aggression has underscored
why Biden was right and why authoritarians — and the authoritarian idea itself — are such a threat to
peace and stability. Russia invaded Ukraine, a democracy, because of the recklessness and domination
of one man, Vladimir Putin. The countries that have rallied most enthusiastically behind Ukraine have almost uniformly been
democracies, chief among them the United States. America is lousy, disappointing, and maddeningly hypocritical in its conduct abroad, but
the notion of any moral equivalence between the United States and Putin’s Russia has been rendered
laughable. And if there is such a thing as a better world, then anti-imperialists may find themselves in
the odd position of hoping and praying for the health and longevity of not just the West but of Western
power.
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Cyber Threat
NATO members victims of cyber attacks now
Stephen Trelor, 6-30, 22, Bloomberg, Russian Hackers Target Norway in Latest Volley of Cyber Attacks,
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-30/russian-hackers-target-norway-in-latest-volleyof-cyber-attacks
Russian hacker group Killnet targeted a string of Norwegian public service websites in the latest digital
salvo against NATO member countries. Norway’s National Security Authority has been assisting a series of organizations in
dealing with targeted cyber attacks from an alleged pro-Russian group, Director General Sofie Nystrom told reporters on Wednesday. Some
websites experienced instability or disruption, but there are currently no indications that any sensitive or personal information has been
compromised. The public administration portal, the corporate page of an online banking identification service and the Norwegian Labor
Inspection Authority were among those affected by so-called distributed denial-of-service attacks. The website of Norway’s largest newspaper
was also down for 25 minutes, it reported on Wednesday. Other
NATO members have faced similar attacks, with
Lithuania’s defense chief saying on Wednesday that the Baltic nation has come under an
unprecedented cyber attack this week after the government announced it would start blocking the transit of sanctioned goods
to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.
Russia engaged in cyber attacks against 42 countries
Frank Konkel, 6-23, 22, Microsoft: Russia Stepping Up Hacking, Cyber Penetration Efforts on 42 Ukraine
Allies, https://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2022/06/microsoft-russia-stepping-hacking-cyberpenetration-efforts-42-ukraine-allies/368514/
Four months into its war on Ukraine, Russia is carrying out cyber operations on much more than its
neighbor, according to a report released by Microsoft Thursday. In the report, Microsoft said it
detected Russian network intrusion efforts in 128 organizations in 42 countries outside Ukraine, with
the majority of its “strategic espionage” focused on governments, think tanks, aid groups and
businesses. Russia has most often targeted the U.S. and other NATO countries, including Poland, where
military logistics and humanitarian assistance is being coordinated. “Since the start of the war, the
Russian targeting we’ve identified has been successful 29 percent of the time,” the Microsoft report
said. “A quarter of these successful intrusions has led to confirmed exfiltration of an organization’s data,
although as explained in the report, this likely understates the degree of Russian success.”
Russia has ordered cyber attacks against the UK
Aliki Kraterou, 6-19, 22, The Sun, SPY ANOTHER DAY Putin ‘orders up to 50 sleeper agent spies hiding in
Britain to prepare to launch cyber attacks against UK’, https://www.the-sun.com/news/5593797/putinsleeper-agent-spies-britain-prepare-cyber-attacks/
VLADIMIR Putin has ordered up to 50 sleeper agents in Britain to prepare to strike against the UK, it
has been claimed. MI5 believes the Russian leader has instructed the undercover agents to be ready to
launch cyber attacks amid soaring tensions with Moscow over the war in Ukraine. Intelligence chiefs
fear that agents will also try to steal military information and target Ukrainian activists and Russian
dissidents. Sources have told the Mirror that Russian spies have infiltrated all parts of British society,
including top public schools and the civil service. A senior intelligence insider said: “We have to assume
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Russia is now active at all levels of British society. "They scoop up all forms of intelligence and pass it
back to the Kremlin through handlers. “This could be anything from what sort of weaponry is being sent
to the Ukraine – and how much of it – to the sexual antics of the country’s political and military leaders.”
And former military intelligence officer Lt Col Philip Ingram, told the outlet: “It is impossible to
accurately assess how many Russian agents there are in the UK. “Of course there are different types –
declared intelligence officers known as part of Russian diplomatic missions, and those operating under
cover trying to recruit agents and then sleeper agents in all aspects of society. "Given our support for
Ukraine, Russian intelligence will be focused heavily on operations inside the UK and could also
include recruiting agents inside political establishments, defence and industry”. Meanwhile, a
suspected Russian spook in his 40s was arrested last week, under the Official Secrets Act as he
attempted to leave the UK via Gatwick Airport. He was taken to Hammersmith Police Station accused of
spying and sabotage that is "useful to an enemy state". A source told The Sun: "The suspect is believed
to have been in the UK spying on behalf of the Putin regime. “He was kept under observation and
arrested as he arrived at Gatwick to try and fly out of the country.’’
Russia and the US are engaged in cyber conflict now
Tom O’Conner, 6-10, 22, Newsweek, Russia Warns Growing Cyber Conflict With U.S. Could Spark War in
Real World, https://www.newsweek.com/russia-warns-growing-cyber-conflict-us-could-spark-war-realworld-1714896
Russia's top cyber diplomat has warned that a worsening conflict with the U.S. in cyberspace could
lead to a real-world escalation between the two powers as both sides vowed to strike back against
any virtual provocations. Washington and Moscow have long denied conducting malicious cyber
activities against one another, but U.S. Cyber Command Director General Paul Nakasone confirmed last
week in an interview with Sky News that the Pentagon's cyber branch was involved in "a series of
operations across the full spectrum," including those both "offensive" and "defensive" in nature, as
well as "information operations," in support of Ukraine as it struggles to fend off a Russian incursion
launched in February. Days after the senior U.S. military official's comments, Russian special
presidential representative for cooperation in the field of information security Andrey Krutskikh
accused the U.S. of having "unleashed cyber aggression against Russia and its allies" in an interview
Monday with the newspaper Kommersant. Reached for comment by Newsweek regarding the nature
of Moscow's potential response, the Russian Foreign Ministry shared a statement attributed to
Krutskikh in which he asserted that "rest assured, Russia will not leave any aggressive actions
unanswered." Krutskikh, who also serves as director of the Russian Foreign Ministry's Department of
International Information Security, said the "how" and "where" remained to be seen, but said that "all
our steps will be measured and targeted in accordance with our legislation and international law." And
though an absence of international cooperation has left a potentially dangerous gray zone in assessing
cyberwarfare, Krutskikh argued that the Biden administration was in clear violation of international law
when it came to Washington's backing for Kyiv. US, Marines, conduct, cyber, exercise, 2016 Moscow has
consistently denied allegations of interfering in U.S. election security, but its cyber activities have
nonetheless been designated a national security priority by Washington. Above, Marines and sailors
monitor network activity during an exercise at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego,
California, on August 22, 2016. "State institutions, critical and social infrastructure facilities, storage of
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personal data of our citizens and foreigners living in Russia are being hit," Krutskikh said. "Officials in the
United States and Ukraine are taking responsibility for the sabotage. It is there that they categorically
refuse to develop international legal foundations. They do not seem to fully realize the danger of such
aggressiveness and encouragement of gangsterism in the field of information security." He then listed
what he described as evidence of such activities against Russia, mostly involving distributed denial-ofservice, or DDoS, attacks using foreign servers based in the likes of the U.S. and Germany. As of last
month, he said "over 65,000 'armchair hackers' from the USA, Turkey, Georgia, and EU countries
regularly took part in coordinated DDoS attacks on our country's critical information infrastructure,
including Rutube video hosting." And "in total, 22 hacker groups are involved in illegal operations
against Russia," Krutskikh alleged. He also accused the U.S. of relaxing its rules to conduct offensive
operations against Russia, calling it "alarming that Washington is deliberately lowering the threshold for
the combat use of ICT." If left unabated, he warned of possible real-world ramifications, including an
outright skirmish between the world's top two nuclear weapons powers. "The militarization of the
information space by the West and attempts to turn it into an arena of interstate confrontation have
greatly increased the threat of a direct military clash with unpredictable consequences," Krutskikh said.
"Once again, I want to repeat to those who do not immediately get it: the uncontrolled distribution of
'virtual weapons' and the encouragement of their use will not lead to good." The U.S. has also accused
Russian of having conducted multiple cyberattacks against the nation, and has warned such a threat was
heightened given the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. And just because a major cyber incident hasn't
happened yet, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly told the RSA
Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday that she didn't "think we are out of the woods in terms of a
threat at this point in time." "We're only 100 days into this war," she said at the time, as cited by The
Wall Street Journal. "We know that it's part of the Russian playbook to use malicious cyber activity,
whether it's through a state-sponsored entity, whether it's through criminally aligned groups."
US engaged in offensive cyber warfare against Russia now
David Ignatius, 6-7, 22, The U.S.-Russia conflict is heating up — in cyberspace,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/07/us-russia-conflict-is-heating-up-cyberspace/
As the war in Ukraine rages, a long-standing
battle between Russia and the United States over cyberspace is
also heating up, with a top Russian diplomat warning of “catastrophic” consequences if the United States or its allies “provoke” Russia
with a cyberattack. The “information space,” as the Kremlin likes to call it, has been a growing domain of U.S.Russian conflict, not only in the Ukraine war, but in Russia’s hacking attacks against the presidential
campaigns in 2016 and 2020 as well as the congressional elections in 2018. The two countries briefly seemed to
be working together for common rules for cyberspace last year, but that cooperation has now exploded. Andrei Krutskikh,
the top cyber expert at the Russian foreign ministry, charged in an interview on Monday with the Russian newspaper
Kommersant that the United States had allegedly “unleashed cyber aggression against Russia and its
allies.” He claimed that Washington was using Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and “the IT Army
created by him to carry out computer attacks against our country as a battering ram.” Krutskikh continued
ominously: “We do not recommend that the United States provoke Russia into retaliatory measures. A rebuff will certainly follow. It will be firm
and resolute. However, the outcome of this ‘mess’ could be catastrophic, because there will be no winners in a direct cyber clash of states.” To
back up Krutskikh’s claim that the United States has attacked Russian cyber targets, Kommersant cited a June 1 comment by Army Gen. Paul
Nakasone, head of U.S. Cyber Command. Speaking about Ukraine during a visit to Estonia, Nakasone told Sky News: “We’ve conducted a series
of operations across the full spectrum: offensive, defensive, [and] information operations.” A Cyber Command spokesman had no comment. A
senior State Department official said Krutskikh’s allegations were “nothing new” and a “rehash” of past statements. The Biden administration,
for its part, accused Russia last month of conducting “malicious cyber activity” against Ukraine, including an attack on a commercial satellite
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communications network that damaged systems in other European countries. The State Department condemned Russia’s cyber-meddling, but
the senior official said the United States hasn’t seen the “huge attacks” some were expecting, perhaps because the Russians “don’t want a war
on two fronts.” Krutskikh
contended that a “freeze” by the Biden administration in developing a common
approach to cybersecurity had reversed progress made last year at the United Nations. U.S. and Russian
officials had endorsed a joint U.N. resolution in October outlining a framework for discussing cybersecurity issues. Krutskikh called it a “historic
moment.” But at that time, the Russians were already preparing their invasion of Ukraine, which began on Feb. 24. Even so, contact between
the two countries on cyber issues has continued, with two meetings since December and another scheduled in July, the senior official said. The
Kremlin’s cyber chief said Monday that Russia was still ready to negotiate “appropriate legal agreements with all states that soberly assess the
threat of cyberwarfare.” But that same day, Russia included Michele Markoff, the State Department’s cyber security coordinator and the main
channel of contact with Krutskikh, on a new list of sanctions permanently banning travel to Russia. Russia’s view of the internet is
fundamentally different from that of the United States, the senior State Department official said during an interview on Tuesday. Whereas the
United States seeks an open, free and interoperable system, Russia wants “an internet with sovereign borders,” where it can suppress speech it
doesn’t like. Russia’s obsession with cyberspace partly reflects Moscow’s view that the United States controls the internet and its governance. A
favorite Russian target is a group of experts known as ICANN, which oversees the internet’s system of domain names. ICANN used to operate
under a Commerce Department contract but has been fully independent since 2016. On Monday, the group published a compendium of
Russia’s attempts to rewrite internet rules, through the United Nations or other international regulatory bodies it seeks to control. From
President Vladimir Putin on down, the Russians quoted in the ICANN report resent the United States’ digital dominance. The U.S.-Russian
contest over cyberspace will play out in this September’s election for a new secretary general of the International Telecommunications Union, a
U.N. agency that could, in theory, take over internet governance. Two leading candidates are Doreen Bogdan-Martin, an American who
currently runs one of the ITU’s bureaus, and Rashid Ismailov, a Russian who has worked in his country’s communications ministry and for
Huawei, Nokia and other companies. Watch that space, folks. The internet confrontation is a microcosm of Russia’s larger standoff with the
West. Russia yearns for recognition as a great power and global standard setter. But
as the war in Ukraine grinds on, Putin
has become ever more prickly, isolated and angry at his foes. He is severing Russia’s connections to
the world, even as he seeks to dominate cyberspace. His computer is crashing, and he doesn’t seem to
know how to reboot.
Russia engaging in cyberwar in the Ukraine and it threatens NATO countries
Catler & Black, 4-6, 22, DAVID CATTLER is Assistant Secretary General for Intelligence and Security at NATO. DANIEL BLACK is Principal Analyst in
the Cyber Threat Analysis Branch at NATO, The Myth of the Missing Cyberwar Russia’s Hacking Succeeded in Ukraine—And Poses a Threat
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2022-04-06/myth-missing-cyberwar
After Russia invaded Ukraine, many observers initially expected cyberattacks to steal the limelight as a
major instrument in Russia’s arsenal. But after a month of fighting, a host of prominent scholars and
analysts of cyberconflict have reached the opposite conclusion. Russia’s activities in cyberspace, they
claim, have been paltry or even nonexistent. They have dismissed the role of cyber-operations, variously
proposing that digital preparations for the invasion in Ukraine never occurred, were haphazard or lacked
any real impact, or were mere continuations of Russia’s long-term cyber-activity against Ukraine that fell
below the threshold of outright war.
This is a dangerous misdiagnosis. All available evidence indicates that Russia has employed a
coordinated cyber-campaign intended to provide its forces with an early advantage during its war in
Ukraine. The apparent disconnect between these observed incidents, on the one hand, and the public
analysis that Russian cyber-operations have been minimal, on the other, is jarring. Preconceived notions
of the role of cyberattacks on the battlefield have made it hard for analysts to see cyber-operations in
Ukraine for what they are and for the role they play within Russia’s military campaign. Leaning on these
preconceptions will only lead to future policy and intelligence failures. Cyberspace is still a nascent
domain of operations, and events in Ukraine will have outsized implications not just for any appreciation
of Russian cyberpower but for an understanding of the nature of cyberconflict itself.
OPENING SALVO
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The belief that cyber-operations have played no role in Ukraine does not stem from a lack of real-world
impact. To the contrary, the magnitude of Moscow’s pre-kinetic destructive cyber-operations was
unprecedented. On the day the invasion began, Russian cyber-units successfully deployed more
destructive malware—including against conventional military targets such as civilian communications
infrastructure and military command and control centers—than the rest of the world’s cyberpowers
combined typically use in a given year.
The cumulative effects of these attacks were striking. In the hours prior to invasion, Russia hit a range
of important targets in Ukraine, rendering the computer systems of multiple government, military,
and critical infrastructure sectors inoperable. Forensic analysis by Microsoft, the cybersecurity
company Symantec, and the Slovak firm ESET has found that these attacks affected numerous
government agencies, military institutions, civil emergency services, and a range of other critical
infrastructure sectors such as defense industrial base manufacturers, information technology services,
and energy companies directly relevant to Ukraine’s military capacity.
Cyber-enabled sabotage also knocked offline the satellite Internet provider KA-SAT, which Ukraine’s
military, intelligence, and police units depend on. Victor Zhora, the deputy chief of Ukraine’s State
Service of Special Communication and Information Protection, has characterized the satellite outage as
“a really huge loss in communications in the very beginning of war.” U.S. defensive cyberspace
operations prevented further Russian attacks from disrupting the railway networks that were being used
to transport military supplies and help millions of Ukrainian citizens evacuate.
Russia continues to draw from its wartime arsenal of cybertools, deploying additional destructive
malware on a weekly basis. Cities under siege from Russian shelling, including Kharkiv and Kyiv, have
experienced cyber-enabled disruptions to Internet services. Ukraine’s national cyber-authorities
continue to expose intrusion attempts by Russian and Belarussian cyber-units. All of this has occurred
against the backdrop of a series of website defacements, denial-of-service attacks, and other
destabilizing cyber-operations intended to produce chaos and further exhaust Ukraine’s cyberdefenses.
If observers see this cyber-offensive as a series of isolated events, its scale and strategic significance get
lost in the conventional violence unfolding in Ukraine. But a full accounting of the cyber-operations
reveals the proactive and persistent use of cyberattacks to support Russian military objectives. The
misperception that Russia has been restrained or ineffective in the prosecution of its cyberwar on
Ukraine likely stems from the fact that Russia’s cyber-operations have not had the standalone,
debilitating effects that assessments before the war imagined they would have. But those assessments
pose an unrealistic test of strategic value. No single domain of operations has an independent, decisive
effect on the course of war. Nevertheless, the lack of overwhelming “shock and awe” in cyberspace has
led to the flawed presumption that Russia’s cyber-units are incapable, and even worse, that cyberoperations have offered Russia no strategic value in its invasion of Ukraine.
THUNDER RUN
Analysts should assess the use of cyberpower in its proper context. Evaluating Russia’s cyber-operations
in Ukraine is impossible without accounting for the multiple tactical and strategic errors that have
bedeviled other aspects of Moscow’s military campaign. Russian planners expected a swift victory in
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Ukraine, but their strategy failed for multiple reasons: inadequate coordination and preparation, the
underestimation of the strength and resilience of Ukraine’s military, and various intelligence lapses.
Russia’s missteps and struggles have almost certainly hurt its ability to fully employ its cyber-program in
support of its conventional forces.
But even with those limitations, Russian cyber-units successfully attacked a range of targets in
accordance with Russia’s war plans. Russian cyberattacks on government and military command and
control centers, logistics, emergency services, and other critical services such as border control
stations were entirely consistent with a so-called thunder run strategy intended to stoke chaos,
confusion, and uncertainty, and ultimately avoid a costly and protracted war in Ukraine. Indeed,
Russian cyber-units have demonstrated their ability to succeed without a great deal of advance warning
and direction, and despite the overarching difficulties hampering Russia’s military effort.
The magnitude of Moscow’s cyberattacks on Ukraine has been unprecedented.
The reason for this relative success lies in the unique nature of competition and conflict in cyberspace.
Unlike troop buildups or other forms of military mobilization that are infrequent and highly visible,
cyber-operations are the result of operational cycles that occur covertly and continuously through
peacetime and wartime. The targeting of sensitive networks during peacetime lets attackers lay the
groundwork for malware intended for wartime use. The methods attackers use to establish initial
footholds for espionage activities are indistinguishable from those that precede cyberattacks. For cyberunits, war does not fundamentally change the way they prepare or start to fight.
Russia’s cyberattacks prior to the invasion suggest methodical preparations, with the attackers likely
gaining access to Ukrainian networks months ago. This stands in stark contrast to the evident lack of
preparation across Moscow’s other military instruments, including on the ground, in the air, and in its
frequently used influence operations through media and social media. Russian cyber-units did not need
direct military orders to prepare for the invasion or to generate new capabilities for the war. The
operational realities of cyberspace required them to be ready well in advance. Russian cyber-units will
probably continue to be in a state of permanent readiness and capable of supporting tactical and
strategic objectives on short notice, either in Ukraine or beyond, as the war persists.
The emerging consensus that claims Russian cyber-operations were ineffective misses the bigger
picture. Russia’s strategy failed to capitalize on the full capabilities and numerous operational successes
of its cyber-units. For instance, Russian cyber-units have not yet shut down electricity or Internet
connectivity on a massive scale in Ukraine. That does not mean Russia is incapable of such attacks, as
some observers have suggested, but that it envisioned a swift victory and did not see the need for
such widespread, indiscriminate disruptions. In all likelihood, Russian military units were reliant on
Ukrainian civil infrastructure for their planned seizure of Kyiv and could not risk blowback to their
own operations. Russia is almost certainly capable of cyberattacks of greater scale and consequence
than events in Ukraine would have one believe. Moscow has significantly improved its ability to
conduct comprehensive cyber-operations in recent years and has actively invested in its cybercapabilities, developing new and harder-to-detect variants of its more advanced malware and
operational infrastructure.
NO RESTRAINT
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The war in Ukraine is not over. Russia has been forced to change its operational approach, and Western
intelligence points to Moscow shifting toward a strategy of attrition. With the likelihood that the conflict
will become a protracted war, Russia will probably not exercise restraint in its use of additional
disruptive and destructive cyber-actions. Russian President Vladimir Putin is most likely to double down
on early cyber-successes and seek to further disrupt and undermine government, military, and civilian
infrastructure, as well as defense industrial base enterprises. Russia’s recent attempts to strike the
same targets it hit on the day of the invasion with additional destructive malware indicate this new
phase of the conflict is well underway.
Although less visible than cyberattacks, cyber-enabled espionage—the theft of sensitive information, in
this case from Ukrainian networks—is also likely to play a grisly role in the Russian offensive. Russia’s
Federal Security Service has allegedly used personal information stolen from Ukrainian federal
databases to draw up kill lists of people who could lead a Ukrainian resistance movement in the event of
a Russian victory. And as the war carries on, Russia may be increasingly tempted to tap into the latent
strategic potential of hacking collectives aligned with the Kremlin that specialize in ransomware and can
unleash chaos at a moment’s notice.
Western policymakers should also be prepared for cyber-operations to spread beyond the confines of
Ukraine. Several Russian cyber-operations since the invasion have already had spillover effects into
NATO countries, affecting critical sectors and civilian Internet connectivity across Europe. Russia
knowingly accepted the risk that its cyberattacks would cause collateral damage and has a history of
similar reckless behavior. The U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s Annual Threat
Assessment released in March judged that “Russia is particularly focused on improving its ability to
target critical infrastructure … in the United States as well as in allied and partner countries.” Active
Russian preparations for future cyber-operations indicate that this not an idle threat.
Cyber-operations have been Russia’s biggest military success to date in the war in Ukraine. They will
continue to provide Moscow a flexible tool capable of hitting a range of targets in Ukraine and
beyond. Disregarding their unprecedented use will only leave policymakers and analysts unprepared
for what’s next. A clear-eyed view of the role cyberwarfare has played so far in Ukraine and a better
understanding of its place in modern warfare are imperatives for NATO’s collective security and for
managing the risks of escalation looming in cyberspace.
Russia is still a cyber threat, it simply has chosen not to use cyber weapons in the
Ukraine
Kitche, 4-12, 22, Klon Kitchen (@klonkitchen) is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also
the former national security adviser to Senator Ben Sasse and a fifteen-year veteran of the U.S. intelligence
community, Why Russia’s Cyber Warriors Haven't Crippled Ukraine, https://nationalinterest.org/blog/techlandwhen-great-power-competition-meets-digital-world/why-russia%E2%80%99s-cyber-warriors-havent
Two months after Russia invaded Ukraine, we are beginning to understand the role of cyber in Europe’s
largest land war since World War II. While there have been some initial surprises, Ukraine and the
United States are settling into a posture focused on limiting Russia’s digital operations inside the
warzone and preventing it from escalating cyberattacks internationally. Russia, on the other hand, is
trying to get off its heels tactically, reassert itself as a force to be feared, and keep global leaders
guessing about its capabilities and intentions. Many, including myself, thought a conflict in Ukraine
would begin with extensive Russian cyberattacks against Kiev's military command and control, air
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defense, civilian communications, and critical infrastructure networks. The rationale was that these
operations provide significant military advantages, fall well within Russia’s demonstrated cyber
capabilities, and pose little risk to the attacker. While the early hours of the invasion did include a hack
of U.S. satellite communications provider Viasat and limited “wiperware” and distributed denial of
service (DDoS) attacks, the anticipated cyber onslaught did not materialize. Having learned more since
the invasion began, there appear to be three primary reasons why events unfolded as they did. First,
Moscow seems to have made a strategic choice not to employ large-scale, destructive code in order to
control escalation. While Russian hackers have previously used attacks like the NotPetya worm in
Ukraine, the fact that this attack eventually spread across the globe and caused at least $10 billion in
damages—including inside Russia—likely convinced Putin not to use similar attacks in this context. This
was assuredly the right decision, considering that NATO is already nervous about cyber threats and it is
unclear if a large-scale cyberattack that spread to one of its members would trigger the alliance’s Article
V commitment to mutual defense. Second, Russia may have left Ukraine’s critical infrastructure
unmolested because its military needed it. The ability to deploy secure, tactical communications is a
fundamental capability of modern combat. Yet Russia has utterly failed to do this at the necessary scale
in Ukraine. Instead, the Russian military has frequently used commercial radios and civilian
telecommunications that have been easily intercepted and exploited. While surprising from a military
capability perspective, this dependency would explain the lack of offensive cyber operations against
communications networks. Similarly, critical infrastructure may not have been targeted because
Russian forces assumed they would quickly achieve a decisive victory and that insulating vital services
like water and electricity would be essential for reestablishing order and preventing significant civilian
opposition. This too, while wildly optimistic, helps to explain why these sectors have not been taken
offline. Finally, Russia did try conducting other cyberattacks, but they were successfully repelled. Just
last week, Gen. Paul Nakasone, Commander of U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM), testified to
Congress that so-called “hunt forward” teams deployed to Eastern Europe in December of last year were
working with Ukraine to harden its networks and evict Russian hackers. These teams remain in theater
and have been engaged in online hand-to-hand combat with Moscow’s blackhat hackers ever since. And
this leads us to the current state of play, where operators on all sides are now circling each other,
constantly matching and countering one another’s cyber moves. Last week, for example, the
Department of Justice disclosed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had secretly removed
Russian malware from computer networks around the world, including from some networks owned
by American companies without their permission. The FBI took similar actions last year and appears
poised to do so again, rationalizing that these threats are too significant for responses to be delayed by
slow or uneven efforts by the private sector. The Biden administration has also issued a warning to
commercial owners of critical infrastructure, asking them to redouble their defenses against threats like
ransomware, with the president saying, “We need everyone to do their part to meet one of the defining
threats of our time—your vigilance and urgency today can prevent or mitigate attacks tomorrow.” The
U.S. government is also cracking down on Russian-backed non-state hackers such as the various
ransomware syndicates operating within Russia’s borders. In the weeks before and since the invasion
of Ukraine, USCYBERCOM and the FBI have deconstructed many of these groups’ technical
infrastructure, cut off and even reclaimed some of their cryptocurrency funding, and indicted key
members. But it is not just the government that is engaged in this fight. Microsoft, Google, Facebook,
and other private companies are also actively working against Russian cyberattacks, removing
destructive software, blocking propaganda, and helping Ukrainian users secure their data. These and
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other efforts make one thing very clear: securing the U.S. homeland—as well as American allies and
partners—from malicious cyberattacks requires sustained, multi-dimensional operations that will only
be successful if they are done in partnership with the private sector. Anything less will result in failure.
Russia, for its part, remains dangerous and is far from out of the game. The Office of the Director of
National Intelligence, for example, says Russia remains a “top cyber threat” that is “particularly focused
on improving its ability to target critical infrastructure.” While its military operations in Ukraine have
exposed many previously hidden weaknesses, its cyber capabilities are formidable and welldemonstrated, and Putin’s online strategy is being driven by political calculations, not by a lack of
capacity. In summary, it would be a mistake to conclude that the conflict in Ukraine undermines the
notion that cyber operations are a critical part of modern warfare that pose a serious threat to
international peace. In fact, other global challengers like China are likely observing Russia’s failures
and concluding that the lack of decisive digital attacks has been a key variable in Moscow’s losses.
Putin himself may soon conclude that large-scale, disruptive cyberattacks in the United States or
elsewhere are the best way to reassert himself, intimidate his foes, and regain the advantage. This
would be a costly miscalculation on his part, but it would not be his first.
Russia will escalate cyber attacks in response to sanctions, the US and its allies must
respond
Kello & Kaminska, 4-14, 22, Lucas Kello is Associate Professor of International Relations at Oxford
University. He serves as Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations and as
co-Director of the interdisciplinary Centre for Doctoral Training in Cyber Security in the Department of
Computer Science, Monica Kaminska is a postdoctoral researcher at The Hague Program on
International Cyber Security at Leiden University – Institute of Security and Global Affairs. Her research
examines international cyber conflict, particularly states’ responses to hostile cyber operations,
Cyberspace and War in Ukraine: Prepare for Worse, https://www.lawfareblog.com/cyberspace-and-warukraine-prepare-worse
A large coalition of Western and Western-aligned states (such as Japan and South Korea) have levied
economic and financial sanctions against Russia. The country is now possibly the most heavily
sanctioned nation in the world—even more so than North Korea under the reclusive Kim Jong Un’s rule.
The sanctions go far beyond the targeted financial penalties that the U.S. Treasury Department has
applied to individuals and organizations such as the Russian Internet Research Agency, which it deemed
responsible for previous hacking activities, or those imposed after the SolarWinds incident. They far
surpass, too, the scope and effects of the United Kingdom’s diplomatic and financial penalties in
response to the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate’s (GRU) poisoning operation (with the banned
chemical agent novichok) against its former agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in 2018. The current
sanctions regime against Russia is particularly potent because it has included an extraordinary freeze on
central bank assets and the expulsion of some of Russia’s largest banks from the global interbank
payments system, SWIFT. Hundreds of multinational and mostly Western companies have exited the
Russian market or suspended their operations there. The ruble has undergone dramatic price drops not
seen since the 1998 financial crisis, which has inflicted economic pain on the general Russian population.
The net result of these economic dislocations is an expected drop in Russian gross domestic product of
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15 percent in 2022—a decline that would reduce the Russian economy to its size in 2007 at current
prices.
Against the backdrop of Russia’s economic meltdown, the Kremlin’s retaliatory options within the
diplomatic and economic realms are limited. Russia has so far responded, among other measures, with a
ban on ruble loans to citizens of “unfriendly” states, closed its domestic airspace to Western airplanes
and demanded payment for Russian gas in rubles. These punitive instruments have not hit very hard—if
only because Russia’s strongest measure, the closing of oil and gas exports to Europe and North
America, would severely curtail its remaining source of hard currency (hence why Russia has avoided
this measure). The United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union and other Western players
can wield the potent club of economic sanctions because of their dominant position within the global
financial system (for example, the role of the dollar, the pound and the euro as world reserve
currencies). Russia does not enjoy such a position of dominance; it will seek punitive options elsewhere.
Cyberspace offers attractive alternative options. Hackers and security planners in Moscow must be
assessing how to mirror some of the sanctions’ economic and financial effects through disruptions in
Western cyberspace. Scenarios are not hard to imagine. They include, for example, an interruption of
computers that support stock trading at the NASDAQ or the London Stock Exchange (the Moscow
Exchange index has lost almost 50 percent of its value since its February high); the processing of
payments at SWIFT (from which Russian banks were recently ejected); or the data servers of JPMorgan
Chase, Deutsche Bank and other banks that have dialed down their Russian operations.
Then there are the asymmetric options: acts of unpeace whose effects transcend the economic realm
without crossing the lines of war. Forensic evidence shows that Russia has burrowed itself deeply within
key U.S. networks. The intelligence community’s 2022 Annual Threat Assessment cautioned that Russia
was honing its ability to target underwater cables and industrial control systems. Reports of Russian
GRU hackers penetrating the U.S. electrical grid are commonplace. Perhaps the clearest indication of the
growing risk of breakdowns in cyberspace was President Biden’s public warning on March 21 that the
West should expect them.
But that is not all. Beyond the intentional effects of Russian cyberattacks are their unintentional effects.
During a military invasion that appears to be failing on many fronts, Russian cyber operations are likely
to be at least as brazen and indiscriminate as in the past. An illustrative case is the “NotPetya” wiper
malware that the GRU unleashed upon Ukrainian businesses in 2017 but whose cascading effects
disrupted commercial operations in many countries (notably interrupting the activities of the global
shipping giant Maersk). A more recent example is the hack (likely by Russian state agents) of Viasat, a
U.S. satellite internet provider used by the Ukrainian military and police. What is particularly
significant is that the operation’s effects, like NotPetya’s, spread far beyond Ukraine. It affected
thousands of wind turbines in Germany—which are still not fully operational—and disconnected tens
of thousands of European internet users.
There is also the case of Finland and Sweden. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is driving the two
traditionally neutral states firmly toward NATO membership. They will face a period of critical
vulnerability spanning their formal request for accession (which is expected in the coming months) and
their actual accession (which requires ratification among the alliance’s 30 member states). Russia’s
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motives to disrupt the joiners’ information space will rise even as collective defense guarantees to
protect them are still being worked out.
If and when these scenarios (or their variants) materialize, the history of cyber conflict suggests that
the United States and its partners will struggle to mount a forceful response. Although they often
promised to respond decisively, they traditionally failed to do so. Rather, Western nations—in
particular, the United States—have been risk averse in their reactions. Officials are wary of responding
in kind for fear of engaging in escalating tit-for-tat cyber exchanges in a domain marked by an inherent
potential for collateral damage and blowback.
More broadly, officials struggle to interpret the legal vagaries of unpeaceful conflict—where are its red
or “pink” lines?—which delays decision-making in the aftermath of major incidents. Hence they struggle
to figure out how to impose costs outside of cyberspace for actions within it. In the current crisis,
Western nations are fast running out of those options. The sanctions box of penalties is almost
exhausted. At any rate, it is not clear that imposing them without communicating clear criteria for their
lifting is an effective punishment tool (as Daniel Drezner argued). Moreover, levying sanctions for cyber
activity while simultaneously imposing them for military activity risks muddling the signaling to Moscow.
Where exactly, flustered Kremlin analysts might wonder, are the response thresholds for different
conflict domains?
Therefrom arises another policy dilemma: whether to relax the reluctance to impose costs within
Russian cyberspace. With the sanctions toolbox emptying and the aversion to direct military measures
prevailing, a viable pathway to affect Russian interests—whether in response to future cyberattacks or
events on the ground—might be found in cyberspace.
