For all that’s going on in United States politics, courts, and civil turmoil, there is also an international picture. Oh, yeah.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine goes on, and will likely go on for a long time. If something surprising doesn’t happen, this grinding war will go through this year and maybe the next. We, the west, must keep supplying Ukraine and supporting any way we can. There is no good reason to think the Russian government or people will ever halt Putin’s ambition of recreating the borders that Russia had three hundred years ago – as if they are relevant now.
There is a world-wide crisis associated with this. Besides the war, which puts the democratic order of the world under stress, there is a crisis of food. Ukraine is a breadbasket to much of the world. They have great supplies of grain harvested that need to get to many, many countries on several continents soon, or people will starve. Millions of people.
The war by Russia is halting those shipments. They need to move by sea, and the Russians are controlling and blockading the seaports on the Black Sea where these grains would need to ship from.
It is physically impossible to move more than 10% of these grains over land. The only way to avert a massive worldwide crisis is to put them on ships.
To let them through the Russians will certainly want sanctions lifted. Doing that will give them the ability to destroy Ukraine, and any other country they think belongs under their thumb.
We could send a convoy of NATO ships into the Black Sea to escort the grain ships out, but that could lead to combat with Russia. We should be prepared for that as a reality. We can’t let the world starve, and we can’t let Russia attack and conquer whomever they want. So this may happen. And we may go to war.
And, if that wasn’t enough, Britain is mobilizing its armed forces. This is preventative. The new head of their armed forces sees in this moment the reflection of 1937. That was the year their Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sought appeasement with Germany and Adolph Hitler. He traded accepting Germany’s grab of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland in exchange for peace with the rest of Europe. Hitler was lying and later invaded Poland.
Britain will not be fooled again, and is preparing and mobilizing for a war, as a means to sustain peace. Russia will not invade other countries when facing a formidable and prepared force.
This is our reality. We are closer to a big war than we’ve been since WWII. And with some certain justification. Any plan to accede to Russian demands will only be more painful later.
We must consider it a real threat that such a war is possible.
The good news, if that is the correct phrase, is that NATO is overwhelmingly more powerful than Russia. More powerful than Russia and China combined. There is no conceivable scenario that we would lose such a war, though there is every reason to believe that it would be costly, both in money and lives. And it would upset the normalcy we’ve been accustomed to these last 7 decades.
To a great degree we have no choice. We are part of NATO. As we all know, NATO is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The purpose of forming NATO was to create an alliance of countries with rock solid commitments to defend each other if attacked. This was formed and has worked to sustain peace for all these years. It has been largely untested. It has sat for all this time as a deterrent to foreign aggression. With a moderate force stationed in many European countries as a tripwire, an attack on which would trigger the response of all NATO forces, but which forces would not be large enough to repel attackers.
NATO has changed readiness in light of this Russian attack. It is now deploying and readying forces sufficient to repel attacks in these border countries. The goal is to make attacking NATO countries so likely to fail that Russia will not try. This is a smart play. Russia has the GDP equivalent of Italy, and has no chance against the military of NATO. This isn’t even a close match. This is the Superbowl champion team, along with all of the playoff teams, playing against a high school varsity team. And since the disaster they’ve experienced in their attack on Ukraine, it is that high school team without four of their starting lineup.
They have no chance.
Why would they attack if they have no chance? Well, they likely wouldn’t. And that is why we prepare fully to give them no chance. That is how wars are prevented. But if they did, it would be with the assistance of other countries, and with the help of internal conflicts within the NATO countries. This includes, and mostly affects the USA. Should America face internal civil conflict, or should pro-Russian politicians regain power in the US, it is possible that the US contingent to NATO could be withheld.
These reasons and others are why we need to deepen our commitment to keeping the Democratic party in the majority in the House or Representatives, and expanding the majority in the Senate. Should we lose this, Ukraine will lose, and Russia will control the food supply to a large part of the world. And Russia (as well as China) will have free rein to attack and subjugate whatever country suits them. This will doom the planet to something similar to the world of the book, 1984, by George Orwell, with three mutually powerful countries locked in perpetual war and each led by an authoritarian leader. It doesn’t matter what his name is, if Big Brother is in charge.
The previous US President, Donald Trump, held an isolationist stance, and pursued alienation of allies while cozying up to the adversarial dictators. It is possible he believed he was “keeping his enemies closer” to borrow a phrase from The Godfather. (1972 film about the American Mafia that Trump and his family members quote all too frequently.) But he did it so ham-handedly that it was plain for all to see. And since his actions were almost entirely for show to a home audience of his political base, there wasn’t any real follow up or enforcement of the tough talk. And, since his administration mostly pursued an agenda of corruption and self-enrichment, it was easy for those various dictators to flatter his ego and bribe him with contracts for him and his family. For the same reasons he put around himself foreign policy advisors who would just agree with whatever he wanted, leaving him effectively without sound advice.
The current President, Joseph Biden, has four decades of experience as Senator and as Vice-President with a wealth of foreign policy experience. Further, he has selected for his cabinet other well-qualified diplomats and advisors to whom he actually listens. He and his team have reunified the countries within NATO to stand against the Russian aggression, and has also sewn up the relationships with most of the rest of the world, with particular attention to those bordering the Pacific Ocean.
This segues to China. Here I will be speaking of both the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on the mainland, as well as the Republic Of China (ROC) on the Island of Taiwan.
Though most people in America who are at all familiar with that region believe that they are two separate nations. This isn’t technically true.
During World War II both communist and nationalist forces were fighting against the Japanese occupation of China. The allied countries worked with both to aid in the destruction of the Japanese military to end the war. After the war was over, those factions continued fighting a civil war for control of China going forward. The communists under Mao Zedong got the upper hand, and the nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek moved to the Island of Taiwan (then Formosa) and established a government in exile. Up until 1979 the US recognized the ROC as a government, but dropped that and recognized the PRC as the sole legitimate government of China, but only acknowledged their authority over Taiwan. The subtle distinction between recognize and acknowledge is full of meaning, and is covered by the US One China Policy. The complicated diplomatic nature of the policy boils down to the US accepting that only one China exists, and that its government is the PRC, but that reunification with Taiwan will only be achieved through peaceful methods, and with the agreement of Taiwan. Which allows the US to continue to support the defense of Taiwan through arms sales and defensive cooperation. Taiwan is a functioning democracy and a significant trading partner with the US and other western nations. The PRC is a single party (Communist) state with severe restrictions on personal liberty, serious human rights violations and ongoing genocide against people within its borders, and no means for the people to express a desire for self-determination.
In short, so long as the mainland is run by communist and authoritarian rule, the US will defend Taiwan from attack. (So long as the US remains a democracy itself.) And the long term hope is that the Chinese mainland will themselves come to embrace democratic principles and eschew communism.
But, the current President of China, and head of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping has territorial ambitions rivaling those of the Russian President Valadimir Putin. Xi intends to restore the borders of China to that of some earlier time, and seeks to dominate Asia and the western Pacific Ocean region. He has pledged to return Taiwan to the control of the PRC and has said that he would use the military if necessary. He