Bracing read. Good thing we’re taking the threat seriously instead of committing so much political energy to culture war and other wedge issues…
Maybe a more salient external threat will act as a force of cohesion within Western countries? We just took that test the last few years though and the results in the end didn’t seem that great.
Great post as usual. But I wonder about your point that "China is not an ideological, proselytizing power; its ideology, basically is just 'China'” -- I think there *is* an ideological component to this, regarding the importance (or relative unimportance) of the individual, which China believes the US worships to the nation's detriment. I read Chinese state news daily and this is the leitmotif. I think this is what you mean by China's ideology is 'China,' yes. And I wonder about Russian ideology in comparison -- you spend a bit less time on it.
Perhaps you are right about 2023, but the ongoing demographic collapse of both China and Russia will be the story of the next 10 years. Also, the dependence of China on imported energy and imported materials needed for industrial agriculture will become clearer. A blockade of China would bring them to their knees in a matter of months. China is a true paper tiger. Russia is simply dying.
A couple of thoughts/wrinkles - though I do agree with the general trajectory:
1. It's easy to overestimate Russia-China cooperation from events like these. Russia has a long history - dating to the USSR - of treating China as a junior partner that just doesnt hold up anymore. A careful look at the choreography of the event shows Putin forcing Xi to come to him to stand in front of the flags for the photoshoot, and a distinct look of annoyance on Xi's face. There is significant economic cooperation for reasons of geography, but the two leaders do not get along.
2. Regarding Russia avoiding outright defeat and the US assessments - US assessments have been chronically downbeat on Ukraine since day 1, and repeatedly underestimated their capabilities/determination and ability to learn new systems. There are real resupply problems and allied coordination issues, but Ukraine's overall combat effectiveness has been significantly higher than Russia's. Russia is also facing real force generation and training challenges.
A brief recommendation - I know you're not a fan of podcasts, but if you don't mind longer-term presentations, I can't recommend Perun's YouTube channel enough. He has a finance and IR background and works in defense procurement, does excellent and accessible analysis of the challenges facing Ukraine, and sees reason to be optimistic.
China's AMORAL diplomacy? Like partnering with Saudi Arabia is a moral thing? Toppling 4 governments in a raw (Irak, Syria, Lybia, Afganistan) for no reason and no result (good job!) is a moral thing?
On which planet do you live?
Aren't you supposed to provide independant opinions, instead of repeating the bullet points of the "morally superior west"?
What a joke.
So much arrogance.
The truth is, the biggest challenge of the 21st century is going to have all westerners wake up to the fact that their moral superiority is nothing but thin air carried by MSM propaganda and White House speakers and that instead of blindly following it they should start accomodate a new multipolar moral order. On that task, you are not helping.
Conflating Russia and China is a big problem in this analysis. Russia might be bigger than Ukraine, but that's not saying a lot. In economic terms, it's insignificant, and the war has largely dissipated its stockpiles of conventional arms.
On the other hand, Putin has committed massive international crimes, while Xi (while terrible domestically) has not.
The closest analagy to Russia now is North Korea - an impoverished client state of China, dangerous because they have nukes.
"Xi Jinping doesn’t care whether you have elections and protect civil rights or send minorities to the death camps, as long as you support Chinese hegemony abroad."
This is a critical point that US diplomats are missing.
The Africans are being very clear about this. Rod Dreher has covered this as did Bari Weiss recently. African countries are turning away from the USA and toward China. They won't say why publicly, but diplomats pressed privately all say something akin to this: "Chinese aid comes with a promise for us not to screw up China's goals, but otherwise China leaves us alone. US aid is conditional on us changing our own laws on abortion and sexuality in ways that our populations find abhorrent."
The 21st century's fastest growing market is pivoting toward China due mostly to the ideological strings own State Dept puts on our foreign aid. The US government has decided it wants to advance universal liberalism (grievance studies, abortion, gender identity, sexual equality) at the expense of concrete US foreign policy objectives. This is a radical departure from our behavior during Cold War I, when we were far more pragmatic.