An intensification of conflict in cyberspace will likely require a reduction of risk aversion in the
response calculus. Western nations should not reinforce the perception in Moscow that missile strikes
in Kyiv are unacceptable but the interruption of banking operations in Manhattan or Frankfurt is
tolerable—a perception that far predates the Ukraine war and which has lived too long. And not just
the hawks in Moscow will be watching. Observers in other capitals such as Beijing or Tehran will also
bear witness. Western officials will want to teach them that computer breakdowns back home will
elicit unacceptable penalties.
More than ever before in the history of cyber conflict, the United States and its partners—long
reluctant cyber warriors—might find cyber operations a more attractive option for strategic action
abroad. Examples are not hard to conjure. Similar to past actions by U.S. Cyber Command, the
operations might involve takedowns of servers of Russian information warfare outfits and hacking
units (like within the GRU) or the disruption of criminal ransomware groups (which have recently
shifted their resources toward patriotic activities). More boldly, they might entail the interruption of
computer networks that support Russian financial or commercial operations that circumvent sanctions.
In sum, the absence of breakdowns in cyberspace likely marks a period of false stability. After Nazi
Germany invaded Poland in 1939, it took eight months—the “phony war” period—for conflict to
break out in earnest on the Western front. Unlike 1939, the current prospect of direct war involving
large nations is low. But we expect that, like then, the conflict will eventually spread to other fronts.
The common desire to avoid a direct war on the ground has increased the risk of lesser but still
consequential conflict in cyberspace (although unprecedented warnings and multiple CISA alerts, such
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as this one, about sophisticated attack tools could already be having a deterring effect). After the
aggressor shifts its focus from immediate tactical objectives to broader strategic gains, it may want to
pursue them there. The Ukraine war will probably shape the next chapters in the annals of cyber
conflict. Western security planners should be active authors in the saga. Beyond shoring up defenses,
they should prepare their responses now.
Russia’s failure in the Ukraine means it will resort to cyber attacks
Stavros Atlamazoglou, May 17, 2022, https://www.19fortyfive.com/2022/05/putins-next-move-a-cyberwar-on-nato/ Putin’s Next Move: A Cyber War On NATO?, Stavros Atlamazoglou is a seasoned defense
journalist specializing in special operations, a Hellenic Army veteran (national service with the 575th
Marine Battalion and Army HQ), and a Johns Hopkins University graduate.
Is Putin Planning a Cyber Attack? The director of one of the United Kingdom’s top spy agencies warned
that Russia is looking to target the U.S., NATO, and European Union countries with cyberattacks for
their ongoing support of Ukraine. Putin’s Cyberwarfare Plan The war in Ukraine isn’t going well for
Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin. The Russian military has suffered failure after failure
in Ukraine, losing thousands of troops, tanks, aircraft, and vehicles in the process. Russia and Putin are
becoming an international pariah as NATO wants to add new members. Sweden and Finland have
decided to shed hundreds of years of non-alignment and join the transatlantic military alliance. It seems
that cyberwarfare remains the one warfighting domain in which Russia can truly be effective and a
tool Putin can leverage. And the West knows that. In a cyber security conference, Sir Jeremy Fleming,
the director of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), warned that the Russian
military and intelligence services are searching for targets in the West to potentially attack with
cyberweapons. “We’re seeing it in cyber too. Perhaps, the concept of a ‘cyber war’ was over-hyped. But,
there’s plenty of cyber about, including a range of activity we and partners have attributed to Russia.
We’ve seen what looks like some spill over of activity affecting other countries. And we’ve seen
indications that Russia’s cyber operatives continue to look for targets in countries that are opposing
their actions,” the GCHQ director said. GCHQ is the signals and cyber intelligence agency of the U.K. and
an equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Is Putin Thinking Cyberattack? On the eve of
the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian hackers launched a cyberattack against the Ukrainian
military’s secure communications in an attempt to frustrate or takedown altogether its command and
control (C2) functions. The idea was to prevent commanders from effectively and timely communicating
with one another and their troops as the Russian ground and air forces were launching their operations.
However, the attack spilled over and took down satellite communications in other countries, disrupting
operations and internet service for thousands. “Today, in support of the European Union and other
partners, the United States is sharing publicly its assessment that Russia launched cyber attacks in late
February against commercial satellite communications networks to disrupt Ukrainian command and
control during the invasion, and those actions had spillover impacts into other European countries. The
activity disabled very small aperture terminals in Ukraine and across Europe. This includes tens of
thousands of terminals outside of Ukraine that, among other things, support wind turbines and provide
Internet services to private citizens,” the U.S. Department of State stated last week in a press release In
addition to that cyberattack, the Russian intelligence services had been targeting Ukraine with repeated
cyberattacks in the years and months before the invasion. “The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre
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(NCSC) assesses that the Russian Military Intelligence was almost certainly involved in the 13 January
defacements of Ukrainian government websites and the deployment of Whispergate destructive
malware. The NCSC also assesses that it is almost certain Russia was responsible for the subsequent
cyber-attack impacting Viasat on 24 February,” the U.K. government announced.
Global cyber threats increasing
Merle Maigre, German Marshall Fund, April 2022, https://www.gmfus.org/sites/default/files/202204/Maigre%20-%20NATO%20-%20Geopolitics%20-%20Cyber%20-%20final.pdf, NATO’s Role in Global
Cyber
Security Malicious cyber
activity has increased substantially over the past years while the world has kept
turning amid the omnipresent pandemic and now war in Ukraine. States, non-state actors, and criminal
groups compete and are increasingly weaponizing sensitive information and infiltrating other
countries’ networks to steal data, seed misinformation, or disrupt critical infrastructure. The coronavirus
pandemic further complicated the cyber-threat landscape. In March 2020, attempts to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus led to social
distancing measures, travel restrictions, and remote work. In a short span of time, IT security professionals had to respond to the challenges of
working from home, such as enterprise data movements when employees accessed cloud-based apps via their home internet, corporate
software, videoconferencing, and file sharing.11ENISA: European Union Agency for Cybersecurity, The Year in Review. ENISA Threat Landscape
from January 2019 to April 2020, 2020. Even if hardware and software solutions were in place to secure the organization’s data, there were
often no established policies to help employees wade through the jungle of threats and vulnerabilities they faced when moving their workplace
out of the traditional office environment.22NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, Recent Cyber Events: Considerations for
Military and National Security Decision Makers, No. 10, May 2021. According to the FireEye Mandiant Special Report: M-Trends 2021, the top
five most targeted industries in 2020 were business and professional services, retail and hospitality, finance, healthcare, and high technology.
The main methods used were extortion, ransom demands, payment card theft, and illicit transfers. Direct financial gain was the likely motive
for 36% of intrusions, and an additional 2% of intrusions were likely perpetrated to resell access. In 2021, data theft remained an important
mission objective for threat actors; in 32% of intrusions, adversaries stole data.33Fire Eye Mandiant Services, Special Report, M-Trends 2021,
pp. 17-19. Currently,
highly organized, technically proficient criminal syndicates comprise the most
significant cyber threat to allies. These groups try to steal data or extort money through ransomware. In 2021, prominent
ransomware attacks struck Colonial Pipeline, the operator of the largest fuel pipeline on the East Coast of the United States; JBS, the largest
meat processing company in North America; and Coop, a major supermarket chain in Sweden. Healthcare was also targeted—in May of the
same year, the entire health service system of Ireland was disrupted for weeks, and over the spring and summer, dozens of hospitals in Europe
and the United States were locked out of life-critical systems by ransomware attacks.44Ciaran Martin, “Cyber Criminals Will Cause Physical
Harm,” Wired, February 2, 2022. Another
set of threats comes in the form of belligerent state actors that seek
to steal sensitive data for espionage. In December 2020, Russian intelligence services infiltrated the digital systems run by US
tech firm SolarWinds and inserted malware into its code. During the company’s next software update, the virus was inadvertently spread to
about 18,000 clients, including large corporations, the Pentagon, the State Department, Homeland Security, the Treasury, and other US
government agencies. The hack went undetected for months before the victims discovered vast amounts of their data had been stolen.55Jack
Stubbs, Raphael Satter, and Joseph Menn, “US Homeland Security, thousands of businesses scramble after suspected Russian hack,” December
14, 2020. There are also politically motivated cyberattacks mandated by states that interfere in democratic processes and political discourse. In
September 2020, the internal email system of Norway’s parliament was hacked.66Catalin Cimpanu, “Finland says hackers accessed MPs’ email
accounts,” ZDNet, December 28, 2020. Ine Eriksen Søreide, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Norway, underlined the significance of the attack
by calling it an important cyber incident that affected the “most important democratic institution” of the country.77BBC, “Norway blames
Russia for cyberattack on parliament,” October 13, 2020. Norwegian authorities later identified Russia as the actor responsible for the attack,
marking the first time that Norwegian authorities had made a political attribution to such an attack. Since the beginning of this year, Ukraine’s
government has been hit by a series of cyberattacks that defaced government websites and wiped out the data on some government
computers. In mid-January, hackers defaced about 70 Ukrainian websites, including the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Defense, Energy,
Education, and Science, as well as the State Emergency Service and the Ministry of Digital Transformation, whose e-governance portal gives the
Ukrainian public digital access to dozens of government services. The hackers replaced the home pages of about a dozen sites with a
threatening message: “be afraid and expect worse.” After a couple of days, however, most of the sites were restored.88Kim Zetter, “What We
Know and Don’t Know about the Cyberattacks Against Ukraine,” Substack, January 17, 2022. The international hacktivist collective Anonymous
has declared “cyberwar” against Russia’s government, claiming credit for several cyber incidents including distributed denial of service attacks
that took down Russian government websites and Russia Today, the state-backed news service.99Monica Buchanan Pitrelli, “Global hacking
group Anonymous launches ‘cyber war’ against Russia,” CNBC, March 4, 2022. Around
the globe, aging critical infrastructure
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has long been vulnerable to attack. The most worrying type of cyberattack is sophisticated malware designed by states or statebacked actors that act as “time bombs” in the critical cyber networks of target countries, such as the energy, telecom, and transportation
sectors. Around the globe, aging critical infrastructure has long been vulnerable to attack. In 2020, the UK’s
National Cyber Security Centre issued a warning of Russian attacks on millions of routers, firewalls, and devices used by infrastructure operators
and government agencies.1010Alix Pressley, “The ‘cumulative effect’ of ransomware and the lessons for UK national infrastructure,” Intelligent
Cio, July 20, 2021. On the day of the Russian invasion, ViaSat, a provider of high-speed satellite broadband services, was hacked along with one
of its satellites Ka-Sat, whose users included Ukraine’s armed forces, police, and intelligence service. Destructive wiper malware attacks by
Russia against Ukraine included WhisperGate, discovered in January by Microsoft, in Ukraine’s networks that “provide critical executive branch
or emergency response functions”;1111Microsoft Security, Destructive malware targeting Ukrainian organizations, January 15, 2022.
HermeticWizard and IsaacWiper,1212ESET Research, IsaacWiper and HermeticWizard: New wiper and worm targeting Ukraine, March 1, 2022.
targeting multiple Ukrainian organizations just hours before the Russian invasion began; and CaddyWiper, spotted by researchers at the Slovak
internet security company ESET in mid-March.1313ESET Research, CaddyWiper: New wiper malware discovered in Ukraine, March 15, 2022. All
of them were designed to wipe or overwrite critical files on infected systems and leave computer hard drives corrupted and unrecoverable.
These incidents demonstrate that, in the words of cyber expert and Silverado Policy Accelerator think tank chairman Dmitri Alperovich,
“Cyberattacks have become a theater for great-power conflict in which governments and militaries fight in the hybrid ‘gray zone,’ where the
boundaries between peace and war are blurred.”1414Dmitri Alperovitch, “How Russia Has Turned Ukraine Into a Cyber-Battlefield,” Foreign
Affairs, January 28, 2022. The actors navigate a complex web of ambiguous and deeply interconnected challenges, where cyberattacks are not a
separate front, but rather an extension of the conflict. While they can offer some advantages in military operations, cyberattacks also have
limitations in feasibility and effect. In the event of military attacks, military objectives can be supported by intelligence-gathering operations,
operations aimed at disrupting the opponent’s military, and psychological operations against the opponent’s public.1515Ibid. Nevertheless,
sophisticated cyberattacks require a lot of luck, but also skill and time—for example, the 75-minute power outage in 2016 in Kyiv took 31
months to prepare.1616Ciaran Martin, “Cyber Realism in a Time of War,” Lawfare, March 2, 2022. The Russian military exercise Zapad 2021 in
September included one of the largest uses of electronic warfare, which has been increasingly on display in eastern Ukraine since 2014 and in
Syria since 2015. Roger McDermott, a leading analyst on Russian military developments has described that “Russia’s
growing
technological advances in EW [electronic warfare] will allow its forces to jam, disrupt, and interfere
with NATO communications, radar and other sensor systems, unmanned aerial vehicles, and other
assets.”1717Roger McDermott, “Russia’s Electronic Warfare Capabilities to 2025,” ICDS, September 2017. Russia sees EW as a seamless
whole, ranging from kinetic combat operations on the battlefield to missions in cyberspace and the information domain.1818Jonathan Marcus,
“Zapad: What can we learn from Russia's latest military exercise?” BBC, September 20, 2017. While there were no public sources confirming
any navigation or communications disruption by the Baltic-Polish defense leadership during Zapad 2021, it is nevertheless important that NATO
continue to adapt to the evolving cyber-threat landscape.
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Cyber Threat to the US
US vulnerable to a cyber attack
Joseph Marks, 6-6, 22, Washington Post, The U.S. isn’t getting ahead of the cyber threat, experts say,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/06/us-isnt-getting-ahead-cyber-threat-experts-say/
Our network of cyber experts have a less-than-rosy take on the United States' ability to fend off cyber attacks. Most of them said the
U.S. is
either just as vulnerable to cyberattacks or even more vulnerable today than it was five years ago. That
assessment, from a group of experts polled by The Cybersecurity 202, reflects a half-decade during which government and industry have
supercharged their efforts to defend against devastating hacks from foreign governments and criminals — but the bad guys have upped their
game even more, most experts say. ‘[We’re] less vulnerable against the threats of five years ago. But I see no evidence that the threat has
stood still, and in fact, it is likely that it has grown at a faster rate than our defenses,” said Herb Lin, senior research scholar for cyber policy and
security at Stanford University “We become evermore vulnerable with each passing day,” warned Lauren Zabierek,
executive director of the Cyber Project at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. “I don't know where the bottom is.” The breakdown
About 43 percent of respondents to our Network experts poll said the United States is more vulnerable to cyberattacks now. About 38 percent
said we’re just as vulnerable as we were five years ago. Just 19 percent of experts said the United States is less vulnerable in cyberspace than
five years ago. The sobering results come as cyber executives and analysts are convening in San Francisco for the RSA Conference, the largest
annual industry-focused cybersecurity gathering, which is being held in person for the first time since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
The cyber industry has fared extremely well during the past half-decade — nearly doubling in value, according to some estimates — but
it has also struggled to keep up with the dizzying pace of attacks. More targets One key problem, according to experts
who said the United States is more vulnerable now: The nation has become more reliant on technology during the
past five years — significantly increasing the targets that hackers can aim at. And that technology is
often being built without security foremost in mind. “Cybersecurity is improving constantly, but the complexity of our
digital society may be outpacing our efforts to keep up,” Mandiant Threat Intelligence chief John Hultquist said Cyber and tech investor Niloofar
Razi Howe: “We
are more vulnerable because of the dizzying pace we are adopting technology, engaging
in tech transformation, and adding devices without prioritizing security.” One particularly rich target has been a
vast new array of Internet-connected devices, such as refrigerators, thermostats and cameras. These devices, commonly called the “Internet of
things” or “IoT” are notorious for relying on weak or default passwords and being difficult to update with software patches — making them
easy pickings for hackers. “Many of these technologies have shortchanged their cybersecurity expenditures, creating ever-increasing liabilities
for everyone,” said Sascha Meinrath, founding director of X-Lab, a think tank at Penn State focusing on the intersection of technologies and
public policy. “As the cyber-strategist Biggie Smalls would have said, ‘More IoT, More Problems,’ ” quipped Peter Singer, a fellow at the New
America think tank. (Singer said the United States is equally vulnerable compared to five years ago). Many experts blamed the United States’
ongoing vulnerability to hacking on the increased brazenness of U.S. adversaries, especially Russia. Norma Krayem, a cyber policy expert at Van
Scoyoc Associates: “Russia's
use of cyber tools against Ukraine has clearly demonstrated to the world that it
can fully disrupt key aspects of critical infrastructure.” Dave Aitel, a cybersecurity researcher and Partner at Cordyceps
Systems: “Our adversaries continue to advance their skills and no amount of cyber hygiene is enough to compensate for that basic fact.” Betsy
Cooper, director of the Aspen Institute’s Tech Policy Hub: “Adversaries have gotten stronger. Business and individuals are more dependent on
the Internet than ever. And we haven't prioritized cybersecurity enough to counteract these trends.” That sentiment was shared by several
experts who said the United States is equally vulnerable compared to five years ago. They described a cat-and-mouse game in which U.S.
companies are constantly improving defenses but never really getting ahead. Jamil Jaffer, founder and executive director of the National
Security Institute at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School: “While defenders have certainly gotten better in the last five years,
so have the attackers.” John Pescatore, director of emerging security trends at the SANS Institute: “A lot of progress has been made, but
unfortunately by both the bad guys and the good guys.” Many experts who picked the equally vulnerable response said it’s simply impossible to
determine whether the United States is more or less vulnerable to hacking now — either because the answer varies so much from industry to
industry or because there’s not good enough data to make the call. “It's better in some sectors and worse [in] others, but as a country, the
net/net is that we're still in a comparable — and fairly awful — position,” said Jeremy Grant, managing director at the law firm Venable. Steve
Weber, a cyber-focused professor at the University of California at Berkeley: “You can't manage what you can't measure, and measurements of
'vulnerability' are incredibly messy, undisciplined, almost certainly biased, and partial at best.” For those who said the United States is less
vulnerable to hacking now, many based that assessment on the rising public awareness of cyberthreats — especially after ransomware attacks
that have threatened the economy and national security in recent years. “Awareness about the threat has improved dramatically,” said Michael
Daniel, a former White House cyber coordinator who now leads the Cyber Threat Alliance. “Thanks to high profile ransomware attacks
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awareness is greater than ever at the board and governmental level, and I believe if you are aware of risks, you are more likely to protect
against them,” said Jeff Moss, founder and CEO of DEF CON Communications. “Since complexity is the enemy of security, ipso facto, security is
harder and the United States is more vulnerable.” — Mark Weatherford, a former top Department of Homeland Security cyber official who’s
now a general partner at Aspen Chartered. “The
U.S. is more vulnerable than ever to cyberattacks due to its
increased dependence on complex, interconnected software.” — Katie Moussouris, founder of Luta Security. “The
pace of progress has been uneven. There are still certain sectors and critical functions that remain woefully behind and even overall we are by
no means where we need to be.” — Frank Cilluffo, director of Auburn University's McCrary Institute for Cyber and Critical Infrastructure
Security. “The most sophisticated level of attackers are no longer exclusively nation-states. Private actors, who are sometimes contractors to
governments, have serious compromise capabilities and can execute complex attacks.” — Robert Strayer, executive vice president of policy at
the Information Technology Industry Council who was the State Department’s top cyber official during the Trump administration. “Both the
private sector and the federal government are in a far better position to resist cyberattacks than five years ago, but the sophistication and
scope of our cyber adversaries has outstripped those gains.” — Glenn Gerstell, former NSA general counsel who’s now a senior adviser at the
Center for Strategic and International Studies. Just as vulnerable: “Actually, the best answer to this question is ‘nobody can tell.’ In the absence
of ANY metrics about cybersecurity, it is realistically impossible to answer this question.” — Paul Rosenzweig, founder of Red Branch
Consulting. “Ransomware is the richest attack monetization we have ever seen so attackers will continue to increase their efforts to
compromise, even as we get more secure.” — Chris Wysopal, co-founder of Veracode. Less vulnerable: “Ransomware has helped to make
cybersecurity a real political priority, but it will take a sustained effort over several years to make significant progress. Keeping our foot on the
gas is not something we’ve done well in the past, but that must change. — Chris Painter, top State Department cyber official during the Obama
administration who’s now president of the Global Forum on Cyber Expertise.
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Need More Cyber Defense
Status quo won’t solve – NATO cyber policy already out of date. NATO needs to
strengthen cyber cooperation and defenses
Merle Maigre, German Marshall Fund, April 2022, https://www.gmfus.org/sites/default/files/202204/Maigre%20-%20NATO%20-%20Geopolitics%20-%20Cyber%20-%20final.pdf, NATO’s Role in Global
Cyber At the Brussels summit
in 2021, the allies endorsed a new Comprehensive Cyber Defense Policy highlighting collaboration as necessary to
strong cyber defense, which recognized that “the impact of significant malicious cumulative cyber activities might, in certain circumstances, be
considered as amounting to an armed attack.2424NATO, Brussels Summit Communiqué, June 14, 2021. A key feature of the new policy is the
prominent role of offensive cyber operations.2525Erica D. Lonergan and Mark Montgomery, “Pressing Questions: Offensive Cyber Operations
and NATO Strategy,” Modern War Institute, January 25, 2022. In Brussels, member states committed to “employ the full range of capabilities at
all times to actively deter, defend against, and counter the full spectrum of cyber threats.”2626NATO, Cyber Defence, March 23, 2022. In other
words, the alliance declared it could respond to malicious cyber activities below the threshold of use of force causing significant harm with,
among other things, conventional military or offensive cyberspace operations. NATO has committed to develop its next Strategic Concept for
the 2022 summit. The alliance’s current Strategic Concept dates back to the Lisbon summit in 2010.
It is clearly out of date, having
been conceived when terrorism and energy cut-offs were the major threats and the alliance’s primary
mission was to cultivate partnerships with non-member states rather than to face aggressive greatpower rivals. Action Plan for the Next Five Years To make NATO future-proof, it must be cyber-secure and
operational. But is it doing enough to address the complex and evolving challenges of cyberspace? NATO’s strategic challenge is to blend
its successful conventional deterrence functions with a new strategy for cyber action. NATO’s ability to send a collective message of resistance
and to establish a credible threat response is its most valuable asset on the cyber-security front. Four
sets of actions for NATO are
proposed. First, denying covertness by attribution: NATO should persuade opponents that they
cannot be clandestine in their cyber actions. NATO and its members need to demonstrate that it is
difficult or impossible to act covertly and be clear about attributing responsibility for cyberattacks . Until
recently, governments did not publicly release details on cyber incidents. But since 2018, public disclosures of cyberattacks by several Western
powers indicate a new multinational policy of state transparency. The growing relevance of attribution is partially due to states becoming
better at attributing cyber operations. Greater public knowledge of cyberattacks heightens awareness of cyber conflicts and leads to greater
public acceptance of cyber countermeasures. Ultimately, what matters is that states engaging in unlawful actions using cyber means will face
consequences. With attribution, policymakers show that they know what is happening in these networks and can investigate incidents. It also
clearly spells out unacceptable behavior and can help create state practice. The best way to implement the international norms is by calling out
behavior and having consequences when these norms are breached. Attribution will make clear to the malicious actor that their actions will be
seen and addressed. It is the basis, under international law, for countermeasures and self-defense. Effective public attribution requires a clear
understanding of the attributed cyber operation and the cyber-threat actor, but also the broader geopolitical environment, allied positions and
activities, and the legal context. When should states publicly attribute cyberattacks? Effective public attribution requires a clear understanding
of the attributed cyber operation and the cyber-threat actor, but also the broader geopolitical environment, allied positions and activities, and
the legal context. The public attribution framework put forward by Max Smeets and Florian Egloff in March 20212727Florian Egloff and Max
Smeets, “Publicly attributing cyber attacks: a framework,” Journal of Strategic Studies, March 10, 2021. distinguishes four factors that act as
enablers or constraints in public attribution. These factors are intelligence, incident severity, geopolitical context, and post-attribution actions.
The combination of these four components enables consistent decision-making about whether to publicly disseminate information about an
adversary’s actions, privately tell the adversary, or restrict knowledge of the intrusion to the government and potentially other partners.
Collecting and processing intelligence—information about foreign countries and their agents—provides a technical basis for attribution. How
could allies improve intelligence sharing to conduct more rapid attribution and enable a response to adversary cyber activity? During the
Nordic-Baltic foreign ministers meeting in Tallinn in September 2020, a 90-minute tabletop exercise was organized2828Ministry of Foreign
Affairs of Estonia, Joint Statement from Nordic-Baltic (NB8) Foreign Ministers’ annual meeting, September 9, 2020. to test the ministers’ ability
to respond to and attribute an escalating cyberattack. They answered multiple-choice questions on communication of and possible diplomatic
countermeasures to the attack. The ministers learned through first-hand experience that a timely exchange of technical intelligence can be key
in attributing any cyberattack. “The shared view [of the countries involved]—especially when it comes to complicated issues—is crucial,” said
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Urmas Reinsalu, Foreign Minister of Estonia.2929Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Estonia, Nordic and Baltic foreign ministers discuss regional and
global politics in Tallinn, September 9, 2020. Attribution is only as good as the information that allies are willing to share. NATO’s value can be
in becoming the preferred platform for sharing cyber information. General Paul Nakasone, who heads US Cyber Command, told the House
Armed Services subcommittee on intelligence that “in 35 years” he has never seen a better sharing of accurate, timely, and actionable
intelligence than what has transpired with Ukraine.3030House Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations, “Defense Intelligence
Posture to Support the Warfighters and Policy Makers,” March 17, 2022. Sharing information and intelligence with allies “builds coalitions” and
can “shine a light on disinformation” campaigns, like the one Russia used to lay the groundwork for their invasion of Ukraine. As
the
second course of action, NATO should use the current crisis to accelerate the progress with setting up
NATO’s own cyber command and sharpen allied responses to malicious cyber actions. Overall, this
would give more credibility to its cyber defense. In February 2019, allies endorsed a set of tools to respond to cumulative
cyber activities, but not much has happened to take it forward. It is now time to build upon this set and develop concrete steps at the political,
military, and technical levels to model alliance behavior according to the threat landscape. This means a sharper focus on future responses to
high- and low-end cyberattacks along with concrete deterrence actions and tools for individual sectors and target types. Much of this is based
on the high-end cyber capabilities of select individual allies called “volunteer sovereign cyber effects,” where cyber-capable nations deliver
voluntarily offensive cyber effects on a target designated by an operational-level commander. The NATO Cyber Command would be responsible
for matching military needs with the willingness and capabilities of the nations potentially able to deliver such effects.3131Goździewicz,
“Sovereign Cyber Effects Provided Voluntarily by Allies (SCEPVA).” The alliance should clarify which allies are responsible for offensive cyber
operations against certain targets and the information-sharing and notification requirements. A good plan requires practice. The
scenarios
of cyber responses that are under the Article 5 threshold should be regularly practiced, and the NATO
Cooperative Cyber Defense Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE) Locked Shields exercise is a good way to do so. Organized since 2010, it enables
cyber-security experts to enhance their skills in defending national IT systems and critical infrastructure under real-time attacks. The focus
should be on realistic scenarios simulating the entire complexity of a massive cyber incident, including strategic decision-making and legal and
communication aspects. Locked Shields is a unique opportunity to encourage experimentation, training, and cooperation among allies in an
authentic but safe training environment. NATO should
also make more use of its Cyber Range, a platform for
NATO exercises and training in Estonia operated by the Estonian Ministry of Defense. NATO should
also make more use of its Cyber Range, a platform for NATO exercises and training in Estonia
operated by the Estonian Ministry of Defense. The Cyber Range already facilitates NATO’s flagship annual cyber defense
exercise Cyber Coalition, and NATO CCDCOE has based Locked Shields on Cyber Range for over a decade. The versatility and computing power
of the platform allows a different, complex scenario to be simulated every year for an increasing number of participants. The technical, redteaming exercise CrossedSwords, organized by NATO CCDCOE, tests the capabilities and skills needed when executing a full-spectrum cyber
operation in real life, focusing on experimentation with integrating kinetics and offensive cyber operations in the context of a modern
battlefield. More operational- and technical-level joint activities should be practiced among allies and with like-minded partners in order to
contribute to imposing costs to malicious actors in cyberspace. Given that NATO’s cyber response teams are stretched thin due to protecting
NATO’s own networks, bi- and multilateral collaboration enables countries to share best practices and, in the event of an emergency, provide
mutual rapid assistance in crisis response. The cyber exercise Baltic Ghost originated from a series of cyber defense workshops in 2013 and
should be expanded to include all NATO battlegroups in the Baltics and Poland. Currently it is facilitated by the United States European
Command with the objective to develop and sustain cyber partnerships between Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania on one end, and the Maryland,
Michigan, and Pennsylvania Army National Guards on the other end. Building on the success of Baltic Ghost, regular cyber exercises should take
place in multinational NATO battlegroups, led by the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and the United States, in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania,
and Poland. Future exercises should regularly support NATO enhanced forward presence forces and train participants to respond to aggression
in a contested, degraded, and denied cyberspace environment. The
third action focuses on building resilience of
domestic critical infrastructures. Doors are locked to keep homes safe. Likewise, all NATO member
states should address their digital insecurity by locking digital doors as individuals, companies, and
countries. The strategic vulnerability to disruption and sabotage lies not so much in the military space but in the hospital booking system,
logistics schedule, power grid, and thousands of other mainstream, civilian, mostly privately owned networks. Based on the 2016 Cyber
Defence Pledge, in which member states committed to improving their ability to protect their cyber networks, the alliance could formulate a
NATO cyber-security baseline with concrete resilience goals to achieve or maintain the baseline. These resilience goals could then be
apportioned among member states in the same way as the defense-planning capability targets. This
should come with obvious
financial and investment implications. Public debates on burden sharing within NATO for too long have focused on how much
member states spend on defense in isolation, without adequate prioritizing where those funds are going. Member states should be rethink
defense spending relative to emerging threats and collective security challenges. To ensure funding for cyber security is appropriately
prioritized, NATO should strengthen a commitment to digital defense spending, building on the strong base it has developed in terms of
doctrine, standards, and requirements. This also includes
strengthening the political resilience of member states
by broadening NATO consultations to include more areas of government. Regular North Atlantic Council-format
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meetings among member state directors of cyber authorities at the political and military levels would help build consensus on cyber policy
issues. Another
course of action for NATO in cyber security is to increase its cyber capacity-building
efforts for partner countries of strategic importance, reinforcing NATO’s commitment to partners and
projecting stability in NATO’s neighborhood. This kind of cyber capacity-building could include various types of support,
ranging from strategic advice and cyber institution-building in defense sectors to education and training or advice and assistance in cyber
defense. The objective should to be to enable capacity-building activities for military actors, along with the provision of training, equipment,
and infrastructure for security purposes. This would allow NATO to improve the capacities of partners to address crises, prevent conflicts, and
cater for their own security and stability by themselves, to the benefit of their population. As one example, NATO could fill a gap in capacitybuilding for partner countries by bringing together military Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs) to share information on incident
management dynamics, a key factor in modern cyber defense. While partner countries can receive support from donors in establishing
mechanisms and processes to exchange information between civilian CERTs, such cooperation and communication channels are much less
developed in the military domain due in large part to the high sensitivity of the information. There is a need to extend the information-sharing
practices used in civilian circles to partner countries’ military CERTs. Building cyber-security capacity should focus on partners’ ability to respond
to and recover from cyber incidents. There
is a technical aspect to hardening defenses and building redundancy
in data and services, but the core of resilience lies in leadership that does not ignore the problem. In
sum, most future conflicts will have cyber components that require a technical, political, and diplomatic response. Whether the adversary is a
state’s elite unit or a criminal group rendering ransomware as a service, cyber security is about risk management and solid, pragmatic defense
and response measures to improve the security of the digital environment. There is a technical aspect to hardening defenses and building
redundancy in data and services, but the core of resilience lies in leadership that does not ignore the problem. How our national cyber-security
strategies are translated into policies and procedures needs to be understood by all stakeholders. It is now up to the alliance’s member states
to provide clarity and coherence to successfully draft a new Strategic Concept that includes defense and deterrence. But this is not a job for
NATO alone—it requires close coordination across national governments and the private sector, and NATO and the European Union must
therefore continue to work very closely on this vital issue.
NATO must improve its cyber defense capabilities
Julian Lindley-French is a fellow at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute and chair of
The Alpen Group, 2-1, 22, To keep the peace, NATO must be ready to fight the wars,
https://ipolitics.ca/2022/02/02/to-keep-the-peace-nato-must-be-ready-to-fight-thewars/
The NATO alliance is now facing what could be the most complex set of challenges in its history. Given the nature and extent of the threats
against citizens of the alliance from Vancouver to Vilnius, urgency must be the hallmark of Strategic Concept 2022 — in essence, the alliance’s
manifesto — to more clearly stress defence against, and deterrence of, Russian aggression in the region. Russia
continues to pose
the most immediate threat to NATO (also called the North Atlantic Alliance). The latter will continue seeking dialogue with Russia
and honouring the NATO-Russia Founding Act, even though Russia continues to breach the values, principles, trust, and commitments that
were meant to underpin the NATO-Russia Council. Much will depend on Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine, and the alliance can’t stand aside.
NATO should launch a Ukrainian Deterrence Initiative to provide military equipment and training, as well as enhance Ukraine’s resilience.
Terrorism continues to challenge the rules-based international order by undermining democracy and
stability across the globe. China’s rise as a military power will be the main cause of change in the coming
decade. While NATO must seek to maintain a constructive dialogue with China, possibly through some form of NATO-China Council, Beijing’s
growing influence and power present challenges that the alliance must address. NATO must also grasp failure, and reflect on hard lessons from
the chaotic and tragic withdrawal from Afghanistan. The need for realistic political objectives allied to strategic patience must be reinforced by
strengthened political cohesion and the equitable sharing of risk and cost. Mass disruption and mass destruction are merging into a continuum
of risk, challenge, and threat, which the alliance must contend with across a broad spectrum of tasks, from defence and deterrence to
engagement. Strategic Concept 2022 must reset NATO’s purpose. The alliance will continue to lead the collective defence of Europe in
accordance with Article 5 of the Washington Treaty. NATO remains vital to effective crisis management, and has a critical
role to play in promoting co-operative security with partners in and around Europe and across the wider world. Something old, something new?
