The "New Era" of Russia and China: Unrestrained Imperialism For Both Parties is the Premise
We are living through a historic time in both U.S. domestic and foreign affairs. In some ways what is happening in the U.S., with one party championing democracy and the other espousing authoritarian values, encapsulates the escalating global clash between democracy and unfreedom.
When an established international order is starting to destabilize, it can be hard to recognize the signs. And sometimes, even when those signs are evident, there can be an aversion to doing anything about it, so as not to precipitate further turmoil.
This attitude can lead to appeasement of bad actors (Mussolini and Hitler, 1930s, Putin, 2008-), who then feel more empowered to do things that make the unraveling of that international order impossible to deny. In the meantime, other bad actors are watching carefully and often find a window for their own destabilizing moves.
Six months into Vladimir Putin's war on Ukraine, Western powers seem to have settled on a level of intervention that perpetuates the war by making it very difficult for Ukraine to sustain the kinds of military victories that could bring the conflict to an end. For Putin, this is license to escalate his terroristic methods and expand the war if possible.
Unsurprisingly, during this turbulent time Xi Jinping has also become far more aggressive towards the West, upping his government's imperialistic rhetoric regarding Taiwan and puffing up his personality cult in ways not seen among Chinese premiers since Mao. The day Joe Biden started his presidency on a strong pro-democracy platform, China, Russia, and Iran held their third joint naval drill in the Indian Ocean.
It is instructive to return to Biden's summit with Putin in June 2021, which intended to reset the U.S.-Russia relationship but merely accelerated its decline. I felt a sense of dread as I watched the two men together in Geneva. As I wrote in a Lucid essay that night:
“Biden’s goal for the summit may have been to let Putin know that “we need some basic rules of the road that we can all abide by,” but Biden and Putin are on two different roads. Moreover, like most strongmen, Putin is unpredictable. Energized by chaos and risk-taking, he may act more, rather than less, aggressively post-summit. We may also see an uptick in rogue behavior because...Putin's tone in Geneva was not that of a victor in the democracy-autocracy wars, but of someone on the defensive.”
Each time Biden came out assertively for the cause of global democracy, Russia and China told us that upheaval of the established order was in the works. In November 2021, the Russian and Chinese ambassadors penned an unprecedented joint essay that dripped with scorn for American democracy. Occasioned by Biden's Summit for Democracy (to which they were not invited) the diatribe is a masterpiece of authoritarian doublespeak, demanding that the U.S. "respect people's democratic rights" and stop creating global conflict.
On February 4, 2022 came a joint statement of Russia and China about the "new era" of international relations produced by multipolarity and globalization. It staked a claim for their countries to be recognized as the true democracies in the world. Putin and Xi posed for a photo during the Beijing Winter Olympics --it was their first face-to-face meeting in two years. Russia "has become more vocal in backing Russia in its dispute with NATO powers over Ukraine," reported Al Jazeera, and Russia has returned the favor "backing China over Taiwan."
The premise of the new era - unrestrained imperialism for Russia and China - was all too clear.
Just three weeks later, Russia invaded Ukraine. A new Washington Post investigation reveals that throughout the fall, U.S. officials, armed with intelligence reports, tried to convince the White House and its NATO allies that a plan of "staggering audacity" was about to unfold.
From the perspective of the recurrent disasters caused by our underestimation of strongmen, this is the critical finding: "Some in the White House found it hard to wrap their minds around the scale of the Russian leader's ambitions. 'It did not seem like the kind of thing that a rational country would undertake,' said one participant...." French, German, and other European officials also found the idea nonsensical. Even Ukrainian President Zelensky was skeptical.
Throughout modern history, strongmen leaders who arrive at a certain stage of power often behave in ways that seem irrational to others, but logical to them. Putin likely felt he could secure his place in history by pulling off exactly this kind of impossible undertaking. Hubris, believing their own propaganda, and isolation from objective feedback to their plans has proven time and again to be the undoing of autocrats.
We do not know how Putin's war will end, but we can predict that the longer it goes on the more likely a Chinese aggression on Taiwan will be. Some see U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan as a provocation. And indeed it was met with Chinese military exercises over Taiwan on an unprecedented scale. Yet the trajectory was set for such aggression long before Pelosi set foot in Taiwan.
The answer to Chinese and Russian aggression is not to back down, thinking that doing so will settle the waters. China and Russia are determined to destroy the existing international order. It would be an abdication of our role to make that easier for them.