We saw in Afghanistan how ineffective Western liberationist theories are in 3rd world, tribal societies. Former State Dept FSO Peter Van Buren has chronicled 20 years of trying to convince conservative Afghan women that they should want to wear miniskirts and own businesses. They took our money but never bought our ideology (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdrvpSfJM1w - watch the eyes of the woman at 0:32 as she decides the Americans are crazy). And we haven't learned. Our leaders are still trying to export abstract liberal ideology instead of protect concrete US interests.
Interesting and helpful post as always. The U.S. does need to be more practical rather than ideological in working with friends, allies and other countries around the world. Rather than saying ally with us to counter China, we should say here's some win-win things we can do together. This is important in working with countries from Vietnam, France or Ghana. Nonetheless, it is an ideological cold war in the sense that we would not, or at least should not, worry about the rise of China except for the fact it became increasingly authoritarian and expansionist. If China was liberalized politically we undoubtedly would have some disagreements but there would be no need for a cold war with China. I expand on this idea in a Substack post from a while back: https://samintn.substack.com/p/our-foreign-policy-goal-for-china
"The United States may be rushing into an overly narrow conception of geopolitics, obsessed with China and (to a lesser degree) Russia, treating a vital set of middle powers as necessary adjuncts to those rivalries rather than as strategic actors in their own right. The emerging system is likely to end up not so much as two great magnets pulling the world into a binary system, but rather as one with multiple great-power gravitational centers operating amid an increasingly influential, self-confident, and independent set of middle powers. Such a world will be governed by a different dominant-system dynamic than that of the Cold War. Both in terms of the risks of conflict and instability, and the global alignment of influence, middle powers could well prove to be the center of gravity for world politics and critical force multipliers from a U.S. perspective. The U.S. approach to the challenges of the coming decades should reflect this complex reality."
I appreciate the emphasis on China's enduring manufacturing advantages, and would be happy to learn more. The degree of 'friendshoring' that actually takes place is very much a great question of the next 3-5 years. I'd also like to know your thoughts on whether Chinese credit can continue/resume expansion, or whether those days are over, and what effects that will have.
It's true that Russia will not have as bad a year this year, in the sense that it won't repeat its worst geopolitical blunder in generations. However, I'm not at all convinced that Russia is going to have a good year, or that it will find any meaningful footing, unless that simply means it retains some or all of last year's territorial gains. This year already saw the turning point of the war in January, when the West switched from wanting Ukraine to not lose, to committing to Ukraine's success. Time is now on Ukraine's side, although the war will not be concluded this year.
Fiscally, things have gotten a lot worse for Russia in 2023. Although the effect of sanctions have not been as swift as naive observers anticipated, they have been more effective more quickly than is historically normal. And their efficacy is still growing. Worse still, Russia is now very dependent upon no disasters at sea, in port or along pipelines to prevent much of its oil production being shut in long term. Russia can withstand great privation, but that is exactly what it is headed for - much of its industrial and economic infrastructure has been rendered brittle and on borrowed time.
Will China recover its footing? It's likely. The rate of leadership blunders should return to the mean some time, and a number of traps remain. China's leadership is clearly subject to major blunders, and that is likely now structural, while Xi remains. By now, China's competitors probably realize this, and some may be more prepared to capitalize when they occur than previously.
Nice analysis although I would challenge your point about the US doing the R&D for wind power. IMO, Denmark did most of that during the last 30 years and almost all the big players (outside of China) are basically old Danish companies that were bought or merged. The only major US player is GE.
Good piece, thanks, though I don’t see much evidence that China has an image problem in the emerging world. They have slathered about $200 billion on those countries and are actively working on important projects.
The IMF and the World Bank view Chinese lending as a fiasco, but borrowing from abroad is what EM does, and China pays more bribes to pols and industries than Eurobond issuers or the Paris club banks do, in addition to directly backing visible projects.
Citizens of these countries are used to cycles of debt, inflation and austerity. Does it matter to them where the lenders that facilitate this come from? Yes- there are some countries like Sri Lanka where a prior government was exposed for corruption and over borrowing from China and there was quite a backlash, and then the next government came in and nearly starved people to death and killed the ag industry. Those cycles of corruption and incompetence make for short memories.