The principle of resilience, making civil society more robust, is anchored in Article 3 of the alliance’s founding treaty. NATO has also reaffirmed
that national and collective resilience is a vital component of credible deterrence and defence.
Cyberattacks and information
warfare on critical civilian and military infrastructures are now deemed clear and present dangers,
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and must be countered. But it’s deterrence and defence that must remain NATO’s core business. If the alliance is to remain
credible as a peacekeeper, NATO must always be a capable warfighter. NATO forces must meet the
challenge of the fast-changing character and conduct of warfare, which now stretches across a mosaic
of information war, cyberwar, and increasingly precise and rapid “hyper war.” U.S. armed forces will continue to
lead NATO for operations in Europe, but they’re engaged with the world. By 2030, a more equitable sharing of alliance burdens is needed, built
on a commitment by the European allies to field 50 per cent of NATO’s minimum military requirement. Call it European strategic autonomy or
strategic responsibility; either way, it realizes that greater European military capability will be vital. By 2030, Canadian and European allies must
be able to deploy a NATO Allied Command Operations Mobile Heavy Force (AMHF). By consolidating all Allied Rapid Response Forces into a
single pool of forces, the AMHF could act in any and all emergencies as a high-end first responder NATO Future Force that reinforces rather
than drains the Americans. Fail to act now, and Europe could face a digital Pearl Harbor from which it wouldn’t recover. A
catastrophic
“bolt from the blue” would combine strategy, capability, new technologies of intelligent design,
artificial intelligence, Big Data, quantum computing, etc., to decisively change the character of
warfare, and Europe with it. By 2030, NATO must be a very different alliance, because it will be in a very different place. Otherwise,
it could fail, although any such failure might not be the catastrophic demise some have predicted for so long. A Potemkin NATO would simply
be yet more European-defence pretence: a pretty, reassuring façade of false security. Strategic Concept 2022 is the best chance NATO leaders
have to set the alliance on course for 2030. Collectively, they must generate the necessary will, vision, and leadership.
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Need Offensive Cyber Operations
Russia an expansionist threat; we need to increase military readiness, including cyber
capabilities, to deter
Deborah Haynes, Security and Defence Editor, 6-28, 22, Britain and allies face '1937 moment' following
Ukraine war, head of army warns, https://news.sky.com/story/britain-and-allies-face-1937-momentfollowing-ukraine-war-head-of-army-to-warn-12641463
Britain and its allies face their "1937 moment" following Russia's invasion of Ukraine and must do
everything possible to avert another world war, the new head of the army has said. The warning
emerged as Prime Minister Boris Johnson is expected to announce an uplift in UK defence spending this
week, in line with growing security challenges. General Sir Patrick Sanders, the Chief of the General
Staff, said Russian President Vladimir Putin and his "expansionist ambitions" pose the greatest threat to
sovereignty, democracy and the freedom to live without violence that he has ever known. His
comments, at an annual army conference in London, were made as Mr Johnson and fellow leaders of
the 30-member NATO alliance prepare to meet in Madrid for a landmark summit, dominated by the
West's response to Russia's war. General Sanders, who took over as chief of the army last month, said
his sole focus is "mobilising the army to meet the new threat we face". He said the "British Army is not
mobilising to provoke war, it is mobilising to prevent war" in Europe. He called the scale of the war in
Ukraine "unprecedented". "In all my years in uniform I haven't known such a clear threat to the
principals of sovereignty and democracy and the freedom to live without fear of violence as the brutal
aggression of President Putin and his expansionist ambitions," he said. His warnings will be echoed by
Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, who is also expected to speak at the army conference before he travels
to attend the NATO summit. The defence secretary is set to indicate a desire for greater spending on the
UK's armed forces from 2025, following what has already been a multi-billion-pound boost to defence
spending this parliament. "The defence secretary is expected to emphasise that now that the threat has
changed, governments must be prepared to invest to keep us safe," a defence source said. Another
defence source said: "We do not comment on alleged leaks. The defence secretary and the prime
minister have always said that the government will respond to any changes in threat, which is why in
2020 the Ministry of Defence received a record defence settlement." With Russia's invasion changing
the security landscape in Europe, the head of the NATO alliance has already revealed that allies will
significantly increase the size of a high readiness force to more than 300,000 personnel up from around
40,000. General Sanders gave details of his view on the threat posed by Russia and how his army is
adapting, with a greater focus on urban combat and rebuilding costly stockpiles of weapons - allowed to
be hollowed out to save money since the end of the Cold War. It is a move that will require all ranks
from general to lance corporal to "get ready, train hard and engage", he said. "This is our 1937
moment," the army chief said, referring to the crucial period leading up to World War Two. "We are not
at war - but must act rapidly so that we aren't drawn into one through a failure to contain territorial
expansion… I will do everything in my power to ensure that the British Army plays its part in averting
war." The challenge means the army must modernise, embracing new technologies such as cyber
warfare and long-range missiles, but also retain traditional soldiering skills. General Sanders said if a
battle came "standoff air, maritime or cyber fires are unlikely to dominate on their own - land will still be
the decisive to domain", adding that "you can't cyber your way across a river". He said the army's
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mobilisation is "not the rush to war at the speed of the railway timetables of 1914" but is an
"acceleration of the most important parts of Future Soldier's bold modernisation agenda… an increased
focus on readiness and combined arms training." Future Soldier is the name given to the army's plans
for its capabilities. This will mean more training on combining the different domains of warfare - land,
sea, air, cyber and space as well as rebuilding stockpiles. General Sanders also said the army will "review
the deployability of our vehicle fleet". This could be a signal of a decision to be made about a multibillion-pound programme to develop a mini-tank called Ajax that has been beset with problems and has
not yet delivered. The top officer said deterring Russia "means more of the army ready more of the
time" and that he expects "all ranks to get ready, train hard and engage".
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NATO Good
Strong, unified NATO key to deter a China attack on Taiwan
Helmy, 4-13, 22, Dr.Nadia HelmyAssociate Professor of Political Science, Faculty of Politics and
Economics / Beni Suef University- Egypt. An Expert in Chinese Politics, Sino-Israeli relationships, and
Asian affairs- Visiting Senior Researcher at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES)/ Lund
University, Sweden- Director of the South and East Asia Studies Unit, Modern Diplomacy, U.S- NATO role
in the cyber conflict and Taiwan to confront China after the Ukraine war,
https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2022/04/13/u-s-nato-role-in-the-cyber-conflict-and-taiwan-to-confrontchina-after-the-ukraine-war/
Hence, Beijing
is carefully studying the reaction of the international community to the Russian invasion
of Ukraine. It is certain that China will analyze the most prominent aspects of the benefits of Russian military operations in Ukraine, in
order to benefit from this in its strategy towards Taiwan. The most important thing to me is the Chinese insistence on
monitoring and analyzing the extent of the unity and cohesion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
and other American alliances, as well as the extent to which the alliance and Western countries are able to bear the consequences
and costs of sanctions on Russia. Here, we find that China is trying to monitor and analyze all the course of the war in Ukraine, and the Chinese
analysis on (the most prominent defensive military roles of the “US Pentagon” and NATO after the Ukraine war, and
the impact of
(combining misinformation and the US cyber-attacks on the ground), then the Chinese focus on this relationship,
due to the extent and scope of the formation of the defense and military positions of the US Department of Defense “the Pentagon” and the
military alliance of NATO towards directing the future conflict of linking and the relationship between Ukraine and Taiwan, and their influence
on China. China is well aware of the most important and most prominent (logistical differences between Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and any
possible attack it might have made in its efforts to annex Taiwan). Here, I can analyze China’s assertive position, that it cannot invade Taiwan’s
borders in a scenario similar to the Russian army’s incursion into Ukrainian territory. Where China will work to search where the opportunity
lies and how to take advantage of the Ukrainian crisis. Here, China will try to achieve balance in its dealings with the developments of events in
Ukraine. Therefore, China is also trying to play (the role of neutrality Diplomacy regarding the burning crisis between Russia and Ukraine), and it
is not expected that China will act in the same way that Russia did. Ukraine. Most notably to me, is what I analyzed about the extent of (the
Taiwanese realization of the possibility of exploiting Russia’s war against Ukraine to ignite the situation against Taiwan and prepare the
atmosphere for China to launch a war on it), for the benefit of other parties benefiting from that to achieve their interests, on the top of them,
which are: the Western powers from the members of the military alliance of NATO, led by the United States of America, and its Ministry of
Defense “Pentagon”, are all seeking to ignite a confrontation between China and Taiwan to play primarily on their interests, which was
confirmed by Taiwan’s President “Tsai Ing-wen” herself, that: “Taiwan will continue to strengthen its defenses to confront the war of
propaganda and rumors, which is led by foreign powers inside Taiwan, with the aim of exploiting the situation in Ukraine to spread
misinformation with the aim of weakening the morale of the Taiwanese people”.
China-Taiwan war escalates to include the US and goes nuclear
Carol Lee, May 12, 2022, https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/news/us-prepare-drawn-conflictchina-invades-taiwan-war-game-suggests-rcna28580, U.S. should prepare for drawn-out conflict if China
invades Taiwan, war game suggests
The year is 2027. China has invaded Taiwan and the wheels of all-out war have begun to turn. “We are
not going to let them survive the initial onslaught of our military operations,” says one of the
masterminds of Beijing’s military strategy. “We are not going to let the president of Taiwan survive the
first day.” To achieve that swift decapitation of Taiwan’s government, China casts a wide net of
destruction — even pre-emptively attacking American bases in Japan and Guam. The U.S. responds by
bombing Chinese ports and Australia mobilize forces against Beijing as the worst fears of the U.S. and
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its allies unfold in the Asia-Pacific. It may sound like a purely academic exercise but, in fact, it’s deadly
serious. These hypothetical military operations were planned by U.S. lawmakers, former Pentagon
officials and China experts as part of a war game exercise that played out in NBC News’ Washington
bureau in April. The teams spent some five hours on an exercise that for the Pentagon would typically
take up to five days. The purpose was to think through what a Chinese invasion of Taiwan might look like
now that the world has had to navigate the initial fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Watch the
war game on "Meet the Press Reports" on NBC News NOW live Thursday night at 10:30 p.m. Eastern
and Peacock on demand. The war game was organized in partnership with the D.C.-based think tank
Center for a New American Security (CNAS). It took place amid rising concern among U.S. officials in
multiple administrations and in capitals across the Asia-Pacific about the possibility of China attacking
Taiwan. Just this week, the Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said “a key area of focus” for
U.S. intelligence officials is Chinese President Xi Jinping’s intent on a forced takeover of Taiwan. “China
would prefer coerced unification that avoids armed conflict,” Haines told Congress. “And at the same
time, Beijing is prepared to use military force if it decides this is necessary.” The overarching takeaway
from participants in the war game: If China invades Taiwan, the Indo-Pacific region will plunge into a
broad, drawn-out war that could include direct attacks on the U.S., including Hawaii and potentially
the continental United States. “Neither Beijing nor Washington is likely to have the upper hand after
the first week of the conflict, suggesting that it would eventually become a protracted conflict,” CNAS
experts said. “The war game demonstrated how quickly the conflict may escalate, with China and the
United States crossing red lines.” That escalation, according to the war game, could lead to China
using a nuclear weapon, a step that U.S. officials worry Russia could take in Ukraine. For China, the
reason for a potential nuclear response is Beijing’s limited capacity to respond with conventional
weapons. “New questions over Russian military strength apply to China’s military as well,” CNAS writes
in its preliminary conclusion.
Emboldened by perceptions of US decline, Russia seeking global dominance
Scott Berrier, Lieutenant General, U.S. Army. Director, Defense Intelligence Agency, March 15, 2022,
https://armedservices.house.gov/_cache/files/5/f/5fa65e01-08c0-4b83-97137516a0bc4d62/481DE0F0E64E412E4B1EA9EC9984A1B8.20220317-iso-witnessstatement-berrier.pdf,
WORLDWIDE THREAT ASSESSMENT ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE INTELLIGENCE AND SPECIAL
OPERATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE UNITED STATES HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Russia continues to pursue its national security interests and geopolitical ambitions aggressively
across the globe, acting from a position of increased confidence and emboldened by its perception that the United
States is in a period of decline. Russia is steadily expanding its international profile, increasing its
engagement with select countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America and is working to
diminish U.S. influence around the globe. The Kremlin is seeking to establish military bases and air
and naval access agreements with states in these regions to enhance its power projection capabilities
and increase its regional influence. The Kremlin’s engagement with Pyongyang centers on the preservation of regional stability
and promotion of Russia’s status on the peninsula. Russia has advocated for a comprehensive and negotiated settlement and opposes the use
of force. Moscow agreed to UN sanctions against Pyongyang in 2017; however, Moscow sometimes skirts compliance issues because of
business interests and a fear of destabilizing the North Korean regime. In addition, Russia coordinates its North Korea-related diplomacy with
China, including a bilateral “Road Map” for peace, an initiative since 2017 that has aimed 21 to reduce tensions on the Peninsula through a
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dual-track approach to advance denuclearization and establish a peace mechanism. In
the Middle East, Moscow continues to
provide Syria with military, diplomatic, and economic support, while seeking to broker an end to the Asad regime’s
international isolation and lobbying for economic aid to assist in Syria’s reconstruction. The Kremlin likely calculates this support along with its
military presence in Syria will ensure its sway over the Asad regime, cement Moscow’s status as Syria’s preeminent foreign partner, and bolster
Russian regional influence and power projection capability. Russia and Turkey continue to downplay their disagreements and compartmentalize
their divergent foreign policy objectives in Syria and elsewhere in the region. Russia
also continues to expand its
involvement in Africa, highlighted by the activities of Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin and his
Private Military Company Vagner. Vagner has conducted combat operations in the Central African Republic since
2017, Libya since 2019, and deployed to Mali in December 2021. More broadly, Russia uses arms sales,
training, and bilateral defense agreements to establish lasting relationships on the continent. To enhance
its power-projection capabilities and increase its regional advantage, Moscow continues to pursue military bases and air and naval access
agreements in Africa, such as the planned naval logistics facility in Sudan. In
Latin America, Moscow is focused largely on
strengthening military ties with its traditional partners Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, offering
training, arms sales, and weapons maintenance support. Russia has also threatened to increase its military presence in
the region in response to U.S. support for Ukraine. Moscow continues to support disputed Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro with military
and economic assistance, largely to protect its economic investments and thwart perceived efforts to remove President Maduro from power.
Russian engagement with other Latin American governments remains minimal, but the Kremlin is open to opportunities for more extensive
engagement. 22 Russia views the Arctic as a security and economic priority , seeking to exploit Arctic natural resources
and develop the Northern Sea Route as a major international shipping lane. Russia is refurbishing Sovietera airfields and radar installations,
constructing new ports and search and rescue centers, and building up its fleet of conventionally- and nuclear-powered icebreakers. Russia is
also expanding its network of air and coastal defense missile systems to strengthen its antiaccess/area-denial capabilities in the region. In May
2021, Russia assumed the two-year rotating Chairmanship of the Arctic Council, an association of the eight Arctic nations intended to preserve
the Arctic as a zone of peace and constructive cooperation. Russia intends to use the platform to attract investment in its Arctic projects and
defend its national interests. Looking ahead,
Russia will continue to pose a multifaceted threat to U.S. national
security and its ability to lead and shape international developments while Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine will have immediate and long-term consequences for European security and stability. Protracted
occupation of parts of Ukrainian territory threatens to sap Russian military manpower and reduce their modernized weapons arsenal, while
consequent economic sanctions will probably throw Russia into prolonged economic depression and diplomatic isolation that will threaten their
ability to produce modern precision-guided munitions. As this war and its consequences slowly weaken Russian conventional strength,
Russia likely will increasingly rely on its nuclear deterrent to signal the West and project strength to its
internal and external audiences. Russia’s aggression in Ukraine is reviving fears of a more imperial and
militaristic Russia, prompting requests from NATO allies for assurances that U.S. security guarantees will be honored. U.S. partners in
the former Soviet Union will also look to the United States for signs that they are not being abandoned while adjusting their policies to coexist
with a stronger and more emboldened Russia. Russian military modernization efforts will progress even as initial timelines for some programs
may have to adjust to 23 likely new economic realities, and Moscow
will continue to blend traditional displays of
military might with other coercive political, economic, cyber, and information confrontation measures
to achieve its geopolitical interests, delineate its redlines, and compel the United States to take its concerns more seriously.
Moreover, U.S. efforts to undermine Russia’s goals in Ukraine, combined with its perception that the
United States is a nation in decline, could prompt Russia to engage in more aggressive actions not only
in Ukraine itself, but also more broadly in its perceived confrontation with the West.
NATO not responsible for Russia aggression
Christopher Booth, Moscow Correspondent, 4-8, 22, The Spectator, Russia ‘realists’ have very little to
say about evil, https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/russia-realists-have-very-little-to-say-about-evil
‘Every way of a man is right in his own eyes’, the Book of Proverbs says: it makes us feel good to know we’re on the side of the angels. The
corollary is that other men must be in the wrong, and therefore blameworthy, and this shores up our self-regard still further. Of course, taken
to extremes, the outcome is full-blown narcissism. But in certain schools of international relations, there’s a kind of especially vigorous antinarcissism in fashion: the idea that when it comes to the sins of the world, ‘we’ in the west are almost always the guilty party (excepting those
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enlightened enough to perceive this truth). Ukraine is the latest conflict where self-flagellants flex a version of the argument. In short, were it
not for the incautious expansion of Nato, and the half-promises made to Kyiv, none of this horror would have happened. Professor John
Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago is a vocal proponent of the view, and his commentaries have notched up hundreds of thousands of
views on YouTube during the war. That’s a lot of likes for an academic. So he is clearly tapping into something some people feel. ‘We have led
the Ukrainians down the primrose path and encouraged them to join Nato’ he declares. At the same time, ‘we took a stick and we poked the
bear in the eye’ when it comes to Russia. It is again, you see, all about ‘us’. Mearsheimer
is an articulate and well-regarded
thinker, and has published much learned material to great acclaim. By contrast, I’m merely a former Moscow correspondent. But having
spent a decade in Russia between 1988 and 2005, and witnessed the emergence and flourishing of
Putin’s way of running the country, I can’t help finding Mearsheimer’s theory of ‘offensive realism’ a
poor guide to what is taking place. And in some ways, it just strikes me as plain offensive. There are
lots of reasons why. Starting with the glaring iniquity that such a worldview denies Ukrainians the
opportunity to choose their future. They are either obliged to accept Moscow’s ‘right’ to call the
shots; or they’re painted as dumb puppets of western manipulation. The toppling of the pro-Russian
government in Kyiv in 2014, which so upset the Kremlin, is described by thinkers like Mearsheimer as
a ‘coup’. The choice of word is telling, because it smuggles in a value judgment. Many of my Ukrainian
friends, however, would term the events a popular uprising. Not one in which they were gulled by the
CIA and dark forces, but one in which they eagerly seized the hope to make a country better than the
one Putin was willing to begrudge them. That may be described as ‘unrealistic’, but it at least permits
Ukrainians a role in their affairs. Second, even if Nato were relevant to the choice of war by Putin,
there are plenty of other causes, apart from the man’s taste for risk and violence, that could also
account for the invasion. Access to natural resources and Ukraine’s littoral hydrocarbon deposits
would be a strong one. Another might be the Tsar’s go-to solution for troubles at home: more than a
century ago, Russian interior minister Vyacheslav von Plehve’s explanation for going to war with
Japan was ‘You don’t know Russia’s internal situation. To avert a revolution, we need a small
victorious war.’ Putin has greater reason to fear being overthrown at home for rampant corruption
and immiseration than some far-off and thoroughly implausible Ukrainian membership of Nato. But of
course, it suits him fine if analysts are keen to make it the ‘line in the sand’ which ‘we’ crossed to
trigger the nightmare. Another shortcoming of the theory is that it supposes people like Putin and his entourage are motivated by
statesmanlike reason. But while the Russian defence staff may have planned the war through a prism of rationality – in the event, that prism
turned out to be a drastically flawed one – their commander-in-chief has demonstrated spitting anger and a bloody messianism as high among
his motivations for conflict. The televised address to the Russian nation on the eve of war seemed that of a man possessed: ‘One can say with
good reason and confidence that the whole so-called western bloc formed by the United States in its own image and likeness is, in its entirety,
an “empire of lies,”’ Putin fumed. His public performances suggest a man seated far from sober realism as he sits with increasingly rare guests
at that long, long Kremlin table. Keep in mind, when he talks about bringing ethnic Russians, or merely Russian speakers, back into the fold of
his country, he means every neo-fascist word of what he says. More than that, the
President of Russia habitually dives deep
into the profane language of a lowlife gangster. He’s comfortable referring to the rape of women and
evoking sadistic violence to illustrate what he has in mind if he takes a shine to the metaphor. ‘Sorry, my
beautiful – like it or not, you’re just gonna have to take it,’ is a recent coinage. In the Russian idiom it also rhymes, for greater effect. Some
might say he's just being clever, playing to the home audience. But it’s also possible that Putin delights in using such phrases because of what
they make him feel. A former British ambassador to Moscow put it to me like this: ‘The old Putin had a kind of dark wit when he spoke. He now
comes across as unhinged.’ Whether or not, it’s a far cry from the lexicon of a cool-headed statesman. But there
are other reasons
why the ‘offensive realism’ model is morally slimy. For one thing, it doesn’t account for Putin’s choice
of mediaeval tactics. You can take the idea of the west’s original guilt, if you really have to believe in
it, only so far. Because it was the Russian president’s choice, not ‘ours’, to enthusiastically reduce
Mariupol to rubble and give carte blanche to his troops to maraud across Ukraine, how and where
they pleased. The counter-argument might perhaps be that thanks to western arms supplies and the boost to Ukraine’s defence
capability, Russian generals were left no choice but to render cities to dust and send in the armed rapists. But that stretches belief. And
after Bucha, it is morally grotesque to expect ‘us’ to shoulder the blame for wanton murder . (Russian
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troops in this regard have plenty of form – ask anyone brave enough to speak up in Grozny today about what they went through at the hands of
‘kontraktniki’, contract soldiers, and the secret policemen when Putin was just coming of age politically.) Last, the
‘realists’ have very
little to say about evil. In stressing the role of purported geopolitical force majeure, and western guilt
in the matter, they struggle to find a place for old-fashioned ideas like greed, vainglory and the
capacity of some to take pleasure in what is now called ‘transgressive behaviour’ and what used to be
known as sin. Those motivations, and no doubt many more, are characteristic of despots. They seem a
particularly close fit with all we know of Putin: his thirst for wealth, his need to be feared if not loved,
and his ruthless willingness to achieve such things by killing. In theorising largely in matters of
abstract strategy, the realists have no explanation for the grisly calculus of evil men. In turn, it tends
to absolve these appalling characters of responsibility, even of moral capacity. That is more wrong
today than ever, given that we cannot claim not to know, or close our eyes to what we have seen, and
that it would sign off on a dreadful blank cheque to the future.
Reducing hegemonic power increased aggression by China and Russia
McMaster & Scheinman, 6-17, 22, H. R. McMaster is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover
Institution, a former U.S. national security advisor during the Trump administration, and the author of
Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World; Gabriel Scheinmann is the executive director of the
Alexander Hamilton Society, U.S. Restraint Has Created an Unstable and Dangerous World,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/06/17/us-miliitary-strategy-geopolitics-restraint-russia-china-ukrainewar/
However, restraint was not reciprocated. As the United States reduced its defense spending to the
lowest share of GDP since 1940, Russia and China embarked on the largest military modernization and
expansion programs their countries had seen in generations. They bullied their neighbors (or in
Russia’s case, attacked and occupied them), corroded the institutions they joined, and sought to
eliminate their citizens’ liberties. U.S. restraint was interpreted as weakness. Ignoring these menaces
has now led the West to the most dangerous precipice since the depths of the Cold War.
Even before the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, Russian and Chinese militarism and belligerence
were evident. In June of that year, Chinese tanks put down peaceful protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen
Square, killing thousands of people. In late 1995 and early 1996, Beijing tried to intimidate Taiwan in the
run-up to its first democratic election, firing missiles into Taiwanese territorial waters. In April 2001, a
Chinese fighter jet rammed a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft in international airspace, forcing the naval
airmen into an emergency landing in China, where they were detained for 10 days. Moscow engaged in
two brutal wars against Chechnya and launched an assassination campaign against political opponents
that continues to this day. In 2004, the Kremlin nearly killed then-Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor
Yushchenko in an attempt to secure victory for its preferred candidate. In 2006, a Russian agent
poisoned and killed Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy who had defected, and Anna
Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist, was assassinated for opposing Putin’s wars. From the killing of
Boris Nemtsov, a liberal critic of Putin, in 2015 to the poisoning and incarceration of dissident Alexey
Navalny in 2020 to the most recent imprisonment of Russian opposition politician Vladimir KaraMurza, Putin and his thugs have worked tirelessly to extinguish any criticism of, let alone challenge to,
his iron rule.
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Russia and China were emboldened, in part, because the United States undertook the greatest military
drawdown since the collapse of the British empire.
Washington still did not waver from its predisposition toward restraint. Even after Putin made plain his
goal of undermining the United States and the West at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, the U.S.
military drawdown from Europe and Asia continued. The United States welcomed Russia into the G-7 in
1998, turning it into the G-8. China and Russia became part of the G-20 in 1999 and the World Trade
Organization in 2001 and 2012, respectively. Putin’s 2008 invasion of Georgia was even rewarded with a
positive “reset” of relations. The 2010 U.S. National Security Strategy called for a “stable, substantive,
multidimensional relationship with Russia, based on mutual interests” and sought “Russia’s cooperation
to act as a responsible partner in Europe and Asia.” Similarly, even as Chinese ships began clashing with
those of their neighbors, even as China built and militarized 27 artificial islands and other outposts in the
South China Sea, and even as Beijing claimed sovereignty over the sea and established air and sea
superiority in an area where one-third of global trade passes, Washington remained withdrawn. The
2015 U.S. National Security Strategy “welcome[d] the rise of a stable, peaceful, and prosperous China”
and sought “to develop a constructive relationship with China that delivers benefits for our two peoples
and promotes security and prosperity in Asia and around the world.”
Instead, the two autocracies’ belligerence has only expanded. In 2014, Russia invaded, occupied, and
annexed parts of Ukraine, initiating a long war it has now expanded. The following year, Russian troops
propped up the murderous dictatorship of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, and soon thereafter, Putin sent
his private mercenary army, the Wagner Group, into Libya. In 2016, Russia interfered in elections in
Europe and the United States, exploiting domestic political divisions to sow discord and mistrust in the
democratic process. Not to be outdone, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched a genocide of its
own citizens, imprisoned 1.8 million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in concentration camps and
forcing them to undergo compulsory sterilization, forced labor, medical experiments, mass rape,
torture, renunciation of their religious beliefs in favor of the Communist Party, cutting and selling of
their hair, and organ harvesting. In 2020, Beijing cracked down in Hong Kong in direct contravention of
the “one country, two systems” policy it had committed to by international treaty. Chinese soldiers also
attacked Indian troops across their disputed border, initiating skirmishes leading to several dozen
deaths. As if that was not enough, Beijing’s deceit, dishonesty, and dissimulation about the nature and
origin of COVID-19 helped transform a local and possibly containable outbreak into a horrific global
pandemic that has cost more than 15 million lives so far.
Russia and China were emboldened, in part, because the United States undertook the greatest
drawdown of military power since the collapse of the British empire. In 1990, the U.S. military had
about 266,000 service members stationed in Europe; by the end of 2021, it was only about 65,000
service members. In 1989, the U.S. Army had 5,000 tanks permanently stationed in West Germany
alone; by 2014, there were zero on the entire continent. In 1990, the United States had 5,000 nuclear
bombs forward deployed in Western Europe; today, it has around 150 nuclear bombs. Until the 2014
start of Russia’s war in Ukraine and despite NATO enlargement, not a single U.S. service member was
permanently stationed farther east than during the Cold War. In Asia, where the Chinese People’s
Liberation Army has more than 2 million ground force personnel and the Chinese navy is now the largest
in the world, the United States’ active-duty Army has been cut by one-third since 1990. The U.S. Navy
has 40 percent fewer sailors in Asia and will soon have only half the number of active warships it had
stationed there in 1990. In 2019, China conducted more ballistic missile tests than the rest of the world
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combined. Recent reports show that China is expected to quadruple the size of its nuclear arsenal by
decade’s end.
The policy of restraint continues to limit the U.S. defense budget. At the close of the century, China and
Russia together spent 13 percent of what the United States spends on defense. Today, that number is 67
percent. Whereas U.S. defense spending fluctuated between 4.5 percent and 11.3 percent of GDP
during the Cold War, Biden’s budget request for 2022 would have put defense spending at less than 3
percent of GDP—the lowest level since 1940, when Washington was still trying its best to stay out of
international affairs. And while the White House’s recently released 2023 budget request contains a
small nominal increase, rampant inflation makes it another de facto cut. By comparison, the Chinese
defense budget—which is chronically understated by the CCP and does not include, for example, what
local authorities spend on military bases or investments in research and development—grew 7.1
percent in 2021. And lest you be impressed by the still-ample size of U.S. spending, keep in mind that
Washington spreads its military thinly, whereas Russia and China have a laser-like focus on dominating
their neighbors and regions. U.S. armed forces are not only too small to deter or respond effectively to
aggression, but the services have also incurred significant deferred modernization due to inadequate
and unpredictable defense budgets as well as the U.S. Defense Department’s dysfunctional
acquisition and procurement system. The United States is weaker, less secure, and less prepared to
fight and win than at any time since the beginning of the Korean War.
Consequently, Putin launching the largest war in Europe since World War II should not have come as a
surprise. For over three decades, Moscow and Beijing have eroded, flouted, mocked, and assaulted the
order the United States and its allies built. Restraint encouraged that agenda as the United States and its
allies dismantled the ramparts that had been vital to preserving peace and protecting the sovereignty of
nations on the peripheries of two revanchist powers. And the drawdown continues—even as Russia
continues its brutal invasion and China lays claim to Taiwan and the South China Sea. In its new national
defense strategy, the Biden administration uses the term “integrated deterrence” to create the illusion
that better coordinated policies can be substitute for modernized, ready, forward-positioned forces
capable of operating at a sufficient scale to deter conflict and, should that deterrence fail, fight and win.
The United States must end its unilateral restraint vis-à-vis Russia and China and be realistic about the
nature of the adversaries it faces. First, the United States must rearm, and the defense budget must
increase. It must pay for new capabilities that counter and exceed those China and Russia have invested
in. The Joint Forces must be substantially bigger to deter Russian and Chinese aggression as well as be
able to respond to multiple, simultaneous contingencies. In today’s dollars, achieving even the Cold
War-era floor of spending 4.5 percent of GDP on defense would mean a $1.2 trillion budget. Second, the
United States must end its diplomatic restraint. Where it can, it should counter Beijing’s and Moscow’s
efforts to subvert and co-opt international institutions and turn them against their purpose. If some of
those institutions are beyond rescue, the United States and likeminded partners should form new
groupings to advance the originally intended values and principles. In these cases, new institutions
should prove more resilient and effective than the current ones plagued by discord and corruption. The
Biden administration must stop describing Russia and China as partners in arresting nuclear
proliferation, combatting climate change, and curbing pandemics. Finally, the United States must end its
economic restraint against the predatory practices and outright criminal behavior of the Chinese regime.
U.S. policymakers should not tolerate violations of bilateral and international trade agreements, the use
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of forced labor and other inhumane labor practices, and supply chains that leave U.S. national security
vulnerable. Free trade only works among free people.
Putin’s latest assault on the free world—and Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s threats to do so himself—have
the capability of resuscitating Washington from its comatose policy of restraint. The longer the United
States operates under the delusion that restraint will appease authoritarian regimes that have made
their hostile intentions abundantly clear, Russia and China will become bolder and the risk of a
catastrophic war—which Ukraine was the prelude for—will only grow. In a world created by U.S.
restraint, democracy, prosperity, and peace are on the decline. As Putin’s brutal war has reminded the
world, weakness is provocative. Strength is the best way to preserve peace and secure a better future
for generations to come.
Perception of NATO weakness means Russia never stops in the Ukraine, as the
Ukraine’s survival depends on Russia
Walting, 6-19, 22, Jack Watling is senior research fellow for land warfare at the Royal United Services
Institute (Rusi), Ukraine is fighting a grim war of attrition. Only Nato can help change that,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/19/ukraine-russia-war-of-attrition-nato
One of the primary aspirations of professional militaries is to field a force capable of delivering victory while circumventing attritional warfare.
