The West and our allies in the East are finally realizing that China seeks a new empire ruled from Beijing by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
“The most important message that China can take from this exercise and anything that our allies and partners do together, is that we are extremely tied by the core values that exist amongst our many nations,” said U.S. Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro in Sydney.
French President Emmanuel Macron, one of the softest of Europe’s soft leaders on China, said in a July 27 speech on the Pacific Island of Vanuatu, “A new imperialism is appearing, and new power logics which threaten the sovereignty of numerous states.”
He was clearly referencing Beijing’s growing power and influence, as evidenced by his criticism of “foreign ships fishing illegally” and “numerous loans made with leonine conditions which are quite literally strangling development.”
Mr. Macron could only have been talking about China’s well-known illegal, unreported, and unregistered fishing, and debt trap loans under the Belt and Road Initiative.
Vanuatu is a new state made independent in 1980 after being a French and British-governed territory. Since the end of World War I, the former European empires sought—albeit with disastrous lapses and interrupted successes—to gradually transition their far-flung imperial territories into a system of international sovereign states united by institutions such as the League of Nations and United Nations, as well as trends toward democracy and free trade. Institutions, democracy, and trade, it was thought, would bring international peace.
But these high ideals, first propounded by the philosopher Immanuel Kant in the late 18th century, did not account for the intensity of aggressive authoritarian states like Nazi Germany, or China and Russia today. Modern authoritarians seek to exploit this relatively new liberal international environment of disaggregated democratic states left after the disintegration of the European empires.
Moscow and Beijing see Kantianism, liberalism, and free trade as weaknesses to be exploited, not goals to be achieved. They want to encourage these “weak” ideologies among their adversaries while ensuring that they do not “infect” their own populations sequestered behind walls that stabilize their authoritarian rule by stopping the free flow of ideas, a diverse civil society, and the voluntary association of individuals.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is at least surprised in Ukraine at how a previously relatively disaggregated group of democracies can revive institutions like NATO to identify a new threat and reaggregate their defense policies in the pursuit of a common goal such as the expulsion of Russian troops from Crimea and the Donbass.
NATO has shown resolve in support of Ukraine, both economically and through the moderate supply of military materiel to troops at the front. But it has not gone far enough to stop Mr. Putin from being encouraged by the fear shown by NATO states of “provoking” him into a military escalation that could go nuclear. Mr. Putin is well aware of this fear and plays into it by, for example, flying nuclear-capable bombers around Europe and moving some nuclear weapons west into Belarus.
Mr. Putin’s willingness to engage in nuclear brinkmanship with NATO contributed to our indecisiveness and, ultimately, inaction in the supply of NATO troops into Ukraine, or the timely provision to Ukrainian pilots of more powerful weaponry such as fighter jets.
This halfway unity seeks to balance the threat of escalation with the threat of not doing enough and allowing Mr. Putin to win. What is clear is that the prior strategies of diffusion, disaggregation, and leaving Ukraine out of NATO entirely as a “buffer state” failed to keep the peace.
Given the risk of nuclear war today, we therefore may have gone too far after World War II in disaggregating Western and democratic power globally and leaving frontline democracies like Ukraine and Taiwan out in the cold.
For example, the disaggregation of Vanuatu in 1980 was a step toward greater independence as a state, but that independence also made it more vulnerable to an expanding communist China.
Certainly, today, we see a reaggregation of democracies into new political forms of stronger alliances more focused on threats from Moscow and Beijing.
Whereas the Cold War with the Soviet Union was largely a one-front contest, Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s new power, and both his and Mr. Putin’s greater willingness to take risks, have turned the “Cold War II” of today into a two-front contest.
With North Korea and BRICS, composed of not only China and Russia but Brazil, India, and South Africa, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, adding Pakistan and Iran as observer states, Moscow and Beijing seek to turn the two-front contest into a set of conflicts so far-flung and complex that the U.S.-led “Pax Americana” becomes a thing of the past. It would most likely be replaced by a “Bellum Globus” or global war with Beijing in the lead but far from the violence. Into the disaggregation of U.S.-led international systems, Beijing could step with its concentrated forms of power to reorganize the world in its totalitarian image.
Mr. Xi is thus playing a longer game than Mr. Putin. By encouraging Moscow to fight recklessly in the West while expanding more slowly and carefully in the East, Mr. Xi disintegrates Western and Russian power, which could create a global vacuum into which Mr. Xi and the CCP can step as victors.
To avoid that disaster, the United States must lead the world’s democracies and other states that value their sovereignty into stronger alliances and tougher measures that contain the aggression of both Russia and China.