The US and Europe need to be much more hands on in EM. The US does a pretty good job with military engagement/cooperation across Africa, but politically and economically we’d rather send a small cheque accompanied by a large lecture. From my limited observations, China is winning friends in Latam and along the Silk Road. In Africa where China has been directly involved longer, the pro-China sentiment probably peaked some years ago (and it is true a couple of Silk Road friends are getting squeezed by debts, though Afghanistan is a new friend).
We’ve also seen key EM countries (and even India) take a flexible view toward Russia. To your point about “rules based order” sceptics, let’s remember the US appeased and rewarded Putin in 2009 after the 2008 invasion of Georgia and partition of disputed territories. Then post 2014-Crimea the US passed some mild sanctions but entreated Russia in Syria and with Iran. Biden was part of both those efforts. It is wonderful that the Dem base is now convinced that Putin is Hitler and Ukraine was the hero of Trump’s impeachment, but given the recent history we should forgive the developing countries for a cynical “sure, we’ve always been at war with Oceania” view.
I’m sorry but I don’t believe a word of this. It reeks of the conventional wisdom that serves as a smokescreen for what’s really going on. Number one any argument the west made about its “moral” rationales are believed only by the clueless useful idiots who need to believe in order to carry out power goals of the Atlantic alliance. Second, the west is not by any stretch engaging in actual democracy. Nor is there a clear division between authoritarian countries and the west. We just do our authoritarianism a bit differently with covert influence campaigns to bully the public into buying into the goals of empire. It might be the west against the rest but not because we’re superior. In fact our elites are busy dumping every western tradition that made us strong to begin with.
Bracing read. Good thing we’re taking the threat seriously instead of committing so much political energy to culture war and other wedge issues…
Maybe a more salient external threat will act as a force of cohesion within Western countries? We just took that test the last few years though and the results in the end didn’t seem that great.
Great post as usual. But I wonder about your point that "China is not an ideological, proselytizing power; its ideology, basically is just 'China'” -- I think there *is* an ideological component to this, regarding the importance (or relative unimportance) of the individual, which China believes the US worships to the nation's detriment. I read Chinese state news daily and this is the leitmotif. I think this is what you mean by China's ideology is 'China,' yes. And I wonder about Russian ideology in comparison -- you spend a bit less time on it.
Perhaps you are right about 2023, but the ongoing demographic collapse of both China and Russia will be the story of the next 10 years. Also, the dependence of China on imported energy and imported materials needed for industrial agriculture will become clearer. A blockade of China would bring them to their knees in a matter of months. China is a true paper tiger. Russia is simply dying.
Impressive analysis!
A couple of thoughts/wrinkles - though I do agree with the general trajectory:
1. It's easy to overestimate Russia-China cooperation from events like these. Russia has a long history - dating to the USSR - of treating China as a junior partner that just doesnt hold up anymore. A careful look at the choreography of the event shows Putin forcing Xi to come to him to stand in front of the flags for the photoshoot, and a distinct look of annoyance on Xi's face. There is significant economic cooperation for reasons of geography, but the two leaders do not get along.
2. Regarding Russia avoiding outright defeat and the US assessments - US assessments have been chronically downbeat on Ukraine since day 1, and repeatedly underestimated their capabilities/determination and ability to learn new systems. There are real resupply problems and allied coordination issues, but Ukraine's overall combat effectiveness has been significantly higher than Russia's. Russia is also facing real force generation and training challenges.
A brief recommendation - I know you're not a fan of podcasts, but if you don't mind longer-term presentations, I can't recommend Perun's YouTube channel enough. He has a finance and IR background and works in defense procurement, does excellent and accessible analysis of the challenges facing Ukraine, and sees reason to be optimistic.
China's AMORAL diplomacy? Like partnering with Saudi Arabia is a moral thing? Toppling 4 governments in a raw (Irak, Syria, Lybia, Afganistan) for no reason and no result (good job!) is a moral thing?
On which planet do you live?
Aren't you supposed to provide independant opinions, instead of repeating the bullet points of the "morally superior west"?
What a joke.
So much arrogance.
The truth is, the biggest challenge of the 21st century is going to have all westerners wake up to the fact that their moral superiority is nothing but thin air carried by MSM propaganda and White House speakers and that instead of blindly following it they should start accomodate a new multipolar moral order. On that task, you are not helping.