Attritional warfare develops when neither side is able to achieve a decisive advantage. Unless new
capabilities or terrain shift the logic of a fight, attritional warfare ends when one side exhausts its supply of people, materiel or morale. This is
the grim state of the current fighting in Ukraine. For
Russia, the low morale and poor cohesion of its infantry
prevents its army from undertaking large offensive manoeuvres without taking unsustainable levels of
losses in both personnel and equipment. So far, it has lost about a quarter of its armoured forces in
Ukraine. Advertisement Russia has therefore resorted to the saturation of Ukrainian positions with artillery, destroying defended villages
and tree lines until Ukrainian troops are forced to withdraw, and then advancing to occupy what has been abandoned. This is slow and
resource-intensive, but Russia has enough ammunition to keep up its current rate of fire for several years. For
Ukraine, the
overwhelming Russian artillery advantage means that its armed forces struggle to concentrate in
formations above the company group, and making progress with such a small force demands that
they commit some of the country’s best troops. Casualties among these highly proficient units has a disproportionate
impact on Ukrainian military effectiveness because most of the time these veterans are distributed across the force to support less experienced
troops. Ukraine, therefore, is intermittently conducting small raids when the opportunity arises, while seeking to inflict a high enough number
of casualties to collapse Russian morale, enabling territory to be reoccupied. If the rate of Russian casualties can be increased, collapse is
possible. The Kremlin has avoided a declared mobilisation, preferring to covertly draw people with military experience back into the ranks. This
is because many Russians are actively discussing how they can avoid the draft. The very need for such measures is discussed in Russia as a sign
of government incompetence, and the perception of incompetence undermines enthusiasm for the war, even among ardent Russian
nationalists. If its troops become demoralised in Ukraine because of prolonged massed casualties, the Kremlin may struggle to find
replacements. If the rate of Russian casualties can be increased, collapse is possible For the Ukrainians, the existential stakes in the fighting
have meant that morale is high, despite their taking up to 100 casualties a day over the last couple of weeks. Ukraine has no shortage of
military volunteers but it does have a shortage of equipment for them. Ukraine’s
greatest immediate vulnerability is its
ammunition stocks. It has almost expended its Soviet-era ammunition for key systems and is now
dependent on a limited number of Nato artillery pieces. Here too, however, there is only a finite number of rounds in
Nato’s stocks, which have been chronically depleted since the end of the cold war. Russia hopes that as the Ukrainians burn
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through the available ammunition, their capacity to resist will wither. Another challenge for Ukraine is the
geometry of its current defences in the Donbas. Russian attacks to the north and south have created a horseshoe of territory still held by the
Ukrainian army. After massacres of civilians by the Russian army in Bucha and elsewhere, withdrawal has become politically challenging for the
Ukrainian government. But, ringed by Russian firing positions, it is exceedingly difficult for Ukraine to build up a competitive “fires capability” in
the area, even if it had the guns to deploy. Russia appears to be using Sievierodonetsk as Germany used Verdun in the first world war: a point
where Russia has firepower superiority but from which Ukraine cannot pull back, ensuring high and sustained Ukrainian casualties. There are
several routes to ending these unfavourable conditions. If the Donbas falls to Russia, the return to a linear front may significantly reduce
Russia’s artillery advantage, and if Russia then pushes into Ukrainian territory, the battlefield geometry may be reversed, as occurred north of
Kyiv in the early stages of the war. Another shift from the current attritional dynamic may be caused by the provision of large numbers of longrange western artillery pieces. These, coupled with robust “kill chains”, may allow the Ukrainians to begin to destroy Russian artillery with
impunity. Then Ukraine could concentrate its units and begin to press Russia’s inferior infantry hard. The other method of shifting the current
logic is enabling the Ukrainians to build new combat brigades with protected mobility – armoured vehicles for carrying infantry – to enable its
units to conduct concentrated attacks from Kharkiv, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, expanding the frontage that Russia is having to defend. The
problem with this is that, to be logistically viable, large numbers of vehicles of a consistent type would need to be provided. Advertisement Yet
Nato countries – other than the US – not only possess small fleets but have also let many of their armoured fleets become worn out and poorly
maintained. Refurbishing these fleets entails time and cost, and it is not yet clear how much cost Ukraine’s international allies are prepared to
bear. The final process of attrition for Ukraine is economic, and in this realm there can be no doubt that it is running out of money, while Russia
can withstand western sanctions. Soon it will be essential for economic relief to sustain the government in Kyiv. Alongside the military
considerations outlined above, therefore, ending the attritional struggle in Ukraine is ultimately a question of how much Nato members are
prepared to invest in Russia’s defeat. If President Vladimir Putin
believes that western commitment may fade in the
shadow of a European recession, the risk is that he will be encouraged to grind on.
Strong NATO needed to deter Russia, sustain readiness, protect democracy, and
reduce terrorism
Korb & Cimbala, 6-7, 22, Lawrence J. Korb is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a
former Assistant Secretary of Defense; Stephen J. Cimbala is a Distinguished Professor of Political
Science at Penn State University, Brandywine, How NATO Can Meet the Challenges of the Twenty-First
Century, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/how-nato-can-meet-challenges-twenty-first-century202852
In the aftermath of Putin’s invasion and NATO’s likely expansion, however, complacency among
member states should be avoided. Deterring Russia in the short term understates the demands that the
international system and European politics will impose on an expanded NATO in the years to come.
NATO’s political cohesion, military readiness, and escalation management skills will be essential for
dealing with a variety of challenges and open questions. Among these include what to do with a postPutin Russia; deterring and defeating transnational terrorism; the alliance’s relationship with a rising
China; member states’ ability to maintain stable democratic regimes within their own countries and
promote democratic institutions among non-NATO states; and adapting the alliance’s military
strategy to a new world of technology that privileges cognitive warfare, space, and cyber capabilities.
Strong NATO needed to prevent nuclear terrorism
Korb & Cimbala, 6-7, 22, Lawrence J. Korb is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and a
former Assistant Secretary of Defense; Stephen J. Cimbala is a Distinguished Professor of Political
Science at Penn State University, Brandywine, How NATO Can Meet the Challenges of the Twenty-First
Century, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/how-nato-can-meet-challenges-twenty-first-century202852
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A second issue for NATO will be its collective security agenda with respect to international terrorism.
NATO support for U.S. military operations in Afghanistan was an essential component of U.S. combat
and non-combat responses to the challenges posed by the Taliban and other non-state actors in that
country. U.S. intelligence collaboration with NATO allies and within the Five Eyes group—consisting of
the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand—is supported by global
deployments of American special operations forces and other military and intelligence assets, including
those of NATO allies. A robust network of information sharing tracks the military activities and
communications of Al Qaeda and other major transnational terror networks. Although Biden’s national
security strategy acknowledges that the United States now faces the problem of emerging peer
competitors and the renewed threat of great power war, the threats posed by domestic and
international terrorists have not gone away. In the wake of the U.S. military withdrawal from
Afghanistan in August 2021, the Taliban, ISIS-K, and other groups with anti-American or anti-Western
agendas will find new sanctuaries and outside support. These and other terrorist groups can use
modern net-centric warfare to radicalize individuals across the globe and direct them against U.S. or
allied targets. The possibility of a terrorist attack that uses weapons of mass destruction should also
not be discounted as a continuing aspiration among radicals.
Only hard power stops Russia; Putin doesn’t care about norms and laws
Boot, 4-3, 22, Max Boot is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations and the author of “The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in
Vietnam., Washingtom Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/04/03/atrocities-arethe-russian-way-of-war/
Russian dictator Vladimir Putin got one thing right: His invasion did lead to Ukrainian civilians greeting
troops as liberators. Only they weren’t greeting Russian troops. They were greeting the Ukrainian troops
who in recent days have entered villages around Kyiv that had been occupied by the Russians for more
than a month. The Ukrainian government proclaimed on Saturday that all of the Kyiv administrative
region had been freed of Russian control. It was as if the Free French forces were entering Paris in 1944.
The reason civilians were so jubilant to be liberated has become grimly apparent. Sickening pictures
from Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, show the corpses of residents who had been bound, shot and left by the
side of the road. The mayor of Bucha said that some 270 people had been found in two mass graves and
another 40 were lying dead in the streets. The atrocities in Bucha were no aberration. There is ample
evidence of other war crimes by Russian troops across Ukraine. Human Rights Watch has documented
Russian troops committing rape, summary execution and looting. In Mariupol, the Russians
bombarded a theater where civilians were sheltering. The word “CHILDREN” was printed in Russian in
huge white letters outside. An effort to discourage aerial attack may have actually invited it. Some 300
people in the building were reported killed by Russian bombs on March 16. But it is one thing to kill
civilians with bombs and missiles. It is another to kill them with bullets to the back of the head. This is a
different level of evil — the kind of organized atrocity that Europe has not seen since the Srebrenica
massacre in Bosnia in 1995. Russia’s “anti-Nazi” operation has led Russian troops to act precisely as the
Nazis once did. If there is any justice in the world, Russian war criminals, from Putin on down, will
someday face the kind of justice that the Nazis received at Nuremberg. This, sadly, is the Russian way of
war. It is how Putin’s forces fought in Chechnya and Syria — and before that, how Soviet forces fought
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in Afghanistan and in central Europe during World War II. They commit war crimes to terrorize the
population into surrender. But it hasn’t worked in Ukraine. Russia’s savagery has simply caused the
Ukrainians to resist all the harder because they know they are fighting not just for their freedom but for
their very survival. In the past week, the invaders have been driven out of the Kyiv area, with crippling
losses. The Russians have lost, according to open-source reporting, at least 400 tanks and, according to
the State Department, at least 10,000 troops; by a standard military metric, that means another 30,000
Russian soldiers may have been wounded. So roughly a fourth of the initial Russian assault force —
which included Putin’s best troops — is probably out of action. Some still suggest, incredibly, that the
Russian attack on Kyiv was a feint or a brilliant maneuver by Putin to distract his enemies. History will, in
fact, record it as a catastrophic military blunder. Having failed in their initial objective of regime change,
the Russians are trying to reorganize their battered and depleted forces to capture the Donbas region of
eastern Ukraine. This would have been much easier to do at the outset of the war, without those heavy
losses. Now the Russians will be hard-put to encircle the Ukrainian forces in the east, which have been
fighting Russian-backed separatists since 2014. How will this war end? No one can yet say. The
Ukrainians are rightly enraged by Russian atrocities and will be less likely to make territorial
compromises with the invaders, knowing that to do so would be to consign their fellow citizens to a
Stalinist hell. But as a former Putin adviser says, “Russia cannot afford to ‘lose,’ so we need a kind of a
victory.” The 1995 Dayton Accords, which ended the war in Bosnia, should remind us that it is possible
to make peace even with war criminals — but only after they have been defeated. There is no
indication yet that Putin feels he has lost this war. That is why it is so essential that Russia suffer a
decisive defeat in the Donbas. The West must continue to ramp up aid to Ukraine, providing it with the
kind of heavy combat systems needed to drive back the Russians in the south and east as they have
already done in the north. It is good to see the Biden administration getting ready to transfer tanks to
Ukraine. Other weapons, including artillery, fighter aircraft and long-range air defense systems, must
follow. The only way to achieve peace at this point is not by negotiating with the Russians but by
defeating them. As for the Europeans: It is time, finally, to stop all oil and gas purchases from Russia.
Germany, in particular, cannot continue paying blood money that subsidizes today’s version of the Nazi
Einsatzgruppen mobile killing squads. Enough is enough.
Deterrence critical to stop further aggression, nuclear escalation, the collapse of democracy. US
leadership is key
Charai, 3-1, 22, Ahmed Charai is a Publisher of The Jerusalem Strategic Tribune. He is on the board of
directors of many Think-Tanks including the Atlantic Council, International Crisis Group, Center for
Strategic and International Studies, Foreign Policy Research Institute, and Center for the National
Interest, Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Is a Western Tragedy,
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/russia%E2%80%99s-invasion-ukraine-western-tragedy-200901
This tragedy is perhaps only a prospect of more catastrophe to come, as the conflict between Vladimir
Putin’s autocratic regime and Western democracies is only beginning. Often Russia was seen as a power
in decline that could not credibly challenge Western goals, but this has repeatedly been proven false.
The invasion of Ukraine is simply the latest example. Putin’s project will not stop at Ukraine; he aims to
reconstitute the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. The Russian heartland—where most Russian-speakers
live—is part of the vast European plain, a flat land that is very hard to defend. Since the time of the
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czars and the Soviets, Russia has sought to close the geographic entry points to its endless plain by
expanding its borders west and south. Putin is simply doing what every Russian leader has sought to
do since the reconstruction of modern Russia in the seventeenth century. Today, Putin continues to
speak the language of war, putting his nuclear forces on high alert, while the West speaks the language
of economic sanctions, including shutting Russia out of the SWIFT international banking settlement
service. Removing selective Russian banks from the SWIFT system will compromise their ability to act on
a global scale. Sanctions that bar the Central Bank of Russia from deploying its reserves, in a way that
could undermine the impact of sanctions, could also weaken Russia’s economy. The crackdown on
“golden passports,” that gave wealthy Russians access to Western financial systems, has already
angered Russia’s oligarchs Certainly major and unprecedented sanctions that could paralyze the Russian
commercial banking system—and with internal Russian interest rates climbing from 9 percent to almost
20 percent over the past week, Russia’s economy may be uniquely weak in the face of sanctions. Will
these sanctions be enough? No one can know how long Putin will resist. Until Putin relents, the Kremlin
will set the agenda. There is a real risk that this crisis will spread and envelop the United States and
Europe in a larger war. Putin’s not-so-subtle threat of nuclear escalation in response to Western
interference is a stark reminder of the dangers. Containing Russia’s territorial ambitions and
preventing it from invading other neighbors or launching nuclear strikes requires the U.S., the
indispensable nation, to make certain geostrategic changes that only it can make. European history
reminds us that failure to confront a tyrant can have horrific and generational consequences. Whether
this is one of those moments remains to be seen, but as itbecomes clearer that the valiant and vigorous
attempts at diplomacy are falling on deaf ears in Moscow, the military dimensions of a response must
be defined now. President Joe Biden, by standing tall in the face of this Russian escalation, is sending a
valuable signal to democracies around the world. That message is vital to ensure the security of small
democracies that have larger and threatening neighbors, such as Poland, the Baltic states, and
Taiwan. To be sure, diplomats must continue to negotiate for peace to rescue Ukraine from the deaths
and dispersion of its people and to prevent a potentially destabilizing refugee crisis from rocking NATO.
But more must be done. The West must act. First, the West must further tighten sanctions against
Putin’s entourage as well as Russian companies, not only those operating in Europe but those operating
in Asia. Sanctions must also affect Putin’s ally, Belarus. Second, it must strengthen NATO’s military
capabilities in coordination with allied countries, such as France and the United Kingdom, and put in
place a military strategy that protects European countries vulnerable to any Russian invasion such as
Poland, the Baltic states, or Romania. The United States must fully play its role as world leader and
protector of democracy. This is not a time for half-measures. U.S. leadership will not only be
appreciated by allies but by people around the world.
Only the US could actually fight a war against Russia
Lucas, 6-7, 22, Edward Lucas is a nonresident fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, a Liberal
Democratic candidate for the British Parliament, a former senior editor at The Economist, and the
author, most recently, of Cyberphobia: Identity, Trust, Security and the Internet, NATO Is Out of Shape
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and Out of Date, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/06/07/nato-ukraine-russia-war-alliance-reformgeopolitics-military/
Yet NATO command structures and planning do not fully reflect the imbalance of forces between the
United States and Europe. They rely on the fiction that the European allies are more or less equal
partners. Even military lightweights need to have important-sounding jobs and installations, making the
North Atlantic Council the military version of a parliament dividing out the pork. The resulting command
structure is like a tangled pile of spaghetti. In the Baltic region alone, NATO has several multinational
headquarters, one divisional headquarters split between Latvia and Denmark, another divisional
headquarters in Poland, and a corps headquarters at a different location in Poland. Overall responsibility
for the defense of Europe is divided between three Joint Forces Command headquarters in Naples, Italy;
Brunssum, the Netherlands; and Norfolk, Virginia. But the top U.S. military commander in Europe, Air
Force Gen. Tod Wolters, is based at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe in Mons, Belgium. A
maritime strategy for the Baltic Sea region has yet to be decided—which is just as well, because NATO
has yet to create a naval headquarters for the region. Nor has the alliance drawn up real military plans
for the reinforcement and defense of its northeastern members, let alone decided who would actually
provide the forces and equipment in order to make them credible. Military mobility is meant to be the
responsibility of Joint Support and Enabling Command, headquartered in Ulm, Germany, and originally
set up as part of the European Union’s own defense policy. Europe is, in theory, big and rich enough to
manage its own defense—but its persistent political weakness prevents that. A further problem is
exercises: NATO does not conduct fully realistic, large-scale rehearsals of how it would respond to a
Russian attack. One problem is that these are costly and disruptive. Another is that they expose the
huge weaknesses of some NATO members, which can cope with a carefully scripted exercise but lack the
ability to improvise. A third reason is the fear, in some countries, that practicing war-fighting would be
provocative. Also lacking are detailed plans for fighting a war against Russia, covering such issues as
reinforcing of front-line states, countering a Russian attack, regaining any temporarily occupied
territory, and—most of all—dealing with a nuclear or other escalation. As a result, nobody is quite sure
how anything would work in a crisis. Instead, another assumption reigns: that in a crisis, the United
States would take over and do the heavy lifting on all fronts—logistics, intelligence, and combat. To be
fair, NATO is working on these problems, and all of them are fixable. But that does not mean that they
are anywhere near being fixed. Wishful thinking remains the alliance’s besetting sin. Worse, NATO is
unprepared for the changing nature of modern warfare. Russia’s old-style assault on Ukraine is all too
familiar. But the artillery bombardments and missile strikes that are grinding down Ukraine’s defenses
are only part of the Kremlin’s arsenal. Its most effective weapons are nonmilitary: subversion,
diplomatic divide-and-rule tactics, economic coercion, corruption, and propaganda. The most burning
current example of nonmilitary warfare is Russia’s weaponizing of hunger. By blocking Ukraine’s grain
exports, Russia has raised the specter of famine over millions of people, including in volatile and fragile
countries in North Africa and the Middle East. Mass starvation is not just a humanitarian catastrophe,
but its consequences include political unrest and mass migration, a direct threat to Europe. Yet NATO
is ill-equipped to deal with this. It cannot mandate more economical use of grain—for example, by
feeding less to livestock and stopping grain’s conversion to fuel. It has no food stockpiles to release to a
hungry world. It cannot build new railways to ship Ukrainian grain through other routes. Nor can it
insure merchant vessels that might—for a price—be willing to run Russia’s Black Sea blockade. NATO
has little in-house expertise in countering Russian disinformation and almost zero influence in African
and other countries susceptible to Kremlin narratives blaming the West for the food shortages that are
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already starting now. NATO could acquire these capabilities. Or it could regain them: During the Cold
War, the alliance had an economic warfare division and ran a program called the Coordinating
Committee for Multilateral Export Controls to prevent the Soviet bloc from acquiring sensitive
technologies. But in the strategic timeout that followed the collapse of the Soviet bloc, these agencies
and their skill sets shriveled and died. But as with NATO’s military shortcomings, identifying the
problems is not the same as solving them. And given the bloc’s unwieldy structure and issues with key
members, it might be wise to lower expectations about NATO returning to Cold War levels of consistent
readiness and effectiveness. A more realistic vision for the alliance would be to treat it as a framework
for the most capable and threat-aware members to form coalitions of the willing. These groupings
already exist: The British-led Joint Expeditionary Force, for example, is a 10-country framework for
military cooperation, chiefly aimed at enabling very rapid deployments to the Nordic-Baltic region in the
event of a crisis. France has a similar venture, the European Intervention Initiative. The five Nordic states
have their own military club, called the Nordic Defence Cooperation, while Poland has close bilateral ties
with Lithuania. A similar network of bilateral and multilateral ties would greatly strengthen the alliance’s
floundering presence in the Black Sea and other regions, including North Africa and the Eastern
Mediterranean. These groupings would not supplant NATO but improve action and interoperability on
top of the alliance’s established structures and mechanisms. The difficult and underlying question here
is the role of the United States. Europe is, in theory, big and rich enough to manage its own defense.
But its persistent political weakness prevents that. The paradox is that only U.S. involvement makes
NATO credible—yet overdependence on the United States also undermines the alliance’s credibility,
while stoking resentment in France and elsewhere. The task for Washington is to encourage European
allies to shoulder more of the burden and start thinking strategically again, even as it retains the
superpower involvement that gives the alliance its decisive military edge. That is entirely doable. But
don’t expect it to happen in Madrid—or anytime soon.
s closest to the raging war in Ukraine.
% defense spending inadequate, need a new strategic concept; Russia is a threat to
Europe
McInnis & Fatah, 2-10, 22, Kathleen J. McInnis is a senior fellow in the International Security Program
and the director of the Smart Women, Smart Power Initiative at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies; Daniel Fata is a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for Europe and
NATO in the George W. Bush administration. He is currently a nonresident senior advisor at the Center
for Strategic and International Studies, 2 Percent Defense Spending Is a Bad Target for NATO,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/06/10/2-percent-defense-spending-nato-budget-bad-target/
It’s like clockwork: As NATO’s late June summit in Madrid approaches, the debate over whether allies
spend too little on defense grows louder. NATO defense ministers pledged in 2006 to spend at least 2
percent of their nation’s gross domestic product on their defense annually. Today that’s become a
totemic object for the alliance—especially for Americans who insist that others are spending too little.
There is a certain truth in that, but there are much more pressing concerns for NATO than tracking this
figure. Leaders should be asking harder questions about how the money is being spent and how the
security burden can be shared, not obsessing about who’s giving their fair share.
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The pledge was reaffirmed in 2014 at NATO’s Wales summit by alliance leaders, because NATO states
were collectively failing to meet the 2006 commitment, thanks to decades of chronic underinvestment
by European states on their militaries, which, unsurprisingly, led to significant capability gaps in their
ability to conduct military operations. This, in turn, meant that the United States, which spends more
than 3 percent annually, was absorbing the lion’s share of the costs associated with securing Europe. As
the argument went in 2014, the United States would be much more amenable to continuing its
investment in trans-Atlantic security if NATO nations would just spend at least 2 percent of their GDP on
defense.
Getting all NATO heads of state to agree to the 2 percent minimum target was a laudable
achievement—and one that might not have happened if Russia hadn’t invaded Ukraine earlier that year.
But the 2 percent target has proved to be both operationally insufficient and strategically
counterproductive. Ultimately, without some serious adjustments to the strategic debates, a focus on
the 2 percent minimum target only severely hurts NATO’s relevance—and public support for the
alliance.
The 2 percent minimum target was largely intended as a political mechanism—for example, to help
defense ministries fend off budget cuts imposed by finance ministers. But 2 percent is an input rather
than an output metric. In other words, how that 2 percent is spent is considerably more important
than whether countries are spending enough. Although there’s a hearty debate about how much of
Russia’s ham-handed approach to its war against Ukraine is due to technological weakness versus
Russian strategic incompetence, there is no question that some defense investments need to be
rethought, including those needed for stronger territorial defense—including maritime and airspace
defense—of a soon-to-expanded northeastern NATO border.
With further Russian aggression likely and Afghanistan in the rearview mirror, there’s going to be a
new emphasis on territorial defense and deterrence. That’s more people-heavy than expeditionary
operations, and as any comptroller will tell you, people are surprisingly expensive. Yes, a number of
European countries—including Germany—have decided to increase their defense spending in the wake
of Ukraine, but how will those monies be used?
At the strategic level, the 2 percent minimum target has become even more problematic. Alliances are
frameworks for communication and cooperation among states that extend much more deeply and
broadly than just security and defense; NATO’s benefits for the United States go a long way beyond
military cooperation. Unfortunately, the 2 percent minimum target reframes the conversation about
security burden-sharing into one about transactional cost-sharing. But the value of alliances cannot be
measured in terms of dollars and euros.
The danger of overemphasizing a minimum figure that European partners may not be comfortable with
meeting is that it contributes to the impression the United States is somehow being cheated. Is it any
wonder that after years of hammering Europe about the 2 percent minimum target that the previous
U.S. president decided that his country was getting an unfair deal—and reportedly almost pulled the
United States out of NATO? Support for NATO may be strong among the traditional foreign-policy
establishment, but in a time of rapidly shifting U.S. domestic politics, it’s also potentially fragile.
Nor does the 2 percent minimum account for the nonmilitary dimensions of contemporary security
needs. Economic and political dynamics are critically important to a nation’s security—and from the
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perspective of the public in NATO states are perhaps even more important than military capabilities.
European states have been at the forefront of coping with challenges such as disinformation and
cyberwarfare—capacities and experience that are vital but not fully reflected in military budgets.
This is, arguably, why NATO’s Article 2 exists: to underscore that economic and political policies must
reinforce military alliance commitments. As the Chinese tech giant Huawei’s investments in NATO
countries demonstrate, failure to consider the security dimensions of commercial investments can have
an adverse impact on the alliance. The conversation on burden-sharing must better account for the
broader trade-offs and risks associated with choosing alliance security over commercial profitability.
Those costs of NATO commitment in Europe are rarely visible in Washington discussions.
When NATO governments meet in Madrid, they will endorse an updated “Strategic Concept,” a vision
document for how the alliance views—and should prepare for—the current and emerging strategic
environment. Yet in order to turn that concept into a meaningful and sustainable political reality, the
alliance must then have a tough but necessary conversation on how to recalibrate burden-sharing—and
embed that new understanding in any implementing guidance it develops for the Strategic Concept.
Strategic and operational lessons resulting from the war in Ukraine need to inform the conversation
about sharing security responsibilities—and allies may find out in the process that 2 percent is a
necessary minimum but not a sufficient overall allocation of resources to meet the demands of
tomorrow’s warfare. But ultimately, if the rhetorical 2 percent minimum drumbeat continues, NATO is in
very real danger of cutting off its nose to spite its face.
This is no theoretical matter; the current high levels of public support for NATO might flag as the war in
Ukraine continues and political will across the public in NATO states begins to diverge. Russia will
remain a threat to the alliance’s easternmost neighbors regardless of when the war in Ukraine is
resolved—not to mention the myriad other security challenges that NATO is tasked with addressing. To
deter Russia and to defend Europe, NATO needs to have real strategic discussions about how to
operate and modernize. Focusing only on levels of dollars and euros spent misses the bigger target. No
NATO nation—and particularly not the United States—can afford for that to happen.
NATO expansion hasn’t caused conflict – US hegemonic promotion is peaceful and
sustainable
Brands 22 – Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global
Affairs at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the
Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. (Hal, 15 March, 2022, "Putin’s Biggest Lie: Blaming
NATO for His War," https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3532081/hal-brands/putin%E2%80%99sbiggest-lie-blaming-nato-his-war)//KH
The great NATO enlargement debate never ends. In the 1990s, US officials and academics argued about whether pushing the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization into Eastern Europe was likely to sustain the post-Cold War peace or prematurely end it. More recently, critics have
charged that Russia’s war in Ukraine is a natural response to the aggressive expansion of America’s most powerful alliance.
Now Russian officials, and even President Vladimir Putin himself, have echoed — and sometimes directly cited — American scholars such as
political scientist John Mearsheimer, who argues that the current crisis “is the West’s fault.”
The “blame NATO” argument tells a story of hubris, arrogance and tragedy. It holds that there was a
golden chance for lasting peace in Europe, but the US threw it all away. Rather than conciliating a defeated rival,
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Washington repeatedly humiliated it by expanding a vast military alliance up to Russia’s borders and even into the former Soviet Union. This
pursuit of American hegemony in a liberal-democratic guise eventually provoked a violent rebuke.
In this telling, Putin’s wars against Georgia and Ukraine are just the natural response of one great power whose vital interests are being
heedlessly threatened by another.
The argument isn’t wholly wrong. Putin’s
wars are indeed meant, in part, to push Western influence back from
Russia’s frontiers. But the idea that NATO expansion is the root of today’s problems is morally and
geopolitically bizarre.
Far from being a historic blunder, NATO expansion was one of the great American successes of the post-Cold War era. Far from being the act of
a domineering superpower, it was part of a long tradition of vulnerable states begging to join America’s liberal empire. And far from posing a
mortal threat to Moscow, NATO enlargement actually provided Russia with far greater security than it could have provided itself.
NATO was founded in 1949 with 12 members in Western Europe and North America. It gradually added additional states — Turkey, Greece,
West Germany, Spain — over the course of the Cold War. But the big bang of enlargement came once the superpower conflict ended. NATO
incorporated the former East Germany into the alliance in 1990; it then added three Eastern European countries (Poland, Hungary, the Czech
Republic) in 1999; then seven more, including the Baltic states, in 2004.
To understand why NATO grew so rapidly, we have to remember something that nearly everyone has now forgotten: There was no guarantee
that Europe would be mostly stable, peaceful and democratic after the Cold War. In fact, many of the analysts who now view NATO expansion
as a catastrophe once warned that a post-Cold War Europe could become a violent hellscape.
It wasn’t an outlandish scenario. A reunified Germany might once again try to dominate its neighbors; the old enmity between Moscow and
Berlin could reignite. The collapse of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe could liberate those states to pursue long-suppressed territorial claims
and nationalist agendas. Ethnic tensions and nuclear proliferation might explode as the Cold War order crumbled.
If the US pulled back once the Soviet threat was gone, there would be no extra-European superpower to
put out fires on a continent with lots of geopolitical kindling. “The prospect of major crises, even wars, in Europe is likely
to increase dramatically,” Mearsheimer predicted in 1990.
NATO enlargement was the logical answer to these fears. Expansion was a way of binding a reunified
Germany to the West and surrounding it with democratic allies. Joining NATO required new members to lay aside any
revanchist designs, while allowing them to pursue economic and political reforms rather than investing heavily in military capabilities to defend
their newly won autonomy.
NATO’s move to the east also ensured that Poland and other states that easily could have built nuclear weapons didn’t need to, because they
had American protection. Most important, enlargement kept the US firmly planted in Europe, by preventing the centerpiece of the transatlantic
relationship from becoming obsolete.
No other initiative could have accomplished these objectives. Partnership for Peace — a series of loose security cooperation agreements with
former Soviet-bloc states — didn’t offer the ironclad guarantees that came with NATO membership. (If you want to understand the difference
between “security partner” and “NATO ally,” just look at what is happening today to Ukraine, one of the former.)
The idea of creating a pan-European security architecture (one that included Russia) had the same defect; plus, it would have given Moscow
veto power over the security arrangements of the countries the Soviet Union had so recently dominated.
Only American power and promises could provide stability in Europe, and NATO was the continent’s
critical link to the US. Since 1949, Washington had tamped down rivalries between old enemies such as
France and Germany, while also protecting them from external threats. After 1991, NATO expansion took this zone of
peace, prosperity and cooperation that had emerged in Western Europe and moved it into Eastern Europe as well.
The revolutionary nature of this achievement seemed obvious not so long ago. “Why
has Europe been so peaceful since
1989?” Mearsheimer asked in 2010. The answer, he acknowledged, was because “America has
continued to serve as Europe’s pacifier,” protecting the continent from dangers within and without.
Today, of course, the critics don’t buy this account. They argue that NATO expansion represented crude power politics, as the US exploited the
Soviet collapse to engorge its own empire. What resulted, pundits such as Thomas Friedman contend, was a sort of Weimar Russia — a country
whose dignity was affronted, security imperiled and democracy undermined by a harsh, humiliating peace.
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There is a kernel of truth here, too. Once Russian democracy began to wobble in 1993-94, officials in the Bill Clinton administration saw NATO
expansion — in part — as a way of preventing a potentially resurgent, aggressive Russia from rebuilding the Soviet sphere of influence. Russian
leaders of all stripes griped about NATO expansion from the early 1990s onward, warning that it could jeopardize the peace of the continent.
In hindsight, NATO expansion was one of several issues — including disputes over the Balkans and the collapse of the Russian economy in the
late 1990s — that gradually soured Russia’s relationship with the West. Yet this story omits three vital facts.
First, all policies
have costs. The price of NATO expansion was a certain alienation of Russian elites —
although we often forget that Clinton softened the blow by continually courting Russian President Boris
Yeltsin, bringing Russia into elite Western institutions such as the Group of Seven, and making Moscow a partner in the intervention in
Bosnia in 1995-96. Yet the cost of not expanding NATO might have been forfeiting much of the stability that initiative provided. Trade-offs
are inevitable in foreign policy: There was no magic middle path that would have provided all the
benefits with none of the costs.
Second,
if NATO expansion was a manifestation of American empire, it was a remarkably benign and
consensual form of empire. When Clinton decided to pursue enlargement, he did so at the urging of the
Poles, Czechs and Hungarians. The Baltic countries and others were soon banging at the door. The states of Eastern Europe and the
former Soviet Union were desperate to join America’s sphere of influence, because they were desperate to leave Moscow’s.
This, too, was part of an older pattern: The US
has often extended its influence by “invitation” rather than
imposition. The creation of NATO in 1949 was mostly a European idea: Countries that were terrified of Moscow
sought protection from Washington. One reason Putin’s wars to keep countries from escaping Moscow’s empire are so abhorrent to Americans
is that the US empire has trouble keeping members out.
Putin may not see it that way. All that matters to him is that the mightiest peacetime alliance in history has crept closer to Russian soil. But here
a third fact becomes relevant: Russia was one of the biggest beneficiaries of NATO’s move east.
Open terrain has often left Russia vulnerable to invasion and instability emanating from Europe. Napoleonic France, Imperial Germany and Nazi
Germany all swept through Eastern Europe to wreak havoc on Russian or Soviet territory. This is one reason why the great strategist George
Kennan opposed NATO expansion — because it would surely re-activate this fear of encroachment from the west.
Yet this
was a red herring, because NATO posed no military threat. The alliance committed, in 1997, not
to permanently station foreign troops in Eastern Europe. After the Cold War, America steadily withdrew most of its troops
and all of its heavy armor from the continent. US allies engaged in a veritable race to disarm.
The prospect that NATO could invade Russia, even had it wanted to, was laughable. What the alliance could do was tame the perils that might
otherwise have menaced the Russian state.
Germany could hardly threaten Russia: It was nestled snugly into an alliance that also served as a strategic straitjacket. NATO, Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev had candidly said in 1990, could “play a containing role” vis-à-vis Berlin. Moscow didn’t have to worry about a nuclear
Poland — Warsaw didn’t need nukes because it had the protection of the United States. Aside from the Balkan wars of the 1990s, Eastern
Europe was comparatively free of the geopolitical intrigues and military quarrels that might have made Russia jumpy.
NATO expansion hadn’t just alleviated Europe’s security problems; it had protected Russia’s vital interests as well. Moscow might have lost an
empire, but it had gained remarkable safety from external attack.
Part of the answer is that NATO
expansion wasn’t really the problem, in the sense that Russia didn’t need that
pretext to seek renewed hegemony in its near-abroad. The Soviet Union, and the Russian empire before it, had
traditionally sought to control countries along their frontiers and used brutal means to do it. To say that NATO expansion caused Russian
belligerence is thus to
make an extremely dubious assertion: that absent NATO expansion, Moscow would
have been a satisfied, status quo power.
And this is exactly why a bigger NATO has posed a real problem for Putin. After all, safety
from external attack isn’t the only
thing that states and rulers want. They want glory, greatness and the privileges of empire. For 20 years,
Putin has been publicly lusting after the sphere of influence that the Soviet Union once enjoyed. NATO
expansion stood athwart that ambition, by giving Moscow’s former vassals the ability to resist its pressure.
