China is likely to grab gains as President Barack Obama and his Western allies slide into quicksand in the confrontation with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Obama is still limping in the Middle East, Syria, Iran and Afghanistan, and faces bruises in Ukraine. Meanwhile, Beijing is quietly clenching fists to take swift advantage in its neighborhood of his imbroglios elsewhere.
Beijing has maintained studied neutrality so far in the disputes over Ukraine and Crimea because they will weaken both the US and Russia, which it sees as challenging its own rise as a global Great Power.
Currently, influential American analysts see Beijing’s silence as endorsing Obama’s handling of Russia or at least as a refusal to support Putin’s challenges to Western power.
They are misreading the signals. Beijing perceives its history with the West as a litany of grievances and humiliations as intense as the ones detailed by Putin in his speech last week before he swallowed Crimea whole. It is as determined as Putin to stand up to Washington and, where possible, erode American power in its near abroad of the Far East.
The gains for Beijing will derive from Washington’s entanglement in European security and the costs of maintaining unity among EU governments to enforce economic sanctions to punish Putin.
China is a very ambitious rising power, which is carefully building its hard military strength including a massive navy capable of patrolling the Pacific and Indian oceans, while consolidating its economic muscle. It has weak legs because of potential social unrest among its various ethnic groups, including Tibetans and Uighurs, and the have-nots in its majority Han Chinese population.
To distract attention from such internal weaknesses, Beijing is looking very carefully at Putin’s example. Like Putin who annexed Crimea to strengthen his power base among Russian nationalists, Chinese President Xi Jinping is keen to reassert the Communist Party’s supremacy over China.
One easy shortcut is to excite anti-Japanese nationalism and foment anti-Americanism by raising tensions in the Sea of Japan and South China Sea. That would also divert attention away from other key issues like corruption and incompetence inside the Communist Party.
Scoring points with Chinese nationalists by challenging US power is a dangerous game because unlike in Ukraine, Washington has formal treaty obligations to fight on behalf of its Asian allies including Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. It also has lesser obligations towards the Philippines and some South East Asian countries.
But Beijing has already begun that game of poking and prodding to see how far it can push before Washington reacts.
Russia has accomplished a fait accompli in Crimea by breaking international norms to move very swiftly, after poking and prodding Washington in Ukraine. Beijing may follow suit over the Senkaku islands (called Diaoyu in China) in the East China Sea, which it has already declared to be in its self-declared “air defense zone” thus violating international norms.
Washington says the islands are under Japanese administration but has not clarified who owns them. Nor has it declared that it will fight to keep them in Japanese hands. Several other similarly disputed islands lie in the very large swathes of the South China Sea that Beijing claims to own.
In Putin’s perception, Washington used the European Union’s economic power and the NATO alliance’s military power in relentless steps to undermine the restoration of Russia’s influence in global affairs after the Soviet Union’s collapse. He feels that Washington hit when his new country was still reeling from the overthrow of Soviet communism.
These perceptions are fundamentally erroneous but are driving his thinking as he tries to grip today’s Russia firmly enough to build military and economic power to confront the Western allies. American and European economic power is overwhelming compared to Russia and NATO’s military might is greater than the world has ever seen.
The needs to face such massive power are driving both Russia and China. So far, they are acting separately but could cooperate if pushed too far.
Putin knows that Obama’s push for NATO military exercises in Poland and the Baltic states does not hold a meaningful threat for Russia since Ukraine is not a part of NATO. The alliance cannot justify military response inside Ukraine in the name of NATO’s collective defense treaties. Any military response would have to come from a separate US-led coalition of the willing, for which Obama no longer has the will or support.
On the other hand, Putin is free to invade and occupy East Ukraine since West Ukraine’s armies cannot defeat Russia’s military. China would be quite pleased to see some kind of skirmish there to assess whether Obama will militarily halt the change of balance of power in Europe caused by Russia’s use of force in Crimea.
Putin wants an approach similar to those used in 19th and 20th centuries, when the major powers signed treaties such as the Concert of Europe fixing European boundaries and promising that no power would use force to alter them.
Last week, he said he will keep Crimea but will not use force in Ukraine if a deal can be reached with the US and EU. That deal would turn Ukraine into a neutral federal state with a limited form of democracy, permitting only elections that guarantee a Russia-friendly regime in Kiev.
Obviously, such retrograde demands are unacceptable in the emerging 21st century global order. But Beijing does not have Western-style views about global order. So far, it is interested only in dominating its own region. Instability in the West’s relations with Russia will open opportunities for that.