Conflating Russia and China is a big problem in this analysis. Russia might be bigger than Ukraine, but that's not saying a lot. In economic terms, it's insignificant, and the war has largely dissipated its stockpiles of conventional arms.
On the other hand, Putin has committed massive international crimes, while Xi (while terrible domestically) has not.
The closest analagy to Russia now is North Korea - an impoverished client state of China, dangerous because they have nukes.
"Xi Jinping doesn’t care whether you have elections and protect civil rights or send minorities to the death camps, as long as you support Chinese hegemony abroad."
This is a critical point that US diplomats are missing.
The Africans are being very clear about this. Rod Dreher has covered this as did Bari Weiss recently. African countries are turning away from the USA and toward China. They won't say why publicly, but diplomats pressed privately all say something akin to this: "Chinese aid comes with a promise for us not to screw up China's goals, but otherwise China leaves us alone. US aid is conditional on us changing our own laws on abortion and sexuality in ways that our populations find abhorrent."
The 21st century's fastest growing market is pivoting toward China due mostly to the ideological strings own State Dept puts on our foreign aid. The US government has decided it wants to advance universal liberalism (grievance studies, abortion, gender identity, sexual equality) at the expense of concrete US foreign policy objectives. This is a radical departure from our behavior during Cold War I, when we were far more pragmatic.
We saw in Afghanistan how ineffective Western liberationist theories are in 3rd world, tribal societies. Former State Dept FSO Peter Van Buren has chronicled 20 years of trying to convince conservative Afghan women that they should want to wear miniskirts and own businesses. They took our money but never bought our ideology (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdrvpSfJM1w - watch the eyes of the woman at 0:32 as she decides the Americans are crazy). And we haven't learned. Our leaders are still trying to export abstract liberal ideology instead of protect concrete US interests.
This was excellent.
Interesting and helpful post as always. The U.S. does need to be more practical rather than ideological in working with friends, allies and other countries around the world. Rather than saying ally with us to counter China, we should say here's some win-win things we can do together. This is important in working with countries from Vietnam, France or Ghana. Nonetheless, it is an ideological cold war in the sense that we would not, or at least should not, worry about the rise of China except for the fact it became increasingly authoritarian and expansionist. If China was liberalized politically we undoubtedly would have some disagreements but there would be no need for a cold war with China. I expand on this idea in a Substack post from a while back: https://samintn.substack.com/p/our-foreign-policy-goal-for-china
Thank you for this, Noah. Your China posts are very important. Some other good recent posts:
Tim Sweijs and Michael J. Mazaar make the same point Leonard does from a different angle in the April 4th article on War on the Rocks, Mind the Middle Powers (https://warontherocks.com/2023/04/mind-the-middle-powers/?__s=wrzazez9ax99mg12t05z)
"The United States may be rushing into an overly narrow conception of geopolitics, obsessed with China and (to a lesser degree) Russia, treating a vital set of middle powers as necessary adjuncts to those rivalries rather than as strategic actors in their own right. The emerging system is likely to end up not so much as two great magnets pulling the world into a binary system, but rather as one with multiple great-power gravitational centers operating amid an increasingly influential, self-confident, and independent set of middle powers. Such a world will be governed by a different dominant-system dynamic than that of the Cold War. Both in terms of the risks of conflict and instability, and the global alignment of influence, middle powers could well prove to be the center of gravity for world politics and critical force multipliers from a U.S. perspective. The U.S. approach to the challenges of the coming decades should reflect this complex reality."
Manoj Kewalramani explains China's strategy on the All Things Policy podcast episode "GDI, GSI & GCI: What's driving China's New Initiatives": https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/all-things-policy/id1166552728?i=1000608113752. Great insights here.