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NATO also threatened a certain type of Russian government — an autocracy that was never secure in its
own rule. A democratic Russia wouldn’t so much have minded being neighbors with Western-leaning democracies, because political liberty
in those countries wouldn’t have threatened to set a subversive example for anti-Putin Russians.
Yet, as Russia became more autocratic in the early 2000s, and as Putin’s popularity declined with the Russian economy after 2008, the
imperative of preventing ideological spillover from a US-backed democratic community loomed large.
So Putin began pushing back against NATO’s eastward march. In 2008, he invaded Georgia, a country that was moving — too slowly for its own
safety — toward the West. Since 2014, he has been waging war against Ukraine, in hopes of rebuilding the Russian empire and halting Kiev’s
westward drift. America’s vision of Europe has now run into Putin’s program of violent coercion.
To be sure, US officials made mistakes along the way. Because Russia was prostrate, militarily and economically, during the 1990s, Washington
acquired a bad habit of issuing security guarantees without really considering how it would fulfill them in a crisis. The Pentagon has thus been
scrambling, since 2014, to devise a credible defense of NATO’s eastern flank.
As Russia regained its strength,
US officials also failed to grasp the danger of provoking Putin without adequately
deterring him. When, in 2008, NATO declined to endorse membership for Georgia and Ukraine but
issued a vague statement saying that they would someday join the alliance, it created the worst of all worlds —
giving Putin both the pretext and the time to pre-empt future expansion by tearing those two countries apart.
Yet there
is a curious morality in accounts that blame the West, which sought to protect vulnerable states
in Eastern Europe, for the current carnage, rather than blaming Putin, who has worked to dismember
and intimidate those countries. It is sloppy thinking to tally up the costs of NATO expansion without considering the historic
achievements of a policy that served American, European and even certain Russian interests remarkably well.
And if nothing else, NATO
expansion pushed the dividing line between Moscow and the democratic world to
the east after one Cold War — a factor of great significance now that a second cold war is underway.
The legacy
of NATO expansion isn’t simply a matter of historical interest. Americans’ understanding of the
past has always influenced their view of what policies to pursue in the future. During the 1920s and 1930s, the
widespread, if inaccurate, belief that America had entered World War I to serve the interests of banks and arms manufacturers had a paralyzing
effect on US policy amid the totalitarian aggression that set off World War II.
Today, the US faces a long, nasty struggle to contain Putin’s imperial project and protect an endangered world order. Introspection is an
admirable quality, but the last thing America needs is another bout of self-flagellation rooted in another misapprehension of the past.
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Russia/China Combined
Losing the global strategic competition results in great power nuclear war
Nader Elhefnawy 22, Lecturer at the University of Miami, widely published on international and space
issues, holds a Ph.D in Literature from the University of Miami, and a B.A. in International Relations from
Florida International University, “The Waning of Unipolarity in the Military Sphere: A Note,” 4056097,
03/12/2022, Social Science Research Network, doi:10.2139/ssrn.4056097
If one relies on military power as the basis for such judgments then it may seem that as
of the start of the 2020s unipolarity
continues to endure. Even limiting the estimate to Defense Department appropriations (which leave out vast expenditures on related
matters such as intelligence or the Veteran's Administration) the United States by itself accounts for some two-fifths of global defense
spending, and twice as much as the next three largest powers (Russia, China and India) combined, with the weight of that expenditure telling
powerfully. 2 The
U.S. has no peer, never mind equal, in regard to its global military "footprint," and its capacity
to conduct large-scale operations far from home.3 The fact is strongly connected with America's position
with regard to that traditional arena of strength for "hegemonic" powers, naval might, where its advantage is
overwhelming, especially if one goes by tonnage rather than unit numbers.4 As of 2020 the major combatants of the U.S. Navy amount to some
2.8 million tons of ship, at least three times as much as the second biggest (Russia) and four times as much as the third biggest (China) navies,
and more than the next four navies combined (the Chinese, Russian, Japanese and British navies massing perhaps 2.3 million tons together), an
extraordinary level of maritime preponderance further affirmed when one considers the "capital ships" of the day, namely aircraft carriers. 5
Simply "ship-counting" the U.S. Navy's eleven battle carriers outnumber the combined fixed wing-aircraft carrying vessels of the four other
navies (which have just seven such vessels between them), with the American edge again still greater in tonnage terms (with the U.S.' over 1.1
million tons of carrier against the 400,000 tons or so of the other countries' seven carriers), and this also going for the numbers of aircraft
embarked (with U.S. carriers individually deploying fifty or more fixed-wing combat aircraft against rarely more than thirty on the other nations'
ships). The disparity actually widens rather than shrinks when one counts in vessels limited to Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) aircraft and
helicopters, as of the U.S. Navy's larger amphibious assault ships nine are capable of operating a score of F-35 fighters each—making them
individually equal to most other nations' full-fledged carriers (and comprising as they do another 370,000 tons more of such vessel, collectively
equal to the combined carriers of the four other navies discussed here).
However, formidable as this position appears it is also undeniable that there have been significant changes in the
distribution of military power in the world since the 1990s. That period, which saw the expansion of NATO from the Clinton
era onwards, and the George W. Bush administration's notorious rhetoric on Taiwan (casting aside two decades of deliberate ambiguity on
America's "red line" in the conflict he blurted out that the U.S. would do "Whatever it took to help Taiwan defend herself"), reflected the
perception of a world where on virtually any issue of significance to U.S. interests the prospect of effective military opposition did not exist.6 As
demonstrated by even a slight attentiveness to the events of the twenty-first century three changes in
the world's economic,
technological and political life this past generation have rendered the notion of such a situation obsolete.
1. The Redistribution of Economic Power in the World
It is conventional to construe the Soviet collapse's significance in ideological terms—as marking the end of the ideological contest between American/Western liberal capitalism and
Soviet/"Eastern" Communism, and with it the presumed reason for military competition between America/the West and the nations which had comprised the Soviet bloc. Yet the principal
reason that the ideological contest was also a military contest was that the Soviet Union was, from the end of World War II to perhaps the end of the Cold War, the possessor of the world's
second largest economy, disposing of half or more the output of the United States, with all that implied for its capacity to generate military force.7 And the reason that the military rivalry
ceased, was that the Soviet Union's breakup saw constituent republics containing half the country's economic base establish themselves as sovereign states, while the half of the economy that
remained under Moscow's control was disrupted by the severing of so many critical links, and the astonishing blend of staggering corruption and appalling blundering that characterized its
reforms—in the 1990s leaving Moscow in control of an economy perhaps a quarter as big as what it controlled in the late 1980s. Certainly those who thought least of the Soviet system were
often optimistic about the consequences of reform, but all the same, an economically modernized and prosperous Russia remained far off, while even a prosperous Russia alone had its limits
as a rival.
Of course, the Soviet collapse still left the other "Communist" military giant, China, with its system officially unchanged and the political factor which drove it into alliance with the West gone.
Indeed, even before the Soviet Union's dissolution the country concluded with China a treaty settling their long-running border conflict (the 1991 Sino-Soviet Border Agreement), relieving the
military pressure on the country from the north and northwest, while diminishing the prospect of Soviet/Russian support to other states with which China had disputes, notably Cold War-era
Soviet clients India and Vietnam. Meanwhile Beijing's conflict with Taipei, which put it on the opposite side of the U.S. on the issue of Taiwan's political status, remained unresolved, all as the
country's economy, and military, potential, grew briskly. Still, that growth was from rather a small base, which, even with the country's strategic position improved in many ways, for the time
being made China's competing militarily with the West appear as remote as Russia's doing so.
A comparison of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) figures makes the disparity between American power, and Russian and Chinese power, quite clear. Measured in current dollars the U.S.
economy in 1993 was fifteen times as big as that of Russia or China, and almost eight times as big as their two economies combined. That margin was shrinking, but it was unclear how quickly
it would do so, and how long it would continue to do so, with many analysts predicting that Russia and China would remain non-factors in this sense. This was especially the case with Russia as
its performance continued to disappoint in the '90s, with, in the wake of the default on its debt marking the low point of the country's economic fortunes, Russia's Gross Domestic Product only
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one-forty-ninth that of the U.S.. 8 The assessment of China's performance and prospects tended to be more positive, but even some self-declared optimists about China's course suspected the
country's recent growth and future prospects were overstated, with Lester Thurow envisioning China not being a major player in the world economy "in the first half of the twenty-first
century. 9 ) The most pessimistic predictions had those countries collapsing or even breaking up outright.10
Of course, if many discounted the Russians and Chinese as military rivals for the time being there were those who looked to the other industrialized nations as at least having the material
potential to become more consequential rivals. Since the World War II era America's growth had been bested by the European nations and Japan, with this continuing after their years of
rebuilding and industrial "catch-up" in the 1950s and 1960s, through the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, in the estimate of many in the late 1980s and early 1990s Japan's economy was already
closer to overtaking the U.S. as the world's largest than the Soviets had ever been; while in the early 1990s a vigorous reunited Germany, with the larger European bloc it was playing an
important role in organizing, was potentially even more formidable; all as neomercantilist thinking was becoming fashionable. 11 Still, any militarization of the economic competition, generally
thought remote, came to seem still more so as the fashion for neomercantilist thought waned after 1995; as Europe showed few signs of coalescing as a political actor capable of bringing its
collective economic strength to bear; and the conventional wisdom that the Japanese, German and more general European economies had gone from being more dynamic than America's to
being stagnant just as America had its most impressive boom in a generation. 12 Achieving a far superior real growth rate in the vicinity of 4 percent a year (and 3 percent in per capita
terms)—a rate of expansion roughly twice as fast as Germany's and four times as fast as that of the so recently formidable Japanese—the makers of the conventional wisdom regarded this not
as some anomaly but as evidence that a "New Economy" as revolutionary as Fordism had been in its day was at hand, not least in the boom's lasting for decades to come. 13
In short, Russian and Chinese poverty (or even Russian and Chinese disintegration), European disorganization, Japanese and European stagnation and American boom created a situation of
unique American economic and military strength such as some compared to the post-World War II period, in conditions even more congenial for the absence of ideological-military rivalry
challenging the U.S. or splitting the global system. Moreover, they envisioned some combination of these factors continuing to spell the absence of another entity of comparable economic
weight capable of potentially funding its military forces at a comparable level, with an extrapolation from the situation at the time usefully making explicit what was implicit in the vague
notions so many observers held—specifically, what would have happened had the U.S. sustained its 1996-2000 economic growth rate, and China had not collapsed, or stagnated, but simply, in
line with a moderately optimistic view, grown in the slower manner that Thurow anticipated.14 As of 2019 U.S. GDP (and thus, also its share of Gross World Product) would still have been five
times as big as China's (some $30 trillion to China's $6 trillion, as measured in constant 2015 dollars), a very modest erosion of the disparity that still left the U.S. with a vast advantage.
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
The reality was soon to prove otherwise in that respect, along with a great many others, with the illusions of late '90s-style boom lasting for a generation or more the first to go. The New
Economy boom did not outlast the decade, while the productivity gains, which fell well short of those Fordism yielded even at its height, withered away after the first years of the century. Thus
did America's per capita growth in the early '00s prove weaker than the German growth of the late '90s at which American commentators had so recently sneered (1.6 versus 1.75 percent),
and then after 2008 fall below a truly anemic 1 percent a year, a performance Germany, and Europe altogether, rather managed to better. Meanwhile Japan, actually doing better in the early
2000s than it had in the late '90s (its growth rate actually rose from 0.8 percent in the late '90s to 1.1 percent after the turn of the century), ran much closer behind the U.S., and has continued
to do so (even after the Great Recession its twenty-first century norm remaining better than three-fifths what the U.S. was managing, compared with just a quarter in 1996-2000).
These improved performances did not prevent the German, European and Japanese shares of Gross World Product from continuing to recede (if their per capita growth rate their much slower
population growth meant "fewer capitas"). 16 However, it did demonstrate the illusory nature of the expectations of the U.S. surging far ahead of the others, all as America ended up at least a
third poorer than it would have been had it sustained those late '90s growth rates. 17
[TABLE 1 OMITTED]
[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]
[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]
[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]
Meanwhile Russia's economy recovered on the strength of the commodity price boom of the twenty-first century (to the point that in 2012-2013 Russian GDP had gone from being one-fortyninth to one-seventh that of the U.S.), while China's growth continued with surprising strength and steadiness. These trends together left China not with a GDP two-tenths the U.S. level, but
with a GDP more than three times that big—equal to seven-tenths of the American figure as measured by that yardstick (a GDP not of $6 trillion against a U.S. level of $30 trillion, but $14
trillion against America's $20 trillion), and a commensurately larger share of Gross World Product (roughly 17 against 24 percent of the total). 23 In the process the U.S. economy went from
being five times as big as China's to scarcely forty percent larger, a drastic narrowing of the margin against what it had been a generation earlier, and in comparison with what many of those
concerned for the balance expected.
[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]
[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]
[FIGURE 7 OMITTED]
Moreover, both those other nations' armed forces quickly reflected the fact. Russian economic recovery was quickly followed by Russian military recovery, and China's continued economic
growth permitted the modernization of its military establishment, all in a context where, again, the U.S. economy was a third smaller than it might have been had the more optimistic scenario
unfolded. Additionally, where the balance of military capability is concerned one may add that the immense cost of U.S. military action in the Middle East, which one estimate puts at $8 trillion
in current dollars—the equivalent of ten years of defense spending at today's far from historically low level—was simply not in the calculations of the theorists of unipolarity, nor the alteration
of priorities that went with that commitment of resources (evident in, for instance, the early halt of F-22 production). 27 Especially coming on top of the country's disappointing economic
performance it hampered concern for and expenditure on conventional war-fighting capability, even as American defense spending surged. 28
2. The End of the U.S. Monopoly on Critical Military Capabilities (and Significant Military Innovation)
As might be expected given the shift in economic power, and unanticipated U.S. expenditures with their implications for the U.S.' formation of
military power itself, the options open
to other states changed not only quantitatively but qualitatively, as can be
was not simply the country's possessing
vast forces, or its having a nuclear arsenal. In terms of raw numbers China's forces outmassed even those
of the Soviets in important respects (e.g. ground troops), while the country was also a nuclear power from 1964 on. Rather two other
seen when one considers what made an actor like the Soviet Union a military superpower. It
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traits, which China did not possess, because it did not have the economic means to possess them, were also important. The first was the
Soviets' ability to broadly match the U.S. technologically—to, if the U.S. fielded a new type of weapon, at the very least produce something
more or less comparable, in operationally meaningful quantity, not too much later; while if the Soviets tended to run behind the United States
there were times when they were on par or even ahead.29 The second was those large, nuclear-backed, modern forces having a worldwide
reach. This was facilitated in part by the Soviet Union's combination of territorial vastness with a central location in Eurasia, extending its
sovereign territory from the Baltic to the Bering Strait, from the Arctic to the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent, with this reinforced by
the acquisition of allies in Eastern Europe extending its security frontier westward; and the massive investment in strategic weaponry of
worldwide reach (missiles, bombers) that established a rough parity in that area between the Soviet Union and the United States. However, the
basis for such a reach was importantly rounded out by the Soviets' development of a "blue-water" navy and acquisition of overseas bases from
Lourdes, Cuba to Vietnam's Cam Ranh Bay. Of course, even at its peak the Soviets' military footprint outside the perimeter of the Warsaw Pact
alliance was slight and precarious in comparison with that of the U.S., but it was still a global presence in a way no other nation had been after
the drastic contraction of the British and French empires in the 1960s. 30
Both of those capacities were early casualties of the Soviet Union's collapse. With its drastically shrunken economy post-Soviet Russia proved to have a very difficult time keeping even a much-reduced military
establishment functional, never mind up-to-date. Particularly conspicuous were its weaknesses in technical areas where the U.S. had demonstrated an advanced capability in the 1991 Gulf War on which it
rapidly improved in subsequent campaigns in Iraq and the Balkans, like the use of stealth aircraft, and a use of precision-guided munitions unprecedented in scale and sophistication (including as it did the
dropping of thousands of "smart bombs" and launch of hundreds of sea- and air-launched land-attack cruise missiles). 31 Of course, there were honest doubts about the efficacy and significance of many of
these technologies. (Just how stealthy were those stealth aircraft in actuality? How often did precision-guided munitions actually hit their targets under actual combat conditions? Etc.) However, what matters
is that it was not intellectual skepticism about the technology but the lack of the material resources for acquiring and assimilating that technology that determined the final outcome. That lack was also
reflected in how post-Soviet Russia evacuated virtually all its forces abroad from beyond the perimeter of the old Warsaw Pact, and recalled its once globally present navy to its home ports, from which that
navy was little seen leaving as it "rusted away."
In the meantime it was the case that no other actor displayed the combination of economic wherewithal and political will to generate the technologies, or the global presence, the Soviets had at the height of
their former. Where the former was concerned the next generation of fighter aircraft was a particularly notable case. Where the U.S. continued (albeit a with less urgency, and an early decision to terminate) its
first fifth-generation fighter program, bringing nearly two hundred F-22 jets into service, Russia and China were simply unable to match the plane even on paper during its production run, which ended as the
U.S. proceeded with a second, complementary program of the type (the F-35), and publicly began to develop the generation of fighters beyond it, the debut of which was expected in the 2025-2030 time frame.
32
Since that time, however, the U.S. monopoly on such capabilities has ceased to exist. This is most obviously the case with respect to stealth tactical combat aircraft, satellite-guided aerial bombs, and air- and
sea-launched long-range land-attack cruise missiles, all of which systems other countries increasingly deploy, with Russia making its own models of them operational (Sukhoi-57 fighters, aerial munitions guided
by its own GLONASS satellite network, cruise missiles like the Kalibr). China's position has been comparable, exemplified by its deployment of its J-20 stealth fighters in quantity.
Moreover, it has again been the case that Russia, and China, appear
to be competing in the development and
deployment not only of those systems the U.S. has pioneered, but new types it has not. Even setting
aside strategic systems about which much is claimed but little truly known (like the Poseidon "torpedo"), Russia boasts the
most radical battle tank design seen in decades, the T-14 Armata.33 Meanwhile both Russia and China are
supposed to have deployed revolutionary Anti-Ship Ballistic Missiles (ASBMs), with Russia possessing the airborne Kh-47
"Kinzhal," and China operating a land-based 3,000-mile range missile.
American analysts tend to disparage many of the systems as merely illusory propaganda objects created for show rather than
mass production and operational use (as with the T-14), or where they have been put into such production and deployed, of inferior quality (as
with the J-20). 34 Yet the fact remains that they do constitute a broadly comparable type of weapon, with even skeptics
generally regarding the supposedly cruder Russian and Chinese fifth-generation fighters as more capable than the older systems those
countries deploy, and thus narrowing the technical gap, while some of the more novel systems hold out the potential of neutralizing important
American capabilities (with the ASBMs advertised as capable of defeating the air defenses of American carrier groups). 35
The same can be said of both nations' capacities for expeditionary operations. Russia's mission in Syria (2015) has
been a clear demonstration of such a capacity—the more in as it deployed its newer systems (the stealth fighters, the cruise missiles, the
satellite guided bombs) in that operation.36 Meanwhile China, while yet to undertake a comparable action, has procured many of the requisite
systems, like aircraft carriers, amphibious assault ships, and strategic airlift; a modernized strategic bomber force (in its updated H-6s); and
even its first overseas base in Djibouti, all the way on the far side of the Indian Ocean.
All of this is the more consequential as the
U.S. has not acquired new capabilities of the kind that would have put it a
generation ahead. This was in part because of that aforementioned combination of slow economic growth with the massive drain on its
resources of the wars it has fought for the past two decades. However, it is also because of what has been an important factor in that slow
growth, the slowness of technological advance, especially as compared with earlier (in hindsight, clearly inflated) expectations.37 Certainly the
case with such fields as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, robotics and materials science, it has also been the case in areas such as directedenergy weaponry, hypersonic propulsion, and space launch capability, with the result that systems which had been slated to enter service
decades ago, like the Space-Based Laser intended for 2012, still sounding science-fictional in 2022. 38 The same goes for the conceptions of the
sixth-generation fighter current when the F-22's production run ended, with the predictions regarding the qualities of the anticipated craft
consistently growing more conservative even as the date of their entry into service has been deferred, such that, besides coming along perhaps
a decade later than earlier promised (e.g. 2040), it is less and less clear what technologies will actually distinguish them from the preceding
generation of fighter aircraft after all that delay. 39 (Indeed, the author has had the impression that the sixth-generation fighter programs will
yield not much more than vaguely improved fifth-generation planes.)
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3. The Increased Willingness of Other Great Powers to Defend Their Perceived Interests Militarily
During the Cold War the Soviet Union's possession of the economic means to fund technologically competitive and globally operative armed forces was reflected in a readiness to use those forces, even in
actions quite far from home—as with the Soviet Union's interventions in the Horn of Africa in the 1970s. This, too, ended with the Soviet collapse—and indeed prior to the event, with the political crises of the
1989-1991 period making just how clearly this was the case. Before the revolutions that swept away a succession of Soviet client governments across Eastern Europe the Soviet government had declared that it
would not use force to keep them in power, and then abided by that promise, standing back even as the particularly important satellite of East Germany was laid open to reabsorption by a heavily armed West
Germany in good standing as a member of the NATO alliance. The last, long perceived as a particularly intolerable outcome from the Soviet Union, would have been inconceivable at the Cold War's height, but
it was exactly what happened.
No less dramatic—indeed, in important respects more so—was the Soviets' posture during the 1990-1991 Gulf crisis and its aftermath. Iraq's government had been established in a coup against a Soviet-backed
regime, and its relations with the Soviet Union had always been shifting and complex, but it could still be counted as an important Soviet client in a region as much the Soviets' "backyard" as the Caribbean was
that of the United States, and the more strategically sensitive because it held the balance of the world oil market so enormously important not only to the global balance of power, but the health of a Soviet
economy so short on other foreign exchange-earning exports that the drop in oil prices after the mid-1980s has often been cited as increasing the pressure on the country's system. That the Soviets would not
only have stood apart from Iraq, but given their sanction at the United Nations to an American-led assemblage of military power intended to destroy the armed forces of that country, and in the process shift
the regional balance of power in favor of the U.S. and its allies as the U.S. itself proceeded to establish a massively expanded American military presence in the region on a permanent basis, would have been at
least as inconceivable at the Cold War's height. Yet that too was exactly what happened.
Moreover, Russia continued to refrain from military action even when the changing situation saw Russia became openly opposed to the thrust of American policy, with Russia unable to act militarily not only
against continued American-led action against Iraq, or its military intervention in the Balkans, but also against NATO's expansion to encompass the former Warsaw Pact (with, beyond German reunification
immediately bringing East Germany into NATO, all the alliance's other non-Soviet members joining in 1999-2004), and even ex-Soviet republics touching Russia's own borders (starting with the Baltic republics
of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in the same 2004 round that brought in Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia). 40 This was even more the case with a China that also opposed those actions, but, apart from having its
interests less directly at stake and being more distant physically from the relevant regions, was even less well-equipped to offer any sort of opposition.
However, Russia's war
against Georgia in 2008, and still more its operations in Ukraine from 2014 on, have
constituted exactly such military opposition within the European region. Meanwhile, where in 2003 Russia limited its
opposition to the U.S. intervention in Iraq to diplomatic activity, in 2015 it deployed combat forces to Syria on a scale that contributed
significantly to preserving the country's ruling government in the face of significant internal and external challenge that included U.S. support
for a rebellion inside the country, and even U.S. forces on the ground within Syria's borders. At
the same time China, which had
treaded cautiously in its disputes with neighbors for a good many years, has, if for the most part
avoiding violent incident, been more inclined to displays of military force, whether in contesting
Japanese nationalization of the Senkaku islands, or making incursions into Taiwanese airspace, while
not all of its confrontations have ended quite so bloodlessly, as Sino-Indian skirmishing along the mutual
border of the two countries since 2020 has unhappily demonstrated. 41
Conclusion
Taken altogether the redistribution of global economic power with what it has permitted other states with regard to the
modernization of their armed forces; the end of the U.S. monopoly on certain critical military capabilities; and the increased readiness of other
states to use those modernized, increasingly high-tech forces in armed confrontations and even outright warfare; have profoundly
altered the character of the international scene as compared with what it had been in the 1990s. Indeed, as of the early
2020s the situation may be said to more closely resemble the Cold War than it does "the post-Cold War," not
least in the reality that a differing distribution of military power, with the heightened risk it entails of a
major war, including large-scale nuclear war between the great powers, imposes increasing constraints
on the actions of all concerned. Yet the great majority of policymakers and mainstream commentators give no sign of having mentally
processed that reality, let alone begun to apply the obvious conclusions to the concrete actualities of world events—begun to reacquire the
rules of realpolitik in the nuclear age forgotten amid the illusions of the 1990s—a fact that may prove dire indeed in
the years to come.
Expansion of US hegemonic influence in Eastern Europe is vital to deter China and
Russia – perception is key.
Rothman 22 – has a M.A. in International Relations from the University of Seton Hall, 1/24/22 (Noah,
“What the Right Gets Wrong about Ukraine, Russia, and American Hegemony”, Commentary,
https://www.commentary.org/noah-rothman/what-the-right-gets-wrong-about-ukraine-russia-andamerican-hegemony/, accessed 6/26/22)//jd
With Russia bearing down on Ukraine and Western nations demonstrating more willingness to deter Moscow from starting another shooting
war on the European continent, some on the American right are wondering why the West is invested in Ukrainian security at all. Indeed, they
don’t see America’s commitment to deterring Russian aggression as deterrence. It is, to them, America sleepwalking into a disastrous conflict
that is none of our business. They have gotten the stakes of this standoff and America’s interests precisely wrong. One of the primary sources of
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confusion among those on the right who favor a more introverted American foreign policy is that they have adopted Moscow’s confused
rationale for its own aggression. Of this impulse, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s analysis is instructive. In his latest column, Douthat
lays most of the blame for the current crisis at the Kremlin’s feet, but not all of it. He writes that, in the supposedly bygone era in which the
United States was a “hyperpower,” America backed the eastward expansion of NATO that was both provocative and risky. This, he writes, was
an aspirational foreign policy, not one that accounted for “the realities of power.” Douthat adds, “the attempt to draw Ukraine out of Russia’s
orbit, the partway-open door to Ukrainians who preferred westward-focused alliances, was a foolish overcommitment even when American
power was at its height.” This outlook is flawed in two ways. First, it assigns all agency to Washington and robs America’s non-allied partners of
sovereignty.
Washington didn’t grab Ukraine by the hand and guide it toward integration with the West.
Ukrainians themselves have made that desire plain, and they have demonstrated a repeated willingness
to fight for it. Ukraine’s present conflict with Moscow arguably began with the “Orange Revolution” of January 2005, xwhich culminated in
the ascension of Viktor Yushchenko to the presidency. Almost immediately after that regime change, Ukraine and NATO inaugurated an
“intensified dialogue” around a Membership Action Plan (MAP) that would one day result in Ukrainian ascension into NATO. But the conditions
NATO attached to ascension were never met and, by 2008, a NATO summit in Bucharest that agreed to Ukraine and Georgia’s ascension only in
the distant and indefinite future signaled the end of Ukraine’s progress toward becoming a NATO member. At the same time, the rise of “nonaligned” Viktor Yanukovych to serve as prime minister and, eventually, the president seemed like a concession to the “realities of power” in the
region. But that proved a concession that Ukrainians were unwilling to make. A second revolution in 2014 ousted the Yanukovych regime, but
the Ukrainians who fought and died fighting their own government in Maidan weren’t carrying NATO flags to the front. They
carried the
flags of both Ukraine and the European Union because the event that catalyzed that rebellion was the
Yanukovych government’s unilateral suspension of a free trade agreement with the EU, not NATO’s
enlargement. Westward alignment isn’t something that Ukrainians are ambivalent about. As recently as
December, polling indicated that only about one-fifth of Ukrainians support joining a customs union with Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.
They back integration with the EU and NATO by 58 and 54 percent respectively—a national ambition so
central to Ukraine’s identity it is codified in its constitution. Consigning Ukraine to the Russian sphere of influence
wouldn’t be the natural course of affairs if we only extricated ourselves from Europe’s complexities, and that sentiment won’t go away just
because we want it to. That brings us to the second flaw in Douthat’s analysis: Ukraine’s ascension into NATO was and remains a distant
prospect. It is Kyiv’s desire to integrate economically and politically with the West that Moscow views as an imminent threat. Russia retails the
notion that the present crisis is a response to the West’s heedless expansionism, but there’s no reason to lend credence to that dubious
narrative. It’s Ukraine’s independence that so irritates the Kremlin. Douthat proposes an “ideal retreat” from Ukraine which would leave
“NATO expansion permanently tabled, with Ukraine subject to inevitable Russian pressure but neither
invaded nor annexed, and with our NATO allies shouldering more of the burden of maintaining a
security perimeter in Eastern Europe.” He concedes that it would be a struggle to execute an immaculate retrenchment, as our
bitter experience in Afghanistan suggests. But it might be the “least-bad” of our available options. This is exactly the concession
Russia is demanding from the West. How else could you interpret Moscow’s demands in exchange for
ratcheting down tensions? The Kremlin has insisted, in writing, that the United States and the West must commit not just to halting
NATO expansion but must remove all troops and weapons from nations that entered the NATO alliance after 1997; namely, the entire former
Warsaw Pact. Thus, Russia
has effectively asked the West to gift them a sphere of influence they cannot
secure militarily, diplomatically, or economically. To do so would abrogate the sovereignty of our
partners and allies in Europe, shatter confidence in America across the globe, and represent a profound
misreading of the imbalance of forces arrayed against Russian interests in its own backyard. Those who are
attracted to Douthat’s argument appear to believe that the West’s only course of action short of war with Russia is retreat. There is, in the
estimation of the American Conservative editor Rod Dreher, an “eagerness” among “American elites” to get involved in a real shooting war with
Russia. “We have no realistic choice but to cede to at least some of Russia’s demands,” he writes, lest we abandon the geostrategic imperative
The dispatching of lethal arms into
Ukraine, as well as the deployment of troops, naval assets, and area denial technology, is designed to
raise the stakes of conflict to the point that Moscow blinks. That would be the best of all imaginable
resolutions to the present conflict, because the refugee crisis, economic disruptions, and war of attrition
in Europe that would follow a Russian invasion would be catastrophic. After all, the likelihood that U.S. could avoid
of containing a revisionist China. Such a theory confuses deterrence with war-making.
becoming entangled in a conflict on NATO’s borders that involves America’s ratified allies is negligible.
Nor is deterrence a
zero-sum game. Both the Chinese and Taiwanese are watching events in Eastern Europe closely, the latter with a sense of
existential dread. In recent weeks, Taiwan has committed to deepening its bilateral ties with post-Soviet states (in particular, Lithuania)
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including the establishment of a billion-dollar fund designed to offset Beijing’s economic pressure on these and other nations to abandon
Taipei. In a 2019 report to Taiwan’s parliament, the country’s National Security Bureau warned that “the Chinese Communist Party is copying
the methods used by Russia to annex Crimea against Taiwan.” The
Taiwanese would rightly view a Western capitulation
to Russian demands that acknowledges the legitimacy of a security architecture that robs Kyiv of its right
to freely join foreign military alliances as a precursor to its own abandonment. Douthat is wrong insofar as the
“least-bad” resolution to the crisis in Europe would be to defuse it without sacrificing either the post-Cold War order or Westphalian
sovereignty. And the only way to secure that outcome amid the crisis Moscow has inaugurated would be to force it to back down—through
troop deployments, diplomatic offensives, preventative sanctions, or even the provision of face-saving offramps like the restoration of defunct
security agreements. But back down it must. What
we cannot do is consign Ukraine to Russian domination. Even if
we could, the Ukrainians themselves have proven they would never accept it. That is a challenge,
indeed, but it’s a manageable challenge. By contrast, the wages of appeasement would be too costly to
bear.
Heg checks Russian and Chinese revisionism through military deterrence
Brands ’20 – Professor of Global Affairs [Hal; Hal Brands is the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished
Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a
scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He is the
author or editor of several books regarding foreign policy and grand strategy; 4-20-20; " Don’t Let Great
Powers Carve Up the World”; https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2020-04-20/dont-let-greatpowers-carve-world; Foreign Affairs; accessed 6-22-2022; AH]
What a difference two decades make. In the early years of this century, the world appeared to be moving toward a single, seamless order under
U.S. leadership. Today
the world is fragmenting, and authoritarian challengers, led by China and Russia, are
chipping away at American influence in East Asia, eastern Europe, and the Middle East. In its 2002 National
Security Strategy, the George W. Bush administration envisioned the end of great-power rivalries. In 2020, the question is how
great powers can navigate their rivalries without stumbling into war. Writing in Foreign Affairs (“The New Spheres of
Influence,” March/April 2020), Graham Allison offers a road map for this new environment: the United States should accept the return of
“spheres of influence” and effectively let China and Russia dominate swaths of their respective geopolitical neighborhoods. Doing so, Allison
contends, is actually in keeping with the United States’ best diplomatic traditions, considering that Washington tolerated a Soviet sphere of
influence in eastern Europe during the Cold War. Reviving that tradition is necessary, simply because the United States no longer has the
military and economic dominance to deny China and Russia their geopolitical due. And it is desirable, because mutually accepted spheres of
influence can promote stability and peace in a more rivalrous world. Allison’s
argument is alluring but wrong. In truth, the United
States has resisted the creation of rival spheres of influence for most of its history, even as it has worked assiduously to build its own. Ceding
ground to China and Russia today would be not a recipe for stability but a blueprint for coercion and
conflict, and it would weaken the United States’ geopolitical hand vis-à-vis its rivals. Nor is a return to spheres of
influence foreordained—Washington still has the power to prevent Beijing and Moscow from dominating their
regions, so long as it rejects Allison’s advice to cut loose its vulnerable frontline allies. A tougher, more competitive world is unavoidable. A
far more dangerous world, divided into competing superpower fiefdoms, is not. AN AMERICAN TRADITION Spheres of influence have been
common throughout history, but Americans have never been quite comfortable with them. In fact, much of U.S.
foreign policy dating
back to independence has consisted of efforts to prevent rival powers from establishing such domains. In the
nineteenth century, U.S. leaders rejected the idea that any European power should have a sphere of influence in North America or the Western
Hemisphere at large. They maneuvered—often quite ruthlessly—to evict European powers from these areas. At the turn of the twentieth
century, the United States took this regional policy global. The so-called Open Door policy aimed to dissuade foreign powers from carving up
China, and later all of East Asia, into exclusive spheres. Washington joined World War I in part to prevent Germany from becoming the
dominant European power. A
generation later, the United States fought to deny Japan a sphere of influence in
the Pacific and prevent Hitler from establishing primacy over the entire Old World. During and after World War
II, Washington also engaged in quieter diplomatic and economic efforts to accelerate the dissolution of the British Empire. Even during the Cold
War, Americans never fully accepted Soviet control over eastern Europe. The Truman and Eisenhower administrations sought to roll back the
Iron Curtain through ideological warfare and covert action; later administrations expanded trade and diplomatic ties with Warsaw Pact states
as a subtler way of undermining Kremlin control. The Reagan administration overtly and covertly supported political movements that were
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challenging the Kremlin’s authority from within. And
when Washington had a chance to peacefully destroy the Soviet
sphere of influence after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it did, supporting German unification and the
expansion of NATO. Opposition to spheres of influence, in other words, is a part of U.S. diplomatic DNA.
