Axis redux?
Robert Kagan’s essay in The Washington Post, “What we can expect after Putin’s conquest of Ukraine,” from only three weeks ago, is even more sobering upon re-reading ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/21/ukraine-invasion-putin-goals-what-expect/ ). Putin’s saber-rattling, to say nothing of his military’s indiscriminate killing and destruction, that must be held to account. There are endless tactical issues, but one must look at strategy. It is impossible to think about the invasion of Ukraine aside from Putin's other territorial wars and his brazen assassination and suppression of dissidents and opponents not only on Russian soil (remember Boris Nemtsov https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-31669061 ) but abroad. He is forming an authoritarian axis along with Xi Jinping, whose consolidation of power in China includes an ever more intrusive surveillance state, the brazen oppression of Hong Kong, the on-going Uyghur genocide, military expansion in the South China Sea, and economic colonialism everywhere from Africa to the Americas. Putin seems to envisage a tripartite authoritarian world, with China dominant in the east, Russia in Eurasia, and a Trumpist America dominant over, well, the Americas. China is backing Russia's propaganda war, down to validating the ludicrous claims that Ukraine is an aggressor, chock full of American bio-weapons labs. Russia is dropping cluster bombs on civilians, much as it did in Syria, and daily threatening NATO members with a nuclear strike, should they intervene — and now even declaring convoys military aid from the west to be legitimate targets.
The fact is that we are in a de facto global war. Putin is fighting a WWII-style land war, and the global community, aside from China, is fighting a very new kind of war, one of coordinated, devastating economic campaigns and media blitzes. At the same time, western allies are fighting what one can see as a conventional Cold War-style proxy war, which amounts to arming defenders and insurgents, providing them with military intelligence, and economic, diplomatic, and humanitarian support. The Putin/Xi axis would mean more kleptocracy, greater poverty, more oppression, more Cold War anxieties, and turning back the clock of open government even as democracy remains in its childhood, in historical terms. Now is the time for exceptional statecraft and extraordinarily nimble military thinking, to stop Putin’s aggression and do so without triggering a nuclear exchange. Ideally, this has to happen before Putin realizes his initial goals: a full occupation of Ukraine that includes expanding Russia's nuclear posture through that country and Belarus; severing the Baltic states from NATO and western Europe; consolidating and making permanent a Stalinist-capitalist hybrid dictatorship over the territories he rules. And that's just for starters.
As Kagan writes,
"Today, Putin seeks at the very least a two-tier NATO, in which no allied f
orces are deployed on former Warsaw Pact territory. The inevitable negotiations over this and other elements of a new European security “architecture” would be conducted with Russian forces poised all along NATO’s eastern borders and therefore amid real uncertainty about NATO’s ability to resist Putin’s demands.
This takes place, moreover, as China threatens to upend the strategic balance in East Asia, perhaps with an attack of some kind against Taiwan. From a strategic point of view, Taiwan can either be a major obstacle to Chinese regional hegemony, as it is now; or it can be the first big step toward Chinese military dominance in East Asia and the Western Pacific, as it would be after a takeover, peaceful or otherwise. Were Beijing somehow able to force the Taiwanese to accept Chinese sovereignty, the rest of Asia would panic and look to the United States for help.
These simultaneous strategic challenges in two distant theaters are reminiscent of the 1930s, when Germany and Japan sought to overturn the existing order in their respective regions. They were never true allies, did not trust each other and did not directly coordinate their strategies. Nevertheless, each benefited from the other’s actions. Germany’s advances in Europe emboldened the Japanese to take greater risks in East Asia; Japan’s advances gave Adolf Hitler confidence that a distracted United States would not risk a two-front conflict.
Today, it should be obvious to Xi Jinping that the United States has its hands full in Europe. Whatever his calculus before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he can conclude only that his chances of successfully pulling something off, either in Taiwan or the South China Sea, have gone up. While some argue that U.S. policies drove Moscow and Beijing together, it is really their shared desire to disrupt the international order that creates a common interest."