And Orville Schell makes the point in this great China Talk podcast, "Schell on the Long Arc US-China and Long Reach of Leninism" (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/chinatalk/id1289062927?i=1000608917283) that Xi's vision has grown, in isolation, really, from a deeply Maoist and Leninist foundation. He makes some of the same points in this Project Syndicate post: https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/xi-jinping-china-tragedy-by-orville-schell-and-irena-grudzinska-gross-2023-03
I appreciate the emphasis on China's enduring manufacturing advantages, and would be happy to learn more. The degree of 'friendshoring' that actually takes place is very much a great question of the next 3-5 years. I'd also like to know your thoughts on whether Chinese credit can continue/resume expansion, or whether those days are over, and what effects that will have.
It's true that Russia will not have as bad a year this year, in the sense that it won't repeat its worst geopolitical blunder in generations. However, I'm not at all convinced that Russia is going to have a good year, or that it will find any meaningful footing, unless that simply means it retains some or all of last year's territorial gains. This year already saw the turning point of the war in January, when the West switched from wanting Ukraine to not lose, to committing to Ukraine's success. Time is now on Ukraine's side, although the war will not be concluded this year.
Fiscally, things have gotten a lot worse for Russia in 2023. Although the effect of sanctions have not been as swift as naive observers anticipated, they have been more effective more quickly than is historically normal. And their efficacy is still growing. Worse still, Russia is now very dependent upon no disasters at sea, in port or along pipelines to prevent much of its oil production being shut in long term. Russia can withstand great privation, but that is exactly what it is headed for - much of its industrial and economic infrastructure has been rendered brittle and on borrowed time.
Will China recover its footing? It's likely. The rate of leadership blunders should return to the mean some time, and a number of traps remain. China's leadership is clearly subject to major blunders, and that is likely now structural, while Xi remains. By now, China's competitors probably realize this, and some may be more prepared to capitalize when they occur than previously.
Nice analysis although I would challenge your point about the US doing the R&D for wind power. IMO, Denmark did most of that during the last 30 years and almost all the big players (outside of China) are basically old Danish companies that were bought or merged. The only major US player is GE.
Good article! I also like your title -- I’m a Star Wars fan myself.
Good piece, thanks, though I don’t see much evidence that China has an image problem in the emerging world. They have slathered about $200 billion on those countries and are actively working on important projects.
The IMF and the World Bank view Chinese lending as a fiasco, but borrowing from abroad is what EM does, and China pays more bribes to pols and industries than Eurobond issuers or the Paris club banks do, in addition to directly backing visible projects.
Citizens of these countries are used to cycles of debt, inflation and austerity. Does it matter to them where the lenders that facilitate this come from? Yes- there are some countries like Sri Lanka where a prior government was exposed for corruption and over borrowing from China and there was quite a backlash, and then the next government came in and nearly starved people to death and killed the ag industry. Those cycles of corruption and incompetence make for short memories.
The US and Europe need to be much more hands on in EM. The US does a pretty good job with military engagement/cooperation across Africa, but politically and economically we’d rather send a small cheque accompanied by a large lecture. From my limited observations, China is winning friends in Latam and along the Silk Road. In Africa where China has been directly involved longer, the pro-China sentiment probably peaked some years ago (and it is true a couple of Silk Road friends are getting squeezed by debts, though Afghanistan is a new friend).
We’ve also seen key EM countries (and even India) take a flexible view toward Russia. To your point about “rules based order” sceptics, let’s remember the US appeased and rewarded Putin in 2009 after the 2008 invasion of Georgia and partition of disputed territories. Then post 2014-Crimea the US passed some mild sanctions but entreated Russia in Syria and with Iran. Biden was part of both those efforts. It is wonderful that the Dem base is now convinced that Putin is Hitler and Ukraine was the hero of Trump’s impeachment, but given the recent history we should forgive the developing countries for a cynical “sure, we’ve always been at war with Oceania” view.
I’m sorry but I don’t believe a word of this. It reeks of the conventional wisdom that serves as a smokescreen for what’s really going on. Number one any argument the west made about its “moral” rationales are believed only by the clueless useful idiots who need to believe in order to carry out power goals of the Atlantic alliance. Second, the west is not by any stretch engaging in actual democracy. Nor is there a clear division between authoritarian countries and the west. We just do our authoritarianism a bit differently with covert influence campaigns to bully the public into buying into the goals of empire. It might be the west against the rest but not because we’re superior. In fact our elites are busy dumping every western tradition that made us strong to begin with.