The reason for this, Charles Edel and I argued in 2018, is that spheres of influence clash with fundamental tenets of U.S.
foreign policy. Among them is the United States’ approach to security, which holds that safeguarding the
country’s vital interests and physical well-being requires preventing rival powers from establishing a
foothold in the Western Hemisphere or dominating strategically important regions overseas. Likewise,
the United States’ emphasis on promoting liberty and free trade translates to a concern that spheres of
influence—particularly those dominated by authoritarian powers—would impede the spread of U.S.
values and allow hostile powers to block American trade and investment. Finally, spheres of influence do
not mesh well with American exceptionalism—the notion that the United States should transcend the
old, corrupt ways of balance-of-power diplomacy and establish a more humane, democratic system of
international relations. Of course, that intellectual tradition did not stop the United States from building its own sphere of influence in
Latin America from the early nineteenth century onward, nor did it prevent it from drawing large chunks of Europe, East Asia, and the Middle
East into a global sphere of influence after World War II. Yet the same tradition has led the United States to run its sphere of influence far more
progressively than past great powers, which is why far more countries have sought to join that sphere than to leave it. And since hypocrisy is
another venerable tradition in global affairs, it is not surprising that Americans would establish their own, relatively enlightened sphere of
influence while denying the legitimacy of everyone else’s. That endeavor reached its zenith in the post–Cold War era, when the collapse of the
Soviet bloc made it possible to envision a world in which Washington’s
sphere of influence—also known as the liberal
international order—was the only game in town. The United States maintained a world-beating military
that could intervene around the globe; preserved and expanded a global alliance structure as a check on
aggression; and sought to integrate potential challengers, namely Beijing and Moscow, into a U.S.-led
system. It was a remarkably ambitious project, as Allison rightly notes, but it was the culmination of, rather than a departure from, a
diplomatic tradition reaching back two centuries.
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2AC---AT: Spheres of Influence
Allowing Russian and Chinese spheres of influence increases authoritarianism
Brands ’20 – Professor of Global Affairs [Hal; Hal Brands is the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished
Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and a
scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He is the
author or editor of several books regarding foreign policy and grand strategy; 4-20-20; " Don’t Let Great
Powers Carve Up the World”; https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2020-04-20/dont-let-greatpowers-carve-world; Foreign Affairs; accessed 6-22-2022; AH]
GIVE THEM AN INCH… The post–Cold War moment is over, and the prospect of a divided world has returned. Russia
is projecting
power in the Middle East and staking a claim to dominance in its “near abroad.” China is seeking
primacy in the western Pacific and Southeast Asia and using its diplomatic and economic influence to
draw countries around the world more tightly into its orbit. Both have developed the tools needed to coerce their
neighbors and keep U.S. forces at bay. Allison is one of several analysts who have recently advanced the argument that the United States
should make a virtue of necessity—that it should accept Russian and Chinese spheres of influence, encompassing some portion of eastern
Europe and the western Pacific, as the price of stability and peace. The logic is twofold: first, to create a cleaner separation between contending
parties by clearly marking where one’s influence ends and the other’s begins; and second, to reduce the chances of conflict by giving rising or
resurgent powers a safe zone along their borders. In theory, this seems like a reasonable way of preventing competition from turning into
outright conflict, especially given that countries such as Taiwan and the Baltic states lie thousands of miles from the United States but on the
doorsteps of its rivals. Yet in reality, a
spheres-of-influence world would bring more peril than safety. Russia’s and
China’s spheres of influence would inevitably be domains of coercion and authoritarianism. Both
countries are run by illiberal, autocratic regimes; their leaders see democratic values as profoundly
threatening to their political survival. If Moscow and Beijing dominated their respective neighborhoods,
they would naturally seek to undermine democratic governments that resist their control—as China is
already doing in Taiwan and as Russia is doing in Ukraine—or that challenge, through their very
existence, the legitimacy of authoritarian rule. The practical consequence of acceding to authoritarian
spheres of influence would be to intensify the crisis of democracy that afflicts the world today. The
United States would suffer economically, too. China, in particular, is a mercantilist power already
working to turn Asian economies toward Beijing and could one day put the United States at a severe
disadvantage on the world’s most economically dynamic continent. Washington should not concede a Chinese sphere
of influence unless it is also willing to compromise the “Open Door” principles that have animated its statecraft for over a century.
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Alternatives Fail
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Multipolarity Fails
China is irredeemably hostile – multipolarity fails even if it’s the most beneficial action
Zelikow 22 - Professor of History at the University of Virginia. A former U.S. diplomat and Executive
Director of the 9/11 Commission, he has worked for five presidential administrations (Philip, July/August
2022, "The Hollow Order," Foreign Affairs, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2022-0621/hollow-order-international-system)//KH
IN IT TOGETHER
It may be easy, and perhaps natural, for the would-be architects of the new system to organize it around Washington. But that would be a
mistake. The enemies of this new order, united by their resentment of the United States, will seek to discredit it as just another effort to
dominate global affairs. For this new order to be viable, it must be conceived in such a way that the charge is false.
The new order must also be decentralized to be effective; the resources and wisdom needed to solve many vexing problems are not
concentrated in the United States. For instance, on the enormous issue of defining rules for a digitized world, Washington has been confused
and passive, despite—or perhaps because of—its dominance in such commerce. It is the European Union that has led the way. The EU’s
General Data Protection Regulation, its Digital Services Act, and its Digital Markets Act created the standards that influence most of the world,
including the Americas. Decentralized leadership has also proved critical to responding to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. The nucleus of the
emerging pro-Ukraine coalition, for instance, is not just the United States but the entire G-7, including the European Commission. South Korea
and Australia should be invited to join this coalition as well.
Yet a revised system of world order shouldn’t be limited to the United States and its traditional allies. It must be open to any countries that can
and will help attain its common objectives. India should have a place at any symbolic high table, for example, as a permanent member of the
UN Security Council. But India’s leaders are still making their choices about their will and capacity to work on common problems. Even China
should be welcome at the table. After
much internal debate in the early 1990s, China’s leaders chose to play a
major and often constructive role in the global commonwealth system that emerged after the end of the
Cold War. In 2005, Zoellick famously urged Beijing to become a “responsible stakeholder.” As late as 2017, Kurt Campbell, who now leads
Asia policy for the Biden White House, thought this invitation was a wise move.
But Zoellick’s
words were a challenge, one that Beijing is failing to meet. China’s partnership with Putin—
whom Xi described to the Russian press as “my best and bosom friend”—is the opposite of responsible.
Instead, it shows that China and Russia lead a primarily Eurasian grouping of dangerous states, including
the likes of Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan. Their loose confederation has its cross-purposes and is united mainly by
hostility toward the United States. But it is building tighter links, better divisions of labor, and more effective coordination than
existed among the Axis powers before or during World War II.
For these and other reasons, pessimists believe
China is irredeemably hostile. They argue that China has written
off the United States as a country determined to resist China’s rise and that Chinese leaders may feel
they have little to lose by embracing confrontation. In this pessimistic view, China is trying to shift from the
post–Cold War era’s emphasis on global interdependence toward a Chinese grand strategy of Eurasian
dominance and growing national self-sufficiency. China’s leaders are now using the pandemic to keep a
chokehold on international travel and strengthen domestic surveillance.
That does seem to be China’s current plan. But it is unclear whether this plan will work. It rests on
unproven social, political, and economic premises that are starting to deeply disturb parts of Chinese
society essential to its past and future success—such as the many residents of Shanghai who have been trapped during the
city’s draconian recent lockdown.
The resources and wisdom needed to solve many global problems are not concentrated in the United
States.
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Chinese leaders may also have noticed that, in backing the Putin regime, they have tethered themselves to an adventurist Russian government
that, for 30 years, has treated its neighbors much as Japan treated China between 1915 and 1945. For instance, Putin insists that Russia is not
invading Ukraine. There is no war, he declared; there is only a “special military operation.” Many Chinese people will recall that, from 1937 to
1941, Japan insisted that it, too, was not invading China. There was no war, the Japanese said; there was merely a “China incident.”
Throughout the years of Japanese aggression, the United States defended China’s territorial integrity. Even amid times of misjudgment and
weakness, Washington maintained that stance, refusing in November 1941 to make a deal with Japan at China’s expense. Ten days later, Japan
went to war against the United States. As they watch what is happening in 2022, Chinese leaders can still reflect on this past and consider what
decisions to make.
If Beijing charts a new course, it would not be the first time it has chosen to change. But if China does rejoin a system of world order, it should
be a new one. The old system has fractured and must be remade. Facing tragic realities, the citizens of the free world must rebuild a global
order that is practical enough to address the most vital common problems, even if it cannot and does not promise progress on all the values
and concerns people face. This system will be far more effective if the world’s most populous country joins it, and China faces another time of
choosing. Regardless of China’s participation, responsible actors must begin the hard, substantive work of protecting the planet from war,
climate, economic, and health risks. The time for rhetoric and posturing is over.
Unipolarity is inevitable and multipolarity collapses into anarchy with a US-China
rivalry
Beckley 22 – Jeane Kirkpatrick Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, associate professor
at Tufts University (Michael, March/April 2022, "Enemies of My Enemy," Foreign Affairs,
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2021-02-14/china-new-world-order-enemies-my-enemy)//KH
THE CLASH OF SYSTEMS
The history of international order building is one of savage competition between clashing systems, not
of harmonious cooperation. In the best of times, that competition took the form of a cold war, with each side jockeying for
advantage and probing each other with every measure short of military force. In many cases, however, the competition eventually boiled over
into a shooting war and ended with one side crushing the other. The
victorious order then ruled until it was destroyed by
a new competitor—or until it simply crumbled without an external threat to hold it together.
Today, a
growing number of policymakers and pundits are calling for a new concert of powers to sort out the
world’s problems and divide the globe into spheres of influence. But the idea of an inclusive order in which no one power’s
vision prevails is a fantasy that can exist only in the imaginations of world-government idealists and
academic theorists. There are only two orders under construction right now—a Chinese-led one and a
U.S.-led one—and the contest between the two is rapidly becoming a clash between autocracy and
democracy, as both countries define themselves against each other and try to infuse their respective coalitions with ideological purpose.
China is positioning itself as the world’s defender of hierarchy and tradition against a decadent and disorderly
West; the United States is belatedly summoning a new alliance to check Chinese power and make the
world safe for democracy.
Disparate actors are starting to join forces to roll back Beijing’s power. In the process, they are reordering the world.
This clash of systems will define the twenty-first century and divide the world. China
will view the emerging democratic order
as a containment strategy designed to strangle its economy and topple its regime. In response, it will seek to
protect itself by asserting greater military control over its vital sea-lanes, carving out exclusive economic zones for its firms, and propping up
autocratic allies as it sows chaos in democracies. The upsurge
of Chinese repression and aggression, in turn, will further
impel the United States and its allies to shun Beijing and build a democratic order. For a tiny glimpse of what this
vicious cycle might look like, consider what happened in March 2021, when Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the EU
sanctioned four Chinese officials for human rights abuses in Xinjiang. The sanctions amounted to a slap on the wrist, but Beijing interpreted
them as an assault on its sovereignty and unleashed a diplomatic tirade and a slew of economic sanctions. The EU returned fire by freezing its
proposed EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment.
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In the coming years, the
trade and technology wars between China and the United States that began during
the Trump administration will rage on as both sides try to expand their respective spheres. Other
countries will find it increasingly difficult to hedge their bets by maintaining links to both blocs. Instead,
China and the United States will push their partners to pick sides, compelling them to reroute their
supply chains and adopt wholesale the ecosystem of technologies and standards of one side’s order. The Internet will be split in two.
When people journey from one order to the other—if they can even get a visa—they will enter a different digital realm. Their phones won’t
work, nor will their favorite websites, their email accounts, or their precious social media apps. Political warfare
between the two
systems will intensify, as each tries to undermine the domestic legitimacy and international appeal of its
competitor. East Asian sea-lanes will grow clogged with warships, and rival forces will experience
frequent close encounters.
The clash of systems between China and the United States will define the twenty-first century and divide the world.
The standoff will end only when one side defeats or exhausts the other. As of now, the smart money is on
the U.S. side, which has far more wealth and military assets than China does and better prospects for
future growth. By the early 2030s, Xi, an obese smoker with a stressful job, will be in his 80s, if he is still
alive. China’s demographic crisis will be kicking into high gear, with the country projected to lose roughly 70 million working-age adults and
gain 130 million senior citizens between now and then. Hundreds of billions of dollars in overseas Chinese loans will be
due, and many of China’s foreign partners won’t be able to pay them back. It is hard to see how a country facing so
many challenges could long sustain its own international order, especially in the face of determined opposition from the world’s wealthiest
countries.
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Multilateralism Fails
Ukraine proves multilateral organizations are useless for security
Kapitonenko, 3-4, 22, Mykola Kapitonenko is an Associate Professor at the Institute of International
Relations in Kyiv, Ukraine, Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Has Changed the World,
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/russia%E2%80%99s-invasion-ukraine-has-changed-world-200988
Sixth, international security organizations will become obsolete (they probably have been long before
February 2022). The management of international disputes in multilateral fora has been profoundly
poor, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has set a new low. The United Nations, Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe, and other international security institutions failed to impose any
additional costs on Moscow’s behavior. International organizations’ weakness may play in Russia’s
favor in the short run, but it will undermine Russia’s normative power in places such as the UN Security
Council.
Multilateral cooperation historically fails
Michael Beckley, March/April 2022, How Fear of China Is Forging a New World Order
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2021-02-14/china-new-world-order-enemies-my-enemy,
MICHAEL BECKLEY is is Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University, a Nonresident Senior
Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the
World’s Sole Superpower. The international order is falling apart, and everyone seems to know how to
fix it. According to some, the United States just needs to rededicate itself to leading the liberal order it
helped found some 75 years ago. Others argue that the world’s great powers should form a concert to
guide the international community into a new age of multipolar cooperation. Still others call for a grand
bargain that divides the globe into stable spheres of influence. What these and other visions of
international order have in common is an assumption that global governance can be designed and
imposed from the top down. With wise statesmanship and ample summitry, the international jungle can
be tamed and cultivated. Conflicts of interest and historical hatreds can be negotiated away and
replaced with win-win cooperation.
The history of international order, however, provides little reason for confidence in top-down,
cooperative solutions. The strongest orders in modern history—from Westphalia in the seventeenth
century to the liberal international order in the twentieth—were not inclusive organizations working
for the greater good of humanity. Rather, they were alliances built by great powers to wage security
competition against their main rivals. Fear and loathing of a shared enemy, not enlightened calls to
make the world a better place, brought these orders together. Progress on transnational issues, when
achieved, emerged largely as a byproduct of hardheaded security cooperation. That cooperation
usually lasted only as long as a common threat remained both present and manageable. When that
threat dissipated or grew too large, the orders collapsed. Today, the liberal order is fraying for many
reasons, but the underlying cause is that the threat it was originally designed to defeat—Soviet
communism—disappeared three decades ago. None of the proposed replacements to the current
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order have stuck because there hasn’t been a threat scary or vivid enough to compel sustained
cooperation among the key players.
Until now. Through a surge of repression and aggression, China has frightened countries near and far. It
is acting belligerently in East Asia, trying to carve out exclusive economic zones in the global economy,
and exporting digital systems that make authoritarianism more effective than ever. For the first time
since the Cold War, a critical mass of countries face serious threats to their security, welfare, and ways
of life—all emanating from a single source.
This moment of clarity has triggered a flurry of responses. China’s neighbors are arming themselves and
aligning with outside powers to secure their territory and sea-lanes. Many of the world’s largest
economies are collectively developing new trade, investment, and technology standards that implicitly
discriminate against China. Democracies are gathering to devise strategies for combating
authoritarianism at home and abroad, and new international organizations are popping up to coordinate
the battle. Seen in real time, these efforts look scattershot. Step back from the day-to-day commotion,
however, and a fuller picture emerges: for better or worse, competition with China is forging a new
international order.
ORDERS OF EXCLUSION
The modern liberal mind associates international order with peace and harmony. Historically, however,
international orders have been more about keeping rivals down than bringing everyone together. As
the international relations theorist Kyle Lascurettes has argued, the major orders of the past four
centuries were “orders of exclusion,” designed by dominant powers to ostracize and outcompete rivals.
Order building wasn’t a restraint on geopolitical conflict; it was power politics by other means, a costeffective way to contain adversaries short of war.
Fear of an enemy, not faith in friends, formed the bedrock of each era’s order, and members
developed a common set of norms by defining themselves in opposition to that enemy. In doing so, they
tapped into humanity’s most primordial driver of collective action. Sociologists call it “the in-group/outgroup dynamic.” Philosophers call it “Sallust’s theorem,” after the ancient historian who argued that
fear of Carthage held the Roman Republic together. In political science, the analogous concept is
negative partisanship, the tendency for voters to become
For decades, the United States and its allies knew what they stood for and who the enemy was. But then
the Soviet Union collapsed, and a single overarching threat gave way to a kaleidoscope of minor ones. In
the new and uncertain post–Cold War environment, the Western allies sought refuge in past sources of
success. Instead of building a new order, they doubled down on the existing one. Their enemy may have
disintegrated, but their mission, they believed, remained the same: to enlarge the community of freemarket democracies. For the next three decades, they worked to expand the Western liberal order into
a global one. NATO membership nearly doubled. The European Community morphed into the EU, a fullblown economic union with more than twice as many member countries. The Gatt was transformed into
the World Trade Organization (WTO) and welcomed dozens of new members, unleashing an
unprecedented period of hyperglobalization…
But it couldn’t last. mise. To forge a cohesive community, order builders have to exclude hostile nations,
outlaw uncooperative behaviors, and squelch domestic opposition to international rule-making. These
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inherently repressive acts eventually trigger a backlash. In the mid-nineteenth century, it came in the
form of a wave of liberal revolutions, which eroded the unity and ideological coherence of the
monarchical Concert of Europe. During the 1930s, aggrieved fascist powers demolished the liberal
interwar order that stood in the way of their imperial ambitions. By the late 1940s, the Soviet Union had
spurned the global order it had helped negotiate just a few years prior, having gobbled up territory in
Eastern Europe in contravention of the UN Charter. The Soviet representative at the UN derided the
Bretton Woods institutions as “branches of Wall Street.” Exclusionary by nature, international orders
inevitably incite opposition.
Many in the West had long assumed that the liberal order would be an exception to the historical
pattern. The system’s commitment to openness and nondiscrimination supposedly made it “hard to
overturn and easy to join,” as the political scientist G. John Ikenberry argued in these pages in 2008. Any
country, large or small, could plug and play in the globalized economy. Liberal institutions could
accommodate all manner of members—even illiberal ones, which would gradually be reformed by the
system into responsible stakeholders. As more countries joined, a virtuous cycle would play out: free
trade would generate prosperity, which would spread democracy, which would enhance international
cooperation, which would lead to more trade. Most important, the order faced no major opposition,
because it had already defeated its main enemy. The demise of Soviet communism had sent a clear
message to all that there was no viable alternative to democratic capitalism.
These assumptions turned out to be wrong. The liberal order is, in fact, deeply exclusionary. By
promoting free markets, open borders, democracy, supranational institutions, and the use of reason to
solve problems, the order challenges traditional beliefs and institutions that have united communities
for centuries: state sovereignty, nationalism, religion, race, tribe, family. These enduring ties to blood
and soil were bottled up during the Cold War, when the United States and its allies had to maintain a
united front to contain the Soviet Union. But they have reemerged over the course of the post–Cold War
era. “We are going to do a terrible thing to you,” the Soviet official Georgi Arbatov told a U.S. audience
in 1988. “We are going to deprive you of an enemy.” The warning proved prescient. By slaying its main
adversary, the liberal order unleashed all sorts of nationalist, populist, religious, and authoritarian
opposition.
Many of the order’s pillars are buckling under the pressure. NATO is riven by disputes over burden
sharing. The EU nearly broke apart during the eurozone crisis, and in the years since, it has lost the
United Kingdom and has been threatened by the rise of xenophobic right-wing parties across the
continent. The WTO’s latest round of multilateral trade talks has dragged on for 20 years without an
agreement, and the United States is crippling the institution’s core feature—the Appellate Court, where
countries adjudicate their disputes—for failing to regulate Chinese nontariff barriers. On the whole, the
liberal order looks ill equipped to handle pressing global problems such as climate change, financial
crises, pandemics, digital disinformation, refugee influxes, and political extremism, many of which are
arguably a direct consequence of an open system that promotes the unfettered flow of money, goods,
information, and people across borders.
Policymakers have long recognized these problems. Yet none of their ideas for revamping the system
has gained traction because order building is costly. It requires leaders to divert time and political capital
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away from advancing their agendas to hash out international rules and sell them to skeptical publics,
and it requires countries to subordinate their national interests to collective objectives and trust that
other countries will do likewise. These actions do not come naturally, which is why order building usually
needs a common enemy. For 30 years, that unifying force has been absent, and the liberal order has
unraveled as a result.
Multipolarity results in massive wars
MICHAEL BECKLEY is Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University, a Nonresident Senior
Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the
World’s Sole Superpower., March/April 2022,https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2021-0214/china-new-world-order-enemies-my-enemy, Enemies of My Enemy How Fear of China Is Forging a
New World Order
History shows that eras of fluid multipolarity typically end in disaster, regardless of the bright ideas or
advanced technologies circulating at the time. The late eighteenth century witnessed the pinnacle of
the Enlightenment in Europe, before the continent descended into the hell of the Napoleonic Wars. At
the start of the twentieth century, the world’s sharpest minds predicted an end to great-power
conflict as railways, telegraph cables, and steamships linked countries closer together. The worst war
in history up to that point quickly followed. The sad and paradoxical reality is that international orders
are vital to avert chaos, yet they typically emerge only during periods of great-power rivalry.
Competing with China will be fraught with risk for the United States and its allies, but it might be the
only way to avoid even greater dangers.
Multilateralism fails---failed to tackle the pandemic and can’t deal with climate change
David McNair 21 - David McNair is executive director for Global Policy at ONE, and an ECFR Council member.,
“Multilateralism’s failure to tackle our biggest challenges is compounding them”, European Council on Foreign Relations,
https://ecfr.eu/article/multilateralisms-failure-to-tackle-our-biggest-challenges-is-compounding-them/ //AA
Our collective failure to
end the pandemic now will cause even deeper and more costly problems in the
future At the Global Health Summit in May 2021, G20 leaders declared that the pandemic “will not be over until all countries are able to
bring the disease under control and therefore, large-scale, global, safe, effective and equitable vaccination … remains our top priority.”
Campaigners could be forgiven, then, for feeling optimistic that meaningful action to address vaccine inequity would be taken at the G7
leaders’ meeting in Cornwall in June, or the G20 finance ministers’ meeting in Venice in July. Alas, they have been sorely disappointed. The
members of the G7 pledged to share just 870 million of their 3 billion surplus doses by the middle of 2022, a paltry sum compared with the
11 billion doses that are urgently needed to reach global herd immunity. And the G20 produced little more than excruciatingly vague
“support for collaborative efforts” on global vaccine distribution. Meanwhile, since that grand declaration in May, covid-19 has continued to
wreak havoc around the world: an additional 400,000 people have died as the global death toll has ticked past four million. Africa finds itself
in the grips of a truly devastating third wave of infections, with only 1.4 per cent of the continent’s population fully vaccinated. There
will
be a price to pay for this inaction even beyond the untold human cost. Our collective failure to end the
pandemic now will create and compound even deeper and more costly problems in the future. The
immediate knock-on effects, including for the West, will be severe. But this historic failure of
multilateralism is also undermining the trust and incentives necessary for effective international
cooperation on the other existential challenges of the day – most notably, climate change. In the short
term, for as long as the virus is raging anywhere in the world, variants will continue to emerge that have the potential to send us all back to
square one. The World Health Organisation warned last week that there is a “strong likelihood” that more dangerous variants will develop
that may be even more challenging to control, underlining that “the pandemic
is nowhere near finished”. We’re already
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seeing the damage that can be done by such variants, even in highly immunised countries. Cases are rising in Australia among
fully vaccinated people due to the spread of the highly transmissible Delta variant. The United Kingdom, having vaccinated 68 per cent of its
population, is now facing worker shortages, with up to 20 per cent of the workforce in some firms self-isolating. In June, a covid-19 outbreak
at China’s Yantian port threatened to hold up 5 per cent of global freight capacity. These
disruptions are, in turn, contributing
to rising inflation due to increased commodity prices. But the economic impact of the ‘great divergence’
in the global pandemic response is just beginning. Last year, the International Chamber of Commerce estimated that
vaccine hoarding by rich countries could cost the global economy $9 trillion, half of which would be borne by rich countries facing supply
chain disruptions. In the medium term, the
needlessly prolonged pandemic is likely to undermine global security
and stability. Pandemic-driven social unrest is on the rise around the world, including in Africa. The International Monetary
Fund (IMF) has warned that frustration over governments’ handling of the crisis, as well as mounting inequality and corruption, may lead to
“a new wave of unrest” that could hinder the recovery from the pandemic, especially in developing countries. Again, we’re already seeing
this play out. Nigeria reported recently that the pandemic has worsened the security situation in the country, as 100 people have been killed
during a nationwide lockdown. Nigerian Minister of Interior Rauf Aregbesola attributed the killings to the frustration caused by rising
unemployment and restrictions on movement. In South Africa, more than 70 people have been killed and over 1,300 arrested amid riots
triggered by the jailing of former president Jacob Zuma. The health ministry warned that the country’s vaccination rollout and other
essential healthcare services have been severely disrupted, and there are also reports of an impending food shortage. The European Asylum
Support Office warned that the risk of conflict-related displacement is likely to increase due to the pandemic – raising the spectre of the
2015 refugee crisis, which pushed the EU’s multilateral institutions to the brink of collapse. Of course, the greatest
threat to
global stability is climate change. There are depressing parallels between the international responses to
the covid-19 pandemic and climate change. Like the climate crisis, the pandemic reveals a lot about our
inability to act in our own enlightened self-interest when faced with an urgent and obvious threat, and
provides overwhelming evidence of the humanitarian and economic costs of inaction. As so eloquently argued
by the Financial Times’s Martin Wolf, “even against such a self-evidently global threat, where the costs are huge and immediate, we seem
unable to act with essential urgency,” and, consequently, when it comes to the climate, “it is impossible to imagine we will do much more
than fiddle while the planet burns.” Needless to say, truly
global cooperation is required to effectively address the
climate crisis, which is arguably an even more complex and profound problem than covid-19. But the trust and goodwill such
cooperation demands have been decimated by the West’s short-sighted nationalism in the face of the pandemic. It is hard to overstate the
anger that vaccine inequity has created in Africa, where a meagre 4.3 vaccines have been administered per 100 people (compared to 77 per
100 in North America and 75 per 100 in Europe). We
have the resources and capabilities to end the pandemic
everywhere; it is simply a matter of political will.
Multilateralism is ineffective and outdated
Amrita Narlikar 1/23/20 [Professor Amrita Narlikar is the President of the German
Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA), Honorary Fellow of Darwin College
(University of Cambridge), Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Observer Researcher
Foundation, Distinguished International Fellow of the Indian Association of
International Studies (IAIS), and Non-Resident Distinguished Fellow of the Australia
India Institute., “The malaise of multilateralism and how to manage it”, Observer
Research Foundationhttps://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/the-malaise-of-multilateralism-and-how-tomanage-it/]//AA
Why multilateralism is in such a mess today boils down to three reasons: disillusionment with
globalisation, lacklustre narratives in support of multilateralism, and the inadequacy of existing
multilateral rules to meet new challenges. Ups and downs in the lives of individual international institutions are not new, but
the malaise that now afflicts multilateralism is unprecedented in range and depth. It transcends issue-areas, and
occurs at a time when the need for sensible rules of international cooperation has greater urgency than ever before. Even as trade wars rage
outside, the Dispute Settlement Body of the World Trade Organization (WTO) finds itself paralysed due to the blocked appointments/reappointments of judges in its Appellate Body. Public
awareness of climate change as a global emergency may have
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increased, but the United States has at the same time delivered a serious blow to the mitigation regime
by moving to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. In his remarkable interview with The Economist in November this year,
French President Macron declared the “brain-death” of the NATO and pointed to the fragility of Europe.
Impending Brexit is one thorn in the side of the European project; the rise of the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) party in Germany is
another. Multilateralism,
in both its universal and non-universal versions, and across economic and
security issues, is under severe strain. Explaining the malaise It is commonplace — especially by those with liberal
and/or centrist inclinations in politics — to attribute the crisis of multilateralism to two factors. First, many observers
point the finger at President Trump and his “America first” agenda. Is it surprising then, they ask, that others
follow suit when the world’s largest economy behaves with such great irresponsibility and chooses to
turn its back on the very system that it had once led the way in creating? Second, some see Trump’s
politics as part of a broader phenomenon involving the rise of strongmen leaders with populist
inclinations who fan nationalist sentiment, framing the rights and interests of local populations as pitted
against those of a “global elite.” Both explanations, however, are deeply misguided. Nor is the wrong-headedness of such
applications purely an academic matter. Rather, the knee-jerk solutions that they result in are likely to worsen the
malaise of multilateralism. Reacting to Trump’s message of “Make America great again,” Macron countered with “Make our planet
great again.” This was not a bad response per se, especially given the crudeness of Trump’s pledge. Yet, the Yellow Vests protests showed
that Macron’s (probably well-meant) moral high-horsiness did not find many takers. The
problems of multilateralism predate
the arrival of Trump on the international scene; failure to recognise this will keep taking us down the same cul-de-sac as
Macron’s “Make our planet great again.” Take the case of trade multilateralism. True, Trump may have called the WTO “the single worst
deal ever made” and severely dented the system by launching his supposedly “good, and easy to win” trade wars. But amidst this drama, it is
too often forgotten that dissatisfaction with WTO functioning has been brewing for years. The recurrence of deadlocks in the Doha Round
for over the last 15 years is a clear sign of discontent from multiple stakeholders (and not just the US). Similarly, it is worth recalling that
although many blame the Trump administration for the wreckage that is the WTO’s Appellate Body today, the practice of actually blocking
appointments and re-appointments of judges in fact goes back to the Obama administration (although admittedly not on the same scale as
practiced by the current US administration). It was also under President Obama that the US dabbled in the rhetoric of protecting American
workers, showed great reluctance to make concessions during Doha negotiations. And again, it was the Obama administration that
precipitated a turn away from the multilateralism of WTO and towards the (mega-) regionalism of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment
Partnership and Trans-Pacific Partnership. Trump’s
angry and public pronouncements against various multilateral
institutions, or the rhetoric of some populist movements against the global order, have certainly
multiplied the problems facing multilateralism. But they are not the root cause. Why multilateralism is in such a
mess today boils down to three reasons: disillusionment with globalisation, lacklustre narratives in support of multilateralism, and the
inadequacy of existing multilateral rules to meet new challenges. First, backing
Trump’s narrative of “America First” or
the Brexiters’ slogan of “Take back control” is the fact that significant proportions of the electorates of
these countries believe that the gains of globalisation have passed them by. They attribute increasing
inequality within their society, and the job losses and declining wages that they personally endure, to the costs of international
trade. The hardships that these groups suffer have several causes, which range from technological change to inadequate welfare
mechanisms that could allow for better wealth distribution. But trade is often the easy scapegoat, especially as blame can be all too
conveniently attributed to international deal-making. The current US administration is an example of a government that has effectively
harnessed this discontent — perhaps even stirred it further by building a narrative that links domestic inequalities and poverty within the US
to multilateral governance. But this disillusionment with
the system is a real and potent force, which will survive
irrespective of what happens in the upcoming US elections. Second, a solid and convincing counternarrative has been missing. Telling the malcontents and the disillusioned — especially if they face personal economic hardships
amidst increasing inequality — that they should think about the planet first will not reassure them. If anything, such narratives will only
exacerbate the backlash against those increasingly seen as part of a “global elite” and the values of
internationalism that they represent. The takeaway for many parts of the electorate (in different countries) from such cavalier
attitudes will likely be along the lines of ‘only Mr Trump understands my pain, only the AfD is willing to stand up for my rights.’ Third, the
liberal fixation on Trump as the root cause for the decline of multilateralism diverts attention from
another equally serious cause: the rise of an increasingly assertive China. One reason for this blind spot may be that
China itself has been doing an impressive job — at least until recently [1] — in presenting itself as a
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guardian of globalisation and multilateralism. Declarations of support for the system, for example at the World Economic
Forum by President Xi, stand out in stark contrast to the havoc wreaked on the system via President Trump’s angry tweets and trade wars.
But recent scholarship by Henry Farrell and Abe Newman on “weaponized interdependence” has begun to highlight the use of global
economic networks for geostrategic purposes.[2] Combine these insights with China’s meteoric rise and controversial expansionism in its
region and beyond (e.g., via the Belt and Road Initiative), and it is clear that the
underlying premises of the postwar
multilateral system are being put into question. Much of the post-war order was built on an assumption of the virtues of
economic interdependence, which were supposed to bring nations together and promote peace. But if multilateral rules to
promote economic interdependence have been used — or could be used in the future — by “systemic
rivals” to gain geo-economic advantage, then a backlash against these rules is bound to come sooner or
later. While the US has voiced these concerns most vociferously, others too have been raising them in different settings as they argue in
favour of institutional reform and updating. Finding sustainable solutions To fix the malaise of multilateralism, technical solutions — for
example, improving the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Mechanism — will of course be important. But given the deep-rooted nature of the
challenge, a purely technocratic response will not suffice. Four sets of additional measures will be crucial. First, the only way that we will be
able to bring the discontented many on board (and bring them on board we must, if we are to restore trust in the system) is by taking their
concerns seriously. This means reconsidering past trade-offs and developing a new bargain on globalisation with better distributive
mechanisms, both domestically and internationally. Trump-bashing — and its equivalent in other countries — on its own and ridiculing
populist supporters will only exacerbate polarisation. Second, multilateralism will need a brand new narrative. This
narrative will have to convey clearly why reformed multilateralism is of direct benefit to citizens across the board, and not only tomorrow
but also today. Appealing to global public goods and the welfare of future generations are likely to prove insufficient as rationales, especially
to those who feel shortchanged and are enduring economic hardships. This new narrative will need to have individual and group appeal. It
will also need to work across different levels of politics — local, regional, national, and global. [3]
Global multilateral cooperation structurally fails---overwhelming data confirms
Robert J Lieber 14, Professor, Department of Government, Georgetown University, 2014, “The Rise of
the BRICS and American primacy,” International Politics, Vol. 51, p. 137-154
Equally important, liberal
internationalists and others tend to assume that international relations are a positive sum
game (Keohane, 1984; Ruggie, 1993). Experiences with multilateralism and with regional international institutions are said to encourage
cooperation. Transparency, reciprocity and habits of collaboration are seen as self-reinforcing. In order to achieve their own domestic needs for
economic growth, countries find not only these experiences beneficial, but such cooperation spills over across related functions and issue
areas. A generation ago, scholars writing and theorizing about regional integration in Western Europe defined this process as one of ‘spillover’.
For liberal internationalists and globalists there is at least an implied analogy with that European experience despite the immense differences in
geography, history and path dependence.5 That assumption has some basis in the areas of economics and trade, though the mercantilist and
predatory behavior of China provides a serious contrary indicator. In
the security realm , however, there is little reason for
such an optimistic assumption. Cases in point include nuclear proliferation (North Korea, Iran), tensions in
East Asia (China, Japan, Vietnam, South Korea, the Philippines, the East and South China Seas) and conflicts in the Middle East
(Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, Lebanon, as well as Israel and the Palestinians). Nonetheless there are exceptions. Brazil has played a
continuing role in UN Peacekeeping. It assigns nearly 2500 military and police personnel to those missions and has played a leading role in Haiti,
where it has commanded the UN’s operation since 2004. It also has headed the maritime component of UNIFIL (Lebanon) since 2011. In
addition, Turkey has participated actively in NATO-led peacekeeping missions in Bosnia (SFOR), Kosovo (KFOR), and Afghanistan (ISAF).
Skepticism about the BRICS and the momentum assumed by liberal internationalists has not been
scarce.6 Realist scholars have understandably been critical of the assumptions underlying these approaches as well as of the foreign policy
choices they imply. However, other scholars too have found increasing reason for criticism . For example, Barma et al (2013,
p. 56) have recently observed that, ‘Instead of a gradual trend toward global problem solving punctuated by
isolated failures, we have seen over the last several years essentially the opposite : stunningly few instances of
international cooperation on significant issues’. Moreover, Patrick (2010, p. 44) of the Council on Foreign Relations has
cautioned that, ‘The United States should be under no illusions about the ease of socializing rising nations.
Emerging powers may be clamoring for greater global influence, but they often oppose the political and
economic ground rules of the inherited Western liberal order, seek to transform existing multilateral
arrangements, and shy away from assuming significant global responsibilities’. In this regard, Laidi has argued that
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despite their own heterogeneity, the BRICS actually share a common objective in opposing Western liberal
internationalist narratives that run counter to traditional state sovereignty. Instead, they seek to protect their own
prerogatives, independence of action and national autonomy in an increasingly interdependent world
(Laidi, 2012, pp. 614–615).
Hegemony solves multiple hotspots for escalation - China, NoKo – and decline of great
powers make multipolarity impossible
Shapiro 18 {Jacob L. Shapiro is a geopolitical analyst who explains and predicts global trends. He is the
Director of Analysis for Geopolitical Futures (GPF), a position he has held since GPF’s founding in 2015.
At GPF, he oversees a team of analysts, the company’s forecasting process and the day-to-day analysis
of important geopolitical developments., May, 1, 2018, “Is a Multipolar World Emerging?”,
https://geopoliticalfutures.com/multipolar-world-emerging/}
The problem with discussions about multipolarity is that they are often laced with biases about how
people want the world to evolve rather than how the world actually works. Proponents of a multipolar
world see events as defined not by the actions or interests of a single global hegemon but rather by the
competing interests of different nodes of power. They often argue that a multipolar world, where equal powers cooperate in a way that serves their
interests, is more peaceful and desirable than an imperial Pax Americana, where all countries chafe against the overwhelming power of a single political entity. When Russian
and Chinese political figures speak about a multipolar world, they are speaking about the world they
want to see, not the world that exists today. Unsurprisingly, the world they want is one in which they
have a greater share of power than they have now. It is a particularly useful concept for countries like
Russia and China, which have a history of mistrust and very real geopolitical imperatives driving them
toward zero-sum competition. Proponents also tend to use the U.S. as both a scapegoat and a lightning rod: The root of the world’s problems is the level of power the
U.S. holds globally. The inverse is also sometimes true. Proponents of a unipolar system often dismiss setbacks in American foreign policy because setbacks don’t comport with their unrealistic
Ultimately, whether we live in a multipolar or unipolar world is an objective, not a
political, question, and it is an exceedingly important one. The answer affects how we understand the North Korea crisis, developments in Iran
and the trade skirmish with China. If the world is unipolar, then the stories dominating the headlines today are all
brushfires that the U.S. is struggling to put out and that won’t be of much consequence even five years
from now. If the world is on the verge of multipolarity, then these issues are manifestations of the competition between the U.S. and its rising challengers, and the post-1991 way of
viewing the world has become obsolete. Perhaps the simplest way to address this question is to ask what country is driving these events . On the Korean Peninsula, it
was Kim Jong Un who accelerated Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program, but it was the U.S. that
deployed three aircraft carriers to the region and threatened fire and fury against the hermit kingdom
unless it backed down. Now North and South Korea are negotiating, and even recalcitrant China is getting tough on the North. In Iran,
the nuclear deal is under strain because of U.S. threats to withdraw. European countries, led by France and Germany, don’t
want to lose access to what Europeans have always wanted out of Iran – cheap oil. If Trump refuses to renew the
sanctions waiver on May 12, banks in countries that do not reduce Iranian oil imports will face sanctions. And for most, cheap Iranian oil is not worth the price of U.S. sanctions. As for
China, the U.S. made the first move to revamp the bilateral trade relationship, because the U.S. has
more leverage in this relationship – China needs to export to the U.S. more than the U.S. needs to
import from China. In other words, the actions of the United States are still driving global developments. And for all of its mistakes (e.g., the Iraq war) and internal problems
visions of U.S. hegemony.
(e.g., the decline of the middle class’s purchasing power), the U.S. in 2018 is far more powerful than it was when the last discussion of a multipolar world began during the Nixon
administration. In 2018, there is no equivalent to the Vietnam War, nor is there anything close to the level of domestic social unrest in the late 1960s and early 1970s, despite what you might
see in the press. (This week marks the 48th anniversary of the Kent State shootings. It is difficult to imagine what the reaction to Kent State would have been if there were a 24-hour news cycle
The U.S. has a penchant for hysteria that the current media environment only magnifies, and the
world is full of would-be competitors who want to use that crisis of confidence for their own agendas.
Even so, the U.S. is still the world’s pre-eminent power. This isn’t necessarily a permanent state of
affairs. If, for example, GPF is wrong about China’s and Russia’s underlying weaknesses, a multipolar
world might be closer than I’m suggesting. But that’s a pretty big if. In 2018, the world is still unipolar.
back then.)
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The U.S. remains the global center of gravity, and the actions it takes are felt throughout the world. This
should not necessarily come as a comfort. With great power comes great responsibility. But the job of
an analyst is not to provide comfort; it is to point out where great power currently lies.
No shift to multilateralism Laidi 18 { Zaki Laïdi, Professor of International Relations at Sciences Po, was an adviser to former French
prime minister Manuel Valls. His most recent book is Le reflux de l'Europe., May, 18th, 2018, “Is
Multilateralism Finished?”, https://www.dailyeasternreport.com/2018/06/10/is-multilateralismfinished/}
Trump withdrew from the 12-country Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as one of his first official acts in office, and he ended
America’s participation in the Paris climate agreement not long thereafter. Meanwhile, his administration has launched
unprecedented attacks on the World Trade Organization, by accusing it of infringing upon American sovereignty, and by
blocking the appointment of judges to its Appellate Body. In another rebuke to the WTO this spring, the Trump administration
announced sweeping import tariffs of 25% on steel and 10% on aluminum, the costs of which will fall largely on Europe and
Japan, owing to exemptions that have been granted to other countries. The Trump administration is also threatening
to impose additional tariffs on $100 billion worth of Chinese goods. And, in an episode reminiscent of
the colonial era, it is pressuring China to drop its complaints against the United States at the WTO
without a reciprocal commitment. But if Trump’s trade policies were not evidence enough that he is
taking a nationalist sledgehammer to the rules-based system, then his decision this month to renege on
the 2015 Iran nuclear deal drives the point home. There can no longer be any doubt that he intends to
defy the multilateral institutions that the US itself played a primary role in creating and sustaining
throughout the postwar era. To be sure, certain strains of American political culture have long cast
doubt on the value of multilateralism. But with the rise of Trump, distrust has turned into outright
hostility. With the departure of more mainstream White House officials such as Gary Cohn, the former director of the
National Economic Council, and H.R. McMaster, the former national security adviser, Trump’s disdain for
internationalism is now driving his administration’s agenda. Accordingly, one of the administration’s key
objectives is to replace the rules-based system with one based solely on outcomes. To Trump’s mind,
rules and principles are irrelevant; what matters are results (or at least good ratings). The ends always
justify the means. A perfect illustration of this is Trump’s volte face on the Chinese technology firm ZTE, which his
administration recently banned from purchasing US inputs, owing to national security concerns and previous violations of US
sanctions against Iran and North Korea. Trump has now instructed the US Department of Commerce to reconsider the ban,
presumably with the hope that the Chinese will reduce exports to the US, thereby closing the US-China trade deficit and
delivering on one of his central campaign promises. The Trump administration also seems to be dispensing with
America’s allies, which the US now treats with indifference, if not contempt. As Michael Hayden, a
former director of the CIA, recently toldDer Spiegel, America has “a president who views allies as a
burden.” By this twisted logic, it stands to reason that the US should extract economic concessions from
them. Taken together, Trump’s onslaught against the rules-based system and America’s alliances
represents a veritable break from the past 70-plus years of US foreign policy. Even former President George
W. Bush, whose invasion of Iraq clearly violated the United Nations Charter, never renounced US allies. Of course, Bush did his
best to divide them, with the support of Tony Blair, but he still saw allies as necessary for conferring legitimacy on his
administration’s actions abroad. And, rather than threatening multilateral commercial arrangements, he
expanded a number of bilateral trade deals and encouraged dialogue between the US and the European
Union at the WTO. Though Trump is unprecedented in American political history, it would be a mistake
to assume that the end of his presidency will usher in a renaissance of multilateralism. The fact is that
many of the factors behind today’s crisis of multilateralism predate Trump and will persist long after he
is gone. Multilateralism is faltering at the precise moment that the international order is becoming
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more multipolar. The question we should be asking, then, is whether multilateralism and multipolarity
are compatible. One might think that in an international system where power is spread more widely
than in the past, the need for consensus through negotiation and dialogue would be commensurately
greater. But while that might be normatively true, recent events show that the world is heading in a
different direction. For example, Russia, wielding its veto power at the United Nations Security Council,
continues to stand in the way of any resolution to the war in Syria. Russian President Vladimir Putin seems
completely uninterested in addressing the crisis multilaterally, and has instead pursued a narrower peace process
alongside Iran and Turkey, with the obvious goal of diminishing America’s influence in the Middle East. The
deadlock at the WTO is equally apparent. The December 2017 WTO ministerial conference in Buenos Aires was
a failure, even after the agenda had been deliberately narrowed to deliver at least a limited result. And long before
that, the Doha Development Round – first launched in 2001 – was pronounced dead and buried. Today, with only a
few exceptions, even far more limited accords, such as 2015 expansion of the Information Technology Agreement,
which could be regarded as a template for so-called plurilateral agreements, concluded among like-minded states
on a specific issue within the broad WTO framework, stand a small chance of success. The crisis of
multilateralism at the WTO has been brewing at least since 2008, when the Doha round stalled once and
for all. When later efforts to restart the process collapsed, it was largely because of a symbolic
disagreement between the Obama administration and the Indian government on the question of
agricultural subsidies. The Obama administration’s arguments at the time were much less aggressive than what one hears from Trump and his officials, but the grievances
they addressed were not fundamentally different. The problem for the US, then as now, was that WTO negotiations no longer
serve as a useful mechanism for containing China’s rise. Ironically, the need for new containment methods was a key factor in the Obama
administration’s pursuit of the TPP and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, which was also abandoned (though at a much earlier stage, and both parties were to blame for bad
design and the wrong timetable).
Multipolarity sets off multiple scenarios for war
Donnelly 6-2-17
(Thomas Donnelley- co-director of the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American
Enterprise Institute. “Retreat from Reliability” http://www.aei.org/publication/retreat-from-reliability/
Thus we are well down the path toward a more competitive and “multipolar” world, one more prone to
conflict.) mba-alb
we are well down the path toward a more competitive and “multipolar” world, one more prone to
conflict. Political scientists and historians of the “realist” school see the period between the 1815 Congress of Vienna, which
concluded the Napoleonic wars, and the outbreak of World War I in 1914 as a successful multipolar arrangement. They tend to depict a Europe
shepherded by wise statesmen striving to maintain a balance of power. But you have to squint hard to see it that way. The European great-power balance was
wobbly by 1864, when the Prussians and Austrians snatched the duchies of Schleswig, Holstein, and Saxe-Lauenburg from the Danes. Two years later, the Prussians
turned on the Austrians and in the Seven Weeks’ War began the unification of the German states. In 1870, the
new North German Federation invaded France and by January of 1871 had occupied Paris and declared a German Empire. The period was rife
with colonial and proxy conflicts, too, perhaps most strikingly the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), with Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm
Thus
goading the Russian Czar Nicholas to be the “savior of the white race” against the “yellow peril” in Asia, and the British backing the Japanese, who scored impressive victories on land and sea.
It isn’t hard to imagine the scramble for power, influence, and advantage that would follow the
crumbling of the current international order. A rising China is likely to set the pace: Increasingly wealthy and militarily powerful,
shamed by two centuries of European exploitation, and with Han nationalism supplanting Communist
doctrine, Beijing has means and motive. But even if the United States were to grant China its own sphere
of influence in maritime Southeast Asia, Japan would contest it. Indeed, under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japan is much farther
down the road to strategic self-reliance than Merkel’s Germany or the EU, and is prepared to make military investments—perhaps even
nuclear ones. Vladimir Putin built his career as Russian leader around exploiting uncertainties about American
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commitment, beginning in Georgia in 2008 and continuing through Ukraine and the Baltic states. He saw an opportunity in Bashar al-Assad’s distress, a low-cost move that got
Russia back at the table in the Middle East and put pressure on Europe. Meddling—or appearing to meddle—in the 2016 U.S. election has been a Powerball-sized win, too. Yet American
leaders always seem ready for a “reset” that will make Putin a partner for stability. This was Obama’s bet on Iran, too. There is an abiding school of thought in Washington that Iran is our
with the prospect of regional hegemony
in sight and a military built around zealous sectarian militias and ballistic missiles, Tehran is far more
likely to step up its anti-American efforts than become a contented partner. Trump, like Obama before him, has made the defeat
of ISIS the first order of business for America in the Middle East, a fight in which Iran is our partner. Secretary of Defense James Mattis recently announced a shift
from “attrition tactics” to “annihilation.” If that mission is accomplished, will not Iran simply fill the
power vacuum? Western Europe has the most to lose in pursuing a path of self-reliance in place of
American power. This is especially so in the wake of Great Britain’s vote to leave the European Union. History is again revealing: Absent the hand of an
English “offshore balancer,” the continental balance of power has always been precarious. The problem will once
again be weakness—both German and French. Europe is something akin to a geopolitical retirement home and thus very
vulnerable to the bully on its borders. The greatest costs of multipolarity will be measured in lost prosperity and lost liberty. Brookings Institution scholar Homi
natural partner in the Middle East, especially in contrast to the Saudi royal family and its strict Wahhabi views. But
Kharas has estimated that the “global middle class” now numbers 3.2 billion—almost half the planet’s population. Perhaps not coincidentally, the acceleration of prosperity correlates strongly
There is also a similar correlation between American
power and free governments, not least here at home. So, far from creating a repressive national security state, the period from 1945 onward
has seen a steady expansion of civil and social liberties of all kinds—in matters of race, gender, sexual orientation, and more—in the
with the end of the Cold War; in 1985 the global middle class was only 1 billion people.
United States.
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US Not Overstretched
The threat of Chinese revisionism has increased US hegemonic sustainability
Beckley 22 – Jeane Kirkpatrick Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, associate professor
at Tufts University (Michael, March/April 2022, "Enemies of My Enemy," Foreign Affairs,
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2021-02-14/china-new-world-order-enemies-my-enemy)//KH
The international order is falling apart, and everyone seems to know how to fix it. According to some, the United States just
needs to rededicate itself to leading the liberal order it helped found some 75 years ago. Others argue that the world’s great
powers should form a concert to guide the international community into a new age of multipolar
cooperation. Still others call for a grand bargain that divides the globe into stable spheres of influence.
What these and other visions of international order have in common is an assumption that global
governance can be designed and imposed from the top down. With wise statesmanship and ample summitry, the
international jungle can be tamed and cultivated. Conflicts of interest and historical hatreds can be negotiated away and replaced with win-win
cooperation.
The history of international order, however, provides little reason for confidence in top-down,
cooperative solutions. The strongest orders in modern history—from Westphalia in the seventeenth century to the liberal
international order in the twentieth—were not inclusive organizations working for the greater good of humanity.
Rather, they were alliances built by great powers to wage security competition against their main rivals.
Fear and loathing of a shared enemy, not enlightened calls to make the world a better place, brought
these orders together. Progress on transnational issues, when achieved, emerged largely as a byproduct of
hardheaded security cooperation. That cooperation usually lasted only as long as a common threat
remained both present and manageable. When that threat dissipated or grew too large, the orders collapsed. Today, the
liberal order is fraying for many reasons, but the underlying cause is that the threat it was originally designed to
defeat—Soviet communism—disappeared three decades ago. None of the proposed replacements to the current order
have stuck because there hasn’t been a threat scary or vivid enough to compel sustained cooperation among the key players.
Until now. Through a surge of repression and aggression, China has frightened countries near and far. It is
acting belligerently in East Asia, trying to carve out exclusive economic zones in the global economy, and
exporting digital systems that make authoritarianism more effective than ever. For the first time since the Cold
War, a critical mass of countries face serious threats to their security, welfare, and ways of life—all
emanating from a single source.
This moment of clarity has triggered a flurry of responses. China’s
neighbors are arming themselves and aligning with
outside powers to secure their territory and sea-lanes. Many of the world’s largest economies are
collectively developing new trade, investment, and technology standards that implicitly discriminate
against China. Democracies are gathering to devise strategies for combating authoritarianism at home and abroad, and new international
organizations are popping up to coordinate the battle. Seen in real time, these efforts look scattershot. Step back from the day-to-day
commotion, however, and a fuller picture emerges: for better or worse, competition with China is forging a new international order.
ORDERS OF EXCLUSION
The modern liberal mind associates international order with peace and harmony. Historically, however,
international orders have been more about keeping rivals down than bringing everyone together. As the
international relations theorist Kyle Lascurettes has argued, the major orders of the past four centuries were “orders of
exclusion,” designed by dominant powers to ostracize and outcompete rivals. Order building wasn’t a
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restraint on geopolitical conflict; it was power politics by other means, a cost-effective way to contain
adversaries short of war.
Fear of an enemy, not faith in friends, formed the bedrock of each era’s order, and members developed a common set of norms by defining
themselves in opposition to that enemy. In doing so, they tapped into humanity’s most primordial driver of collective action. Sociologists call it
“the in-group/out-group dynamic.” Philosophers call it “Sallust’s theorem,” after the ancient historian who argued that fear of Carthage held
the Roman Republic together. In political science, the
analogous concept is negative partisanship, the tendency for
voters to become intensely loyal to one political party mainly because they despise its rival.
For the first time since the Cold War, a
critical mass of countries face serious threats to their security, welfare, and
ways of life.
This negative dynamic pervades the history of order building. In 1648, the kingdoms that won the Thirty Years’ War enshrined rules of
sovereign statehood in the Peace of Westphalia to undermine the authority of the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire. Great Britain
and its allies designed the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht to contain France by delegitimizing territorial expansion through royal marriages and the
assertion of dynastic ties, Louis XIV’s preferred method of amassing power. The Concert of Europe, the post-Napoleonic peace established in
Vienna in 1815, was used by conservative monarchies to forestall the rise of liberal revolutionary regimes. The victors of World War I built the
interwar order to hold Germany and Bolshevik Russia in check. After World War II, the Allies initially designed a global order, centered on the
United Nations, to prevent a return of Nazi-style fascism and mercantilism. When the onset of the Cold War quickly hamstrung that global
order, however, the West created a separate order to exclude and outcompete Soviet communism. For the duration of the Cold War, the world
was divided into two orders: the dominant one led by Washington, and a poorer one centered on Moscow.
The main features of today’s liberal order are direct descendants of the United States’ Cold War alliance. After the Soviets decided not to join
the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (gatt), these institutions were repurposed
as agents of capitalist expansion—first, to rebuild capitalist economies and, later, to promote globalization. The Marshall Plan laid the
foundation for the European Community by lavishing U.S. aid on governments that agreed to expel communists from their ranks and work
toward an economic federation. NATO created a united front against the Red Army. The chain of U.S. alliances ringing East Asia was
constructed to contain communist expansion there, especially from China and North Korea. U.S. engagement with China, which lasted from the
1970s to the 2010s, was a gambit to exploit the Sino-Soviet split.
Each of these initiatives was an element of an order designed first and foremost to defeat the Soviet Union. In the absence of the Cold War
threat, Japan and West Germany would not have tolerated prolonged U.S. military occupations on their soil. The
British, the French,
and the Germans would not have pooled their industrial resources. The United States—which had spent the
previous two centuries ducking international commitments and shielding its economy with tariffs—would not have thrown its
weight behind international institutions. Nor would it have provided security guarantees, massive aid, and easy market access to
dozens of countries, including the former Axis powers. Only the threat of a nuclear-armed, communist superpower
could compel so many countries to set aside their conflicting interests and long-standing rivalries and
build the strongest security community and free-trade regime in history.
States’ reaction to multiple spheres of influence proves a regional shift away from
Chinese revisionism and towards the USA!
Green and Brands 22 – *senior vice president for Asia and Japan Chair at CSIS and chair in modern
and contemporary Japanese politics and foreign policy at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service
at Georgetown University,**Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins
SAIS, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and columnist for Bloomberg (Mike*
interviewing Hal**, February 25, 2022, “Twilight Struggle: Lessons from the Cold War for China Strategy
Today,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, https://www.csis.org/analysis/twilight-strugglelessons-cold-war-china-strategy-today)//KH
Mike Green: You have a whole chapter on the contest and the periphery, and there was a great... The Soviets
and the Chinese had
an advantage because, for example, the fight in the Korean Peninsula or Vietnam was a continental
Asian fight. They had interior lines. We had to go across the vast maritime space, and we ended up getting sucked into continental wars.
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The peripheral problems this time, with a few exceptions, are maritime. That's
different, isn't it? It's South China Sea, it's
East China Sea. It's increasingly not only the first but the second island chain. It's closer to home, and it's
sort of more vital in the sense of American sea lanes and the, if you will, Anglo-American source of
hegemony for 400 years. How do we think about these peripheral risks and which ones worry you, like Taiwan?
Mike Green: Riffing off what I just said, to me, it sort of says, "Worry more about the maritime periphery than the continental." But how do we
think about these peripheral challenges? We're not looking at a direct US-China fight. It's
about the periphery. It's about third
states. It's about spheres of influence and all that. How do you think about it? What are the ones that worry you, and what does
it mean that it's now increasingly maritime and, therefore, in our face?
Hal Brands: So I think there's maybe at least three ways of thinking about this issue, and so one area that I worry about is the one that you
flagged, which is basically the maritime periphery of East Asia, right? You
think a lot about East China Sea, South China Sea,
and the Taiwan Strait as potential US-China flash points. In fact, those areas are so central to the
competition that I don't know that we would even describe them as peripheral. I mean, that might be the
core of this competition.
Hal Brands: East
Asia might be the core in another way as well in that it's probably the most economically
dynamic region of the world, or at least it has been for a while, and so it's not like fighting in Southeast Asia during
the 1960s when that was the Third World, it was economically underdeveloped, and so on and so forth. It's a bit
of a different situation. But, nonetheless, I think that's where the potential for direct conflict between the US and
China is most severe because that's where our security commitments, or our ambiguous security
commitments in the case of Taiwan, overlap most directly with things that China is increasingly defining
as its own vital interests and indicating that it is very serious about pursuing.
Hal Brands: The
second one would be, I think, kind of the Eurasian hinterland of China, and so one thing that we
Jinping
doesn't forget this. Remember he debuted the Belt and Road Initiative in Central Asia, and so there's certainly
a realization, I think, in Chinese policy that China needs to be thinking about its territorial hinterland as potentially
an area to expand influence in the context of a US-China competition, maybe just because you want better
access to and sort of overland access to resources coming from the Middle East, for instance, so that they're
not subject to interdiction if they have to pass through the Strait of Malacca or something like that, but also
because the Chinese have been talking more and more about trying to create, sort of, a Eurasian space that
is oriented toward China economically and otherwise. So that might actually be a pretty good parallel for kind of the Cold War
sometimes forget when we think about China is that it's a really big country that reaches really far into Eurasia, in fact, and Xi
periphery.
Hal Brands: Then the
third area is maybe the developing world or the developing regions writ large. So when we think
particularly about technological competition, it seems fairly unlikely... I mean, it seemed more likely about three years ago that China
is going to get some sort of technological hammer lock on key American allies in East Asia and Europe. Most of those
countries have started throwing up firewalls against Chinese technological influence in one way or
another. It's more plausible when you think about developing countries in Africa, in Central Asia, in Latin America,
Southeast Asia, places where Chinese technology will be more attractive for price reasons above all else
and where some of the security concerns are perhaps less keenly felt. So maybe that's a third area where you see peripheral
conflict playing out in a US-China context.
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China is threatening, but the US is an early stage of competition. Sustainability indicts
assume the squo, not the longer-term trends of US strength. No safe alternative to US
hegemony.
Green and Brands 22 – *senior vice president for Asia and Japan Chair at CSIS and chair in modern
and contemporary Japanese politics and foreign policy at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service
at Georgetown University,**Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins
SAIS, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and columnist for Bloomberg (Mike*
interviewing Hal**, February 25, 2022, “Twilight Struggle: Lessons from the Cold War for China Strategy
Today,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, https://www.csis.org/analysis/twilight-strugglelessons-cold-war-china-strategy-today)//KH
Mike Green: My favorite quote of the people you quote in the book is the quote you have of Kennan, who argues that... At the very beginning
of thinking about containment, he argues there
is no real security in this strategic competition we were starting out
with vis-a-vis the Soviets, no real security and no alternative to living dangerously. That really stuck with me
because we are, it seems to me, at a cathartic moment in American strategic thought , and, as you know well, by
the way, Australia and the Japanese and a lot of other allies, about this problem, and that just was kind of
chilling. There is no alternative to living dangerously. That, to me, is the strategic point of discontinuity we've hit in the last
few years. We now realize there's no responsible stakeholder. There's no new model of great power
relations. There is no alternative to living dangerously. That really stuck with me. But that's a little bit of a depressing note
to strike, so how would you characterize... What does it mean, in your words, to be preparing for a long struggle?
Hal Brands: So it's a great question, and I think maybe I'll start by starting in the present and then working my way backwards. You
mentioned the transition period in US-China relations that probably began about five years ago with the
advent of the Trump presidency when we decided that the responsible stakeholder was more or less
dead and we were moving into a period of competition. In a way, I think that realization kind of felt liberating for
a lot of American policymakers. I mean, there was less concern about not rocking the boat in the US-China
relationship, and there was freedom to do things that the United States might have wanted to do but felt constrained to do in economic
competition or technological competition for a while.
Hal Brands: But I think we've reached the point now where it's actually more sobering than anything else. I mean, competition is not free of
danger. We've learned that very much over the past year, both in the US-Russia and the US-China relationship, where I think when
a lot of
people were thinking about competition with China even a couple of years ago, it was sort of in this
abstract way and now you realize that, very tangibly, there is a danger of military conflict that attends any
geopolitical competition. It could happen in the Taiwan Strait. It could happen in Eastern Europe. It
could happen in a number of places.
Hal Brands: So it's important going into the study of great power competition not to have a sanitized view of what it means, and this takes us
back to the Cold War, where we look back on the Cold War now and we think of it as the “Long Peace.” The exaggerated version of this is
almost that, you know, there was a 45-year principled agreement to compete short of war but not go into war, and that really, obviously,
wasn't how it worked. There were pervasive fears of global military conflict during the Cold War. The United States had to think very seriously
about how to deter such a conflict or to fight it if it occurred, and so competition was really kind of a terrifying experience, especially given the
presence of nuclear weapons in that competition and how new and terrifying they were. So I think Kennan's quote is quite appropriate in the
sense that when we talk about competition, we're actually talking about something that can be quite perilous.
Mike Green: Looking at the Cold War precedent, again,
this is not the Cold War again, but embarking on a long struggle
like this is an experience where you got to look back at the last time you did it, as you argue throughout the book.
How prepared do you think the American people are? How much consensus is there behind this
competition compared with, say, 1948, '49? The Korean War was cathartic, but before the Korean War, before June 1950, you
had the America Firsters, you had isolationists, you had people opposing NATO. It was not as if the entire American population read the “Long
Telegram” and got it, right? Where are we today, do you think, compared to the beginning of that struggle?
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Hal Brands: In some ways, we're better placed than we were back then for the reason that you allude to, which is
it's a mistake to think back that there was this rock solid Cold War consensus that came about in 1946 and lasted through the end of the Cold
War. That’s not how it happened. There were left-wing critiques of containment in the late '40s. There were right-wing critiques of containment
in the late 1940s. There
was not an acceptance, really, until the '50s, maybe even the '60s, that the United
States was going to maintain this network of global military and diplomatic commitments that it had kind of
been left with after World War II and took up in the course of the Cold War.
Hal Brands: So if you looked at where we are today, you know, the
United States actually has a lot of the things that it
needs to compete with China and Russia, right? We have a network of alliances that's still probably our
foremost tool in competition. We don't have to build that from scratch. We don't have to build an intelligence
community from scratch, a national security state from scratch in the way that we did during the Cold
War. So I think we're better prepared in those ways. Where we're maybe a little bit worse prepared comes from the fact that I think that the
consensus on competition, and let's focus on China here, is probably broader than it is deep right now, and so there is a bipartisan
consensus that China is a competitor of the United States, whatever that means. It came from the Trump
administration. It's come from the Biden administration. It has bipartisan support in Congress, and the polling on this stuff
indicates that the American people are more or less on board with that proposition. But when you start getting into specific issue areas, I think
the consensus looks a little bit shallower.
Hal Brands: So when you start asking people, "Should the United States restrict outbound investment into China to prevent Chinese companies
from using American money to pursue the goals of the People's Liberation Army” and things like that, you start getting less consensus. When it
comes to aspects of technological competition, when it comes to, you know, things that might actually pose some difficult choices for the
United States economically or politically, I think there's less consensus. So I think we're
still at a fairly early stage of the
competition in that respect, and part of the reason is that, and I'd maybe put an asterisk next to this
statement, there hasn't been something quite like the Korean War to have the galvanizing factor in
American public opinion. COVID maybe comes close. I think COVID had a pretty disastrous effect on
China's global image, and it certainly had a liberating effect on China hawks within the United States, but I'm not sure that the effect is
as profound as some of the early Cold War stuff was. So, for those reasons, I think we're in a little bit better position but also maybe a little bit
more tenuous position than we were in, say, 1951.
Mike Green: And maybe the biggest difference... And, again, you're not saying this is a new Cold War. But in terms of using that experience to
understand the dynamics of geopolitical competition and what it means for the American way of government and strategy, probably the
biggest difference, you'd agree, I think, is you didn't have such a stake in Soviet economic interests. You didn't have, you know, prominent Wall
Street financiers, to this day, calling for basically no decoupling and faith in the marketplace with China. You didn't have soybean farmers in
most states of the union getting most of their income from exports to China. You didn't have all of these stakeholders within the US system
who had so much to gain from the Chinese economy.
Mike Green: You didn't talk a lot about that in the book, but how would you amend the lessons, given that piece of it? We've surveyed this, you
know, at CSIS, and both thought leaders and the American public are quite willing to decouple on high tech and do things like that. But when it
comes to stopping agricultural exports or things that benefit us or cheap consumer goods, there's not a lot of support, and that's very different
from the Soviet Union. We had no economic relationship, really, that affected average Americans. So what do you do with that one when
you're trying to look at the parallels and the lessons?
Hal Brands: Yeah. What's different is that there
are very powerful interests in American society that have a very
strong stake in a stable US-China relationship and an open US-China relationship, and that's not entirely
a bad thing. I mean, I think that the key is to think not so much about broad or complete economic decoupling
as to try to figure out what are the areas in which we absolutely cannot be dependent on China for
critical goods or critical inputs? What are the areas in which we absolutely cannot be enabling China's development? Presumably,
we don't want to make it easier for Huawei to wire the world with 5G telecommunications, things like
that. And then what are the larger areas of not particularly sensitive or strategic trade where it's fine if
there's a particularly extensive US-China relationship? I don't know that China buying a lot of agricultural
products from the United States is necessarily a point of strategic vulnerability for us. I think, if anything, it
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testifies to a strategic vulnerability of China's, which is that they are highly dependent on imports of
food and other goods from abroad.
Post-Ukraine, a European economic shift means the US’ position as a global hegemon
is secure
Brands 22 – Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global
Affairs at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the
Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (Hal Brands, May, 21, 2022, "Democracies Can OutCompete the China-Russia Alliance," https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/3657196/halbrands/democracies-can-out-compete-china-russia-alliance)//KH
The economic trauma of the Ukraine
War is only beginning: Energy shocks, food-supply disruption and
commodity shortages will have growing impact as the conflict persists. The war, moreover, is just part of an
acceleratng geo-economic realignment.
The golden age of globalization, when countries pursued interdependence with minimal fear of
insecurity, is over. The global economy is now being reshaped by competition and conflict. That will
create some opportunities for the US to strengthen its position — as well as a whole lot of worldwide turmoil.
A remarkable aspect of the post-Cold
War era was that calculations of economic efficiency so often trumped
calculations of geopolitical risk. An era that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall was dominated by the pursuit of integration across
traditional strategic divides.
A web of trade, financial
and technological ties developed between China and the world’s democracies.
European countries became highly reliant on Russian energy (notably Germany) and investment (the
UK). The pursuit of profit was accompanied by a diplomatic rationale — that economic entanglement would create a
common interest in global stability, mitigating whatever dangers might otherwise result from trading with a prospective enemy.
That rationale proved faulty. Globalization
increased Chinese and Russian capabilities without meaningfully
decreasing their ambitions. By the mid-2010s, global tensions were increasing and interdependence came to be seen as a source of
vulnerability.
Worried that Beijing might translate technological primacy into geopolitical primacy, President Donald Trump’s administration urged other
nations to wall off their 5G telecommunications networks against Chinese influence. It sought to forestall completion of the Nord Stream II
pipeline between Russia and Germany, lest Europe become diplomatically paralyzed by dependence on Moscow’s energy.
When Beijing then threatened to withhold critical pharmaceutical components amid the Covid-19
pandemic, it showed how complex supply chains could be wielded as strategic weapons.
In this context, the war in Ukraine
has thrown global integration into reverse. Western companies that pushed
into Russia after the Cold War are being forced to flee, with McDonald’s Corp. being the latest (and perhaps most
symbolic). US export controls have severed Russia’s access to advanced semiconductors; Germany and
other European democracies are rapidly undoing decades of economic engagement. This conflict-driven
decoupling may simply be a preview of what comes next.
President Xi Jinping’s China was already pursuing what Matthew Pottinger, deputy national security
adviser in the Trump administration, calls an “offensive decoupling” strategy — a program meant to insulate the
country from Western pressure and give it tremendous coercive power by dominating critical technologies. Xi’s “dual circulation”
program is meant to develop China’s internal market and make the country less reliant on external
markets that might slam shut in a crisis.
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It seems inevitable that this campaign will accelerate. China, whose relations with Washington are in a nosedive, can hardly leave itself
susceptible to the sort of punishment the US and its allies have imposed on Moscow.
Similar processes are underway across the democratic world. Europe
is moving to wean itself off Russian oil and natural
gas. The US is considering sharper curbs on investment in China; Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is
pushing “friend-shoring,” or relocating production to countries aligned with Washington.
The administration of President Joe Biden is also working with allies, such as Japan, to create technological supply chains and innovation
ecosystems that leave China on the outside.
It has refused, so far, to remove Trump’s tariffs on China, a step that would help ease inflation, for fear of surrendering a diplomatic advantage.
This turns the post-Cold War norm on its head: Calculations
of geopolitical risk are now trumping calculations of
economic efficiency.
To be sure, interdependence is
hardly a thing of the past. US trade in goods with China was more than $650
billion last year, and American companies such as Tesla Inc. and Apple Inc. are doing more, not less,
business with Beijing.
But the
basic trend is toward a more balkanized global economy, in which key rivals aim to seal off
dangerous vulnerabilities and manipulate the terms of interdependence to their advantage. And if recent
experience is any indication, this process will happen gradually until it happens rapidly — when a grave crisis
erupts, as in Ukraine, and sunders ties that had seemed unbreakable not long before.
Structurally speaking, the US is well positioned. America and the other advanced democracies possess a
clear majority of global production and wealth. If they, plus key developing states such as India, deepen
their integration with each other while limiting it with their rivals, they can create a free-world economy
more vibrant than anything China, let alone Russia, can muster.
But the
current crisis has also revealed how delinquent the democratic world has been in planning for the
dramatic economic interruptions a major geopolitical showdown involving China would cause. And even if
the US and its allies get their act together, no one should underestimate the dislocations headed our way.
As Ukraine demonstrates, obtaining
greater geo-economic security will require rupturing supply chains,
upending trade and investment patterns, and otherwise revisiting the lucrative efficiencies of the postCold War era. A world that is more divided geopolitically will be more turbulent economically as well.
Alliance post-Trump proves East Asia and Europe will always be dependent on the US
– Ukraine marks a shift towards optimism
Kagan and Neil 22 – Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution; adjunct professor at Georgetown
(Andrew Neil interviewing Robert Kagan, 5-10-2022, "Episode 3: Robert Kagan," Tortoise,
https://www.tortoisemedia.com/audio/episode-3-robert-kagan/)//KH
Andrew Neil: So, given Europe’s robust response to the invasion of Ukraine so far, are Americans still from Mars and Europeans still from
Venus, as you once memorably wrote?
Robert Kagan: I still think it’s the case and, by the way, for entirely understandable reasons that the United States is still more prone to use
force in situations than Europeans are. That derives to some extent from European capabilities; Europe doesn’t really have much in the way of
force projection capabilities and up until now, I think it has been quite clear that Europeans haven’t wanted it. The discussion has certainly been
taking place for decades, right? How many times have we said that the Europeans, that the Europeans have said that they are going to build up
their military? They haven’t; they’ve made their choice. Maybe that will change to some extent but I don’t see Europe playing that kind of,
becoming its own sort of stand-alone superpower, even though I would be delighted if it did.
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So, it is partly capability and capability to some extent drives decision-making but of course, on the other hand – and this is something that I
wish Americans were more sensitive to when it comes to countries like Germany – Europe
has a past that is fraught with
conflict and nationalism and two major bloody conflicts in the 20th century and for Europe to be
inclined toward peace is of great benefit to the world and to the United States. I think we should, to some extent,
welcome the degree to which Europeans are more peacefully inclined than maybe they have been in previous centuries and I wouldn’t be quick
to want to push them in a different direction, quite honestly.
I think it means, and this is where it gets complicated, is it means to
some extent Europe is going to continue to depend
for its security on the American security umbrella. America should be willing, in fact perfectly willing to
provide that security umbrella in the interests of global peace and there is going to be that disparity
between the two.
Andrew Neil: Let me move on to some wider considerations of American foreign policy and its place in the world. Is
there not less of an
appetite for America, at home and abroad, to play its dominant role on the world stage because of the
failure of the US interventionism that you’ve espoused?
Robert Kagan: That’s
not what it seems to be the case, does it? I mean, it’s interesting to me how frequently since the Iraq war,
to take the obvious example, Americans have been very slow to get over the Iraq war and I would agree with
you that it has certainly made Americans less inclined to use force in situations where I think in
retrospect they ought to have, for instance Syria, to keep Russia out and to deal with the horrific humanitarian disaster visited upon
the Syrian people by Assad, but yes, there is no question that Iraq and to some extent Afghanistan, have had that effect.
The effect on the rest of the world I think is much less clear. I don’t notice in Japan any less of a desire to
hold on to the US security relationship. In fact, they continue to be demandeurs in that relationship, as
are other nations in East Asia and what we saw in the case of Europe was that the United States was not only
called upon to play a critical role but that role was welcomed and in fact, the one reaction that I most noted in Europe in
recent years was the horror with which Europeans greeted the Trump administration and the whole idea of
America First and Trump’s discussion about perhaps getting out of Nato and Trump’s general hostility to
the idea that the United States should do anything for Europeans, to provide Europeans with any security. And what
was the European reaction to that? It was horror and hopes and prayers that we would get back to an
administration like we have now, which is willing to play that role.
Most people and most countries that are made up of people, they have one question on their mind at any given moment, which is are you
there for us or not when we need you? That is the question that people ask in East Asia, it is definitely the question that people ask in Eastern
Europe and when they ask that question, they don’t talk about Iraq, they talk about the fact that they
want the United States there
to protect them and to help them protect themselves.
Andrew Neil: But the American people have got a right to ask a question too.
Robert Kagan: And they do and they have.
Andrew Neil: You want us there to help you but what are you doing to help yourself? Look how Germany has allowed its military to be hollowed
out and is only now, in the aftermath of Ukraine, doing anything about it.
Robert Kagan: Well, as I say, I’ve never quite understood why Americans should be eager for Germany to become a big military nation again but
if that’s what Americans think they want, I understand the impulse, it’s not agreeing with it. But mostly I think you’re right, of course,
Americans – and by the way, that’s why I was surprised by the reaction in this case, right. I
would have expected, based on what
you’re saying and based on what American public opinion have looked like at least for the last decade or
so, that there would be less interest in a European crisis of this nature than there has been. But look at what’s
happened in the United States, it’s been almost a revolution of American public opinion, which will
increase by the way inevitably, but the dissenting views have been few and far between in the United
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States so what that indicates to me is that there is more in that reservoir than we may have thought in terms of
American willingness, the American public’s willingness to play a more active global role.
Of course, we’ve
seen reverses like this in the past. You brought up the 1930s, clearly that was a major reversal of American
eventually by Pearl Harbour but not initially by Pearl Harbour. I mean American’s
opinion began to shift after Munich, after Kristallnacht, after the invasion of Poland etc, so again you have to go
public opinion, driven
back to this understanding that Americans believe they live in a safe corner of the world, where the rest of the world can’t touch them and it is
very easy for them to say ‘Why did we get involved in here and why did we get involved there?’, especially when the wars don’t turn out the
way we want them to but does that kill off that sentiment for international involvement of the United States? I would say clearly not.
Andrew Neil: I can see why America, you can argue that America still has an appetite to protect existing democracies and it is democracies,
they’re our allies – Japan because of China, European democracies because of Russia and so on, but it doesn’t, I would suggest to you, have an
appetite now for your kind of liberal interventionism. I mean, it’s often bloody efforts to spread democracy this century, has rather than
succeeding, we’ve had a century of growing authoritarianism and autocracy. So-called liberal interventionism has hardly been deemed a
success.
Robert Kagan: Well, first of all, it’s
a complete myth that the United States went into Iraq and certainly went into
Afghanistan in order to promote democracy. The reasons why the United States went into Iraq – rightly
or wrongly – were driven by security interests and fears, especially after 9/11. It was not …
Andrew Neil: There was a whole floor of the State Department devising plans to rebuild an Iraq based on democracy, I saw it myself. It was
called Iraq Shack.
Robert Kagan: I understand that but that was the … the
purpose of invading Iraq was not to spread democracy. Now, as
the United States invades a country, it invariably decides the best way to leave that
country is to leave it a democracy. That was the case in Germany and Japan, it was the case in Central American countries where
you know, once
we were more or less – usually less – successful in accomplishing that goal but the question is, if you want to say an American foreign policy,
anyone’s American foreign policy, certainly my foreign policy was aimed at spreading democracy by force: that’s just a myth, okay, that’s a
myth that’s been created by people who want to oppose these things for one reason or another, which is fine. There was a perfectly good
reason to oppose the war in Iraq but that’s not what that was about.
Now, the fact is however, I am interested to hear you say that the world has just become incredibly authoritarian. Russia
and China
have been authoritarian all along but it is driven by this single rule by one individual and I do think, by
the way, to some extent that is an indication of how the order has weakened in recent decades and I don’t
deny that the order, the liberal order, had weakened. So, countries that used to at least feel that they needed, even dictatorships
needed to put up the pretence of having elections to legitimise their rule, I think in recent years they have felt less and less the need to do so
because the democratic idea has been in retreat, by the way, just the way the democratic idea was in retreat in the 1920s and 30s as well.
But I don’t
think that what we have witnessed is the triumph of authoritarianism and I would say it is even
harder to say that today where it seems to me if any country in the world, if any regime in the world is in
peril right now, it is more likely to be Moscow’s than any democratic countries.
Andrew Neil: Part of your case for liberal interventionism is that there are global responsibilities which only America can bear. Would it not be
more honest to say, it’s got global interests that it needs to pursue?
Robert Kagan: You would have to explain to me exactly why the United States has more interest in stopping China’s expansion or Russia’s
expansion, for that matter, than any of the dozens of countries that lie around their borders. It
seems to me that the United
States has less interest and that this is not driven, American policy is not driven exclusively by what
Americans perceive as their interests except insofar as Americans perceive their interest as defending
the democratic world order, which by the way, most Americans would not say was their goal even though I
think it ought to be their goal, okay.
It is simply the case that Americans at a certain point, I would say World War II and aftermath, decided that they didn’t want to live in a world
that was dominated by authoritarians in Europe and Asia but the anti-interventionists who argue that America would not have been threatened
if Hitler had won in Germany and Japan had won in Asia, I don’t think that we can know for sure that they were wrong about that. So, we have
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to be careful about saying these are American interests because, in many cases, what Americans have done is they have incorporated the
interests of their allies as their own, but if you just look, if you are sitting in Iowa today, what do you care what happens in Ukraine?
Andrew Neil: But as we move now well into the 2020s and the 20th century becomes a bit of a memory, does America, do
Americans still
have the stomach to be a global player on a major scale in Europe and East Asia?
Robert Kagan: Well, it’s a good question. I don’t think I can say with any certainty that I know what the answer is. They have in the past played
simultaneously large roles in both Asia and Europe; they certainly are capable of doing it. I think one of the things that we’ve discovered in this
crisis is how sort of healthy and vibrant those relationships really are. You know, I think the most extraordinary part of this whole thing of
course was the financial response and the ability to get countries
in Asia which are not at all threatened by what is
going on in Ukraine, to take part in these sanctions because they want to make sure that when the same thing happens to
them, the Europeans will then support them and the United States will support them. To me that’s a sign of real health on the
part of the overall structure of the system, which makes it easier for Americans – and that’s why I wanted to make
that point.
It makes it easier for Americans to sustain such a role when they feel that the allies are also heavily
engaged and is it going to help in American politics if Germany fulfils the recent commitment to increase
their defence budget? Yes, it will. It will be an argument for those who want to say these alliances are important and so I do think it
is quite possible that they will sustain it but the problem is of course, we don’t know what events are going to happen, we don’t know what
disasters will befall us. We don’t know for instance – and I know this is of interest to you – what the political situation in the United States is
going to be after 2024 for instance.
Andrew Neil: And I want to come onto that in a minute for our final part but the reason I ask if America still has the stomach, because you will
know better than me that the demands of Europe, where the Russian bear is still active, and Asia where you have this enormous rising power in
China, they require very different military capabilities. One is land-based, boots on the ground, armour; the other is amphibious and air. That’s
a big military build that America would have to pay to do both.
Robert Kagan: Well, I think it ought to have been doing both all along in any case and, you know, as it happens, if
the United States had
favoured anything in the past ten years, it has favoured preparing for a China contingency, not a Russia
contingency and the good news I think on the Russia side of it is, well look, we were able to [33:57] tens of thousands of troops, the troop
build-up in Eastern Europe right now is pretty substantial and again, we may have the luxury afforded us
of having seen that the Russian military does not have the kind of formidable capabilities that we may
have thought.
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A2: Offshore Balancing Solves
Offshore balancing causes global instability and conflict
Hal Brands 15. On the faculty at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University The Elliott School
of International Affairs The Washington Quarterly Summer 2015 38:2 pp. 7–28
The fundamental reason is that both
U.S. influence and international stability are thoroughly interwoven with a
robust U.S. forward presence. Regarding influence, the protection that Washington has afforded its allies has
equally afforded the United States great sway over those allies’ policies.43 During the Cold War and after,
for instance, the United States has used the influence provided by its security posture to veto allies’ pursuit of
nuclear weapons, to obtain more advantageous terms in financial and trade agreements, and even to affect the
composition of allied nations’ governments.44 More broadly, it has used its alliances as vehicles for shaping political, security, and economic agendas in key regions
and bilateral relationships, thus giving the United States an outsized voice on a range of important issues. To be clear, this influence has never been as pervasive as
U.S. officials might like, or as some observers might imagine. But by any reasonable standard of comparison, it has nonetheless been remarkable. One
can
tell a similar story about the relative stability of the post-war order. As even some leading offshore balancers have
acknowledged, the lack of conflict in regions like Europe in recent decades is not something that has
occurred naturally. It has occurred because the “American pacifier” has suppressed precisely the
dynamics that previously fostered geopolitical turmoil. That pacifier has limited arms races and
security competitions by providing the protection that allows other countries to under-build their
militaries. It has soothed historical rivalries by affording a climate of security in which powerful
countries like Germany and Japan could be revived economically and reintegrated into thriving and
fairly cooperative regional orders. It has induced caution in the behavior of allies and adversaries alike,
deterring aggression and dissuading other destabilizing behavior. As John Mearsheimer has noted, the United States
“effectively acts as a night watchman,” lending order to an otherwise disorderly and anarchical environment.45 What would happen if
Washington backed away from this role? The most logical answer is that both U.S. influence and global
stability would suffer. With respect to influence, the United States would effectively be surrendering
the most powerful bargaining chip it has traditionally wielded in dealing with friends and allies, and
jeopardizing the position of leadership it has used to shape bilateral and regional agendas for decades.
The consequences would seem no less damaging where stability is concerned. As offshore balancers
have argued, it may be that U.S. retrenchment would force local powers to spend more on defense,
while perhaps assuaging certain points of friction with countries that feel threatened or encircled by U.S.
presence. But it equally stands to reason that removing the American pacifier would liberate the more
destabilizing influences that U.S. policy had previously stifled. Long-dormant security competitions
might reawaken as countries armed themselves more vigorously; historical antagonisms between old
rivals might reemerge in the absence of a robust U.S. presence and the reassurance it provides.
Moreover, countries that seek to revise existing regional orders in their favor—think Russia in Europe,
or China in Asia—might indeed applaud U.S. retrenchment, but they might just as plausibly feel
empowered to more assertively press their interests. If the United States has been a kind of Leviathan in
key regions, Mearsheimer acknowledges, then “take away that Leviathan and there is likely to be big
trouble.”46 Scanning the global horizon today, one can easily see where such trouble might arise. In
Europe, a revisionist Russia is already destabilizing its neighbors and contesting the post-Cold War
settlement in the region. In the Gulf and broader Middle East, the threat of Iranian ascendancy has
stoked region-wide tensions manifesting in proxy wars and hints of an incipient arms race, even as that
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region also contends with a severe threat to its stability in the form of the Islamic State. In East Asia, a
rising China is challenging the regional status quo in numerous ways, sounding alarms among its
neighbors—many of whom also have historical grievances against each other. In these circumstances,
removing the American pacifier would likely yield not low-cost stability, but increased conflict and
upheaval. That conflict and upheaval, in turn, would be quite damaging to U.S. interests even if it did
not result in the nightmare scenario of a hostile power dominating a key region. It is hard to imagine,
for instance, that increased instability and acrimony would produce the robust multilateral
cooperation necessary to deal with transnational threats from pandemics to piracy. More problematic
still might be the economic consequences. As scholars like Michael Mandelbaum have argued, the
enormous progress toward global prosperity and integration that has occurred since World War II (and
now the Cold War) has come in the climate of relative stability and security provided largely by the
United States.47 One simply cannot confidently predict that this progress would endure amid
escalating geopolitical competition in regions of enormous importance to the world economy. Perhaps
the greatest risk that a strategy of offshore balancing would run, of course, is that a key region might
not be able to maintain its own balance following U.S. retrenchment. That prospect might have
seemed far-fetched in the early post-Cold War era, and it remains unlikely in the immediate future. But
in East Asia particularly, the rise and growing assertiveness of China has highlighted the medium- to
long-term danger that a hostile power could in fact gain regional primacy. If China’s economy continues
to grow rapidly, and if Beijing continues to increase military spending by 10 percent or more each year,
then its neighbors will ultimately face grave challenges in containing Chinese power even if they join
forces in that endeavor. This possibility, ironically, is one to which leading advocates of retrenchment
have been attuned. “The United States will have to play a key role in countering China,” Mearshimer
writes, “because its Asian neighbors are not strong enough to do it by themselves.”48 If this is true, however, then
offshore balancing becomes a dangerous and potentially self-defeating strategy. As mentioned above, it could
lead countries like Japan and South Korea to seek nuclear weapons, thereby stoking arms races and
elevating regional tensions. Alternatively, and perhaps more worryingly, it might encourage the scenario that offshore
balancers seek to avoid, by easing China’s ascent to regional hegemony. As Robert Gilpin has written,
“Retrenchment by its very nature is an indication of relative weakness and declining power, and thus
retrenchment can have a deteriorating effect on relations with allies and rivals.”49 In East Asia today,
U.S. allies rely on U.S. reassurance to navigate increasingly fraught relationships with a more assertive
China precisely because they understand that they will have great trouble balancing Beijing on their
own. A significant U.S. retrenchment might therefore tempt these countries to acquiesce to, or bandwagon with, a rising China if they felt that prospects for
successful resistance were diminishing as the United States retreated.50 In the same vein, retrenchment would compromise alliance relationships, basing
agreements, and other assets that might help Washington check Chinese power in the first place—and that would allow the United States to surge additional forces
into theater in a crisis. In sum, if one expects that Asian countries will be unable to counter China themselves, then reducing U.S. influence and leverage in the
region is a curious policy. Offshore balancing might promise to preserve a stable and advantageous environment while reducing U.S. burdens. But upon closer
analysis, the probable outcomes of the strategy seem more perilous and destabilizing than its proponents acknowledge.
Retrenchment causes nuclear great power war --- best scholarship proves
Brooks, Ikenberry, and Wohlforth 13 (Stephen, Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth
College, John Ikenberry is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at
Princeton University in the Department of Politics and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and
International Affairs, William C. Wohlforth is the Daniel Webster Professor in the Department of
Government at Dartmouth College “Don’t Come Home America: The Case Against Retrenchment,”
International Security, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Winter 2012/13), pp. 7–51)
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deep engagement is that it prevents the emergence of a far more dangerous global security
environment. For one thing, as noted above, the United States’ overseas presence gives it the leverage to restrain partners from
taking provocative action. Perhaps more important, its core alliance commitments also deter states with aspirations to regional hegemony from
contemplating expansion and make its partners more secure, reducing their incentive to adopt solutions to
their security problems that threaten others and thus stoke security dilemmas. The contention that engaged U.S. power dampens the baleful effects of anarchy is
consistent with influential variants of realist theory. Indeed, arguably the scariest portrayal of the war-prone world that would emerge absent the “American Pacifier” is provided in the works of
John Mearsheimer, who forecasts dangerous multipolar regions replete with security competition, arms
races, nuclear proliferation and associated preventive war temptations, regional rivalries, and even runs
at regional hegemony and full-scale great power war. 72 How do retrenchment advocates, the bulk of whom are realists, discount this benefit? Their arguments are
A core premise of
complicated, but two capture most of the variation: (1) U.S. security guarantees are not necessary to prevent dangerous rivalries and conflict in Eurasia; or (2) prevention of rivalry and conflict in Eurasia is not a U.S. interest. Each
response is connected to a different theory or set of theories, which makes sense given that the whole debate hinges on a complex future counterfactual (what would happen to Eurasia’s security setting if the United States truly
disengaged?). Although a certain answer is impossible, each of these responses is nonetheless a weaker argument for retrenchment than advocates acknowledge. The first response flows from defensive realism as well as other
international relations theories that discount the conflict-generating potential of anarchy under contemporary conditions. 73 Defensive realists maintain that the high expected costs of territorial conquest, defense dominance, and
an array of policies and practices that can be used credibly to signal benign intent, mean that Eurasia’s major states could manage regional multipolarity peacefully without the American pacifier. Retrenchment would be a bet on
this scholarship, particularly in regions where the kinds of stabilizers that nonrealist theories point to—such as democratic governance or dense institutional linkages—are either absent or weakly present. There are three other
major bodies of scholarship, however, that might give decisionmakers pause before making this bet. First is regional expertise. Needless to say, there is no consensus on the net security effects of U.S. withdrawal. Regarding each
region, there are optimists and pessimists. Few experts expect a return of intense great power competition in a post-American Europe, but many doubt European governments will pay the political costs of increased EU defense
The result might be a Europe that is incapable of securing itself from
various threats that could be destabilizing within the region and beyond (e.g., a regional conflict akin to the 1990s Balkan wars), lacks
capacity for global security missions in which U.S. leaders might want European participation, and is
vulnerable to the influence of outside rising powers. What about the other parts of Eurasia where the United States has a substantial military presence?
Regarding the Middle East, the balance begins to swing toward pessimists concerned that states currently backed by Washington— notably Israel, Egypt, and Saudi
Arabia—might take actions upon U.S. retrenchment that would intensify security dilemmas. And concerning
East Asia, pessimism regarding the region’s prospects without the American pacifier is pronounced. Arguably
the principal concern expressed by area experts is that Japan and South Korea are likely to obtain a nuclear capacity and increase their
military commitments, which could stoke a destabilizing reaction from China. It is notable that during the Cold War, both South Korea and
cooperation and the budgetary costs of increasing military outlays. 74
Taiwan moved to obtain a nuclear weapons capacity and were only constrained from doing so by a still-engaged United States. 75 The second body of scholarship casting doubt on the bet on defensive realism’s sanguine portrayal
is all of the research that undermines its conception of state preferences.
Defensive realism’s optimism about what would happen if the United States retrenched is very much dependent on its
particular—and highly restrictive—assumption about state preferences; once we relax this assumption, then much of its basis for optimism vanishes. Specifically, the prediction of post-American tranquility throughout Eurasia rests
on the assumption that security is the only relevant state preference, with security defined narrowly in terms of protection from violent external attacks on the homeland. Under that assumption, the security problem is largely
Burgeoning research across the social and other
sciences, however, undermines that core assumption: states have preferences not only for security but also
for prestige, status, and other aims, and they engage in trade-offs among the various objectives. 76 In addition, they define security not just in terms of territorial protection but in view of
many and varied milieu goals. It follows that even states that are relatively secure may nevertheless engage in highly competitive
behavior. Empirical studies show that this is indeed sometimes the case. 77 In sum, a bet on a benign postretrenchment Eurasia is a bet that leaders of major
countries will never allow these nonsecurity preferences to influence their strategic choices. To the degree that these bodies of scholarly knowledge have predictive leverage, U.S. retrenchment would
result in a significant deterioration in the security environment in at least some of the world’s key
regions. We have already mentioned the third, even more alarming body of scholarship. Offensive realism predicts that the withdrawal of the
American pacifier will yield either a competitive regional multipolarity complete with associated
insecurity, arms racing, crisis instability, nuclear proliferation, and the like, or bids for regional hegemony, which may be
beyond the capacity of local great powers to contain (and which in any case would generate intensely
competitive behavior, possibly including regional great power war). Hence it is unsurprising that retrenchment advocates are prone to focus on the
solved as soon as offense and defense are clearly distinguishable, and offense is extremely expensive relative to defense.
second argument noted above: that avoiding wars and security dilemmas in the world’s core regions is not a U.S. national interest. Few doubt that the United States could survive the return of insecurity and conflict among
Eurasian powers, but at what cost? Much of the work in this area has focused on the economic externalities of a renewed threat of insecurity and war, which we discuss below. Focusing on the pure security ramifications, there are
overall higher levels of conflict make the world a more
dangerous place. Were Eurasia to return to higher levels of interstate military competition, one would see overall higher levels of military
spending and innovation and a higher likelihood of competitive regional proxy wars and arming of client
states—all of which would be concerning, in part because it would promote a faster diffusion of military power away from the
United States. Greater regional insecurity could well feed proliferation cascades, as states such as Egypt,
Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Saudi Arabia all might choose to create nuclear forces. 78 It is unlikely that proliferation
two main reasons why decisionmakers may be rationally reluctant to run the retrenchment experiment. First,
decisions by any of these actors would be the end of the game: they would likely generate pressure locally for more proliferation. Following Kenneth Waltz, many retrenchment advocates are proliferation optimists, assuming that
nuclear deterrence solves the security problem. 79 Usually carried out in dyadic terms, the debate over the stability of proliferation changes as the numbers go up.
Proliferation optimism rests
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on assumptions of rationality and narrow security preferences. In social science, however, such assumptions are
inevitably probabilistic. Optimists assume that most states are led by rational leaders, most will overcome organizational problems and resist the temptation to preempt before feared neighbors
nuclearize, and most pursue only security and are risk averse. Confidence in such probabilistic assumptions declines if the world were to
move from nine to twenty, thirty, or forty nuclear states. In addition, many of the other dangers noted by analysts who are concerned about the destabilizing effects
of nuclear proliferation—including the risk of accidents and the prospects that some new nuclear powers will not have truly survivable forces—seem
prone to go up as the number of nuclear powers grows. 80 Moreover, the risk of “unforeseen crisis dynamics” that
could spin out of control is also higher as the number of nuclear powers increases. Finally, add to these concerns the enhanced danger of nuclear leakage, and a world with overall higher levels of
security competition becomes yet more worrisome. The argument that maintaining Eurasian peace is not a U.S. interest faces a second problem. On widely accepted realist assumptions, acknowledging that U.S.
engagement preserves peace dramatically narrows the difference between retrenchment and deep engagement. For many supporters of retrenchment, the optimal strategy for a power such as
the United States, which has attained regional hegemony and is separated from other great powers by oceans, is offshore balancing: stay over the horizon and “pass the buck” to local powers to do the dangerous work of
counterbalancing any local rising power. The United States should commit to onshore balancing only when local balancing is likely to fail and a great power appears to be a credible contender for regional hegemony, as in the cases
of Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union in the midtwentieth century. The problem is that China’s rise puts the possibility of its attaining regional hegemony on the table, at least in the medium to long term. As Mearsheimer notes,
“
The United States will have to play a key role in countering China, because its Asian neighbors are not strong enough to do it by themselves.” 81 Therefore, unless
China’s rise stalls, “the United States is likely to act toward China similar to the way it behaved toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War.” 82 It follows that the United States should take no action that would compromise its
capacity to move to onshore balancing in the future. It will need to maintain key alliance relationships in Asia as well as the formidably expensive military capacity to intervene there. The implication is to get out of Iraq and
the argument that U.S. security commitments are
unnecessary for peace is countered by a lot of scholarship, including highly influential realist scholarship. In addition, the argument that Eurasian peace is
Afghanistan, reduce the presence in Europe, and pivot to Asia— just what the United States is doing. 83 In sum,
unnecessary for U.S. security is weakened by the potential for a large number of nasty security consequences as well as the need to retain a latent onshore balancing capacity that dramatically reduces the savings retrenchment
might bring. Moreover, switching between offshore and onshore balancing could well be difªcult. Bringing together the thrust of many of the arguments discussed so far underlines the degree to which the case for retrenchment
the United States lowers security competition in the
world’s key regions, thereby preventing the emergence of a hothouse atmosphere for growing new military
capabilities. Alliance ties dissuade partners from ramping up and also provide leverage to prevent military transfers to potential rivals. On top of all this, the United States’ formidable military machine may deter
misses the underlying logic of the deep engagement strategy. By supplying reassurance, deterrence, and active management,
entry by potential rivals. Current great power military expenditures as a percentage of GDP are at historical lows, and thus far other major powers have shied away from seeking to match top-end U.S. military capabilities. In
addition, they have so far been careful to avoid attracting the “focused enmity” of the United States. 84 All of the world’s most modern militaries are U.S. allies (America’s alliance system of more than sixty countries now accounts
for some 80 percent of global military spending), and the gap between the U.S. military capability and that of potential rivals is by many measures growing rather than shrinking. 85
The water won’t protect us because (1) navies; (2) cyberwar
Arrequin-Toft, 9-27, 22, In an increasingly digitally-mediated era of great power competition, it’s not
asymmetry of power, but the asymmetry of vulnerability that is driving international political outcomes.
For the United States, retrenchment from the Middle East might make sense. Israel’s increasingly farright government has made it a more costly ally, and the entire world is shifting away from fossil fuels.
But it hardly follows that any resources the United States gains from retrenchment will make it more
secure. The stopping power of water only works, at best, for material threats. And the evolution of
small, dispersed, inexpensive, and autonomous sea-going denial technologies call this into question. In a
non-material sense, domestic and foreign disinformation campaigns have caused citizens worldwide to
lose faith in the democratic process. Finally, the United States’ derogation from its core principles—
along with two unnecessary wars in the Middle East and a force-first foreign policy—has hurt its global
reputation, increased the number of its adversaries, and enabled them to target U.S. vulnerabilities, In
the Digital Age, Retrenchment May Not Make America Safer,
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/techland-when-great-power-competition-meets-digital-world/digitalage-retrenchment-may-not-make?page=0%2C1
Retrenchment advocates argue that the United States would now be better served by allowing the
Middle East to solve its own problems and shifting the resources saved to the growing menace of China
in the Pacific. Others go further and argue that the United States can afford to withdraw completely
from Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East because of something the political scientist John
Mearsheimer labeled “the stopping power of water.” That’s a dangerously material-centric
conception of power.
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Winners, Losers, and Non-Material Balancing
The basic model of conflict-of-interest resolution goes something like this: (1) we clash; (2) there’s a
winner and a loser; and (3) the loser attempts reforms aimed at deterring, not losing, or winning future
clashes. In traditional international relations theory, this is called “balancing” and there are two ways a
weaker actor might increase its likelihood of a better outcome in a future clash. First, it can balance
internally by redistributing domestic resources to increase its power. Second, it can balance externally
by wooing other actors into an alliance. But all of this presupposes that the “power” we’re talking about
is material power: the power to fight and win wars. What if you’re Canada or Belgium though? Internal
balancing won’t work unless you’re willing and able to acquire a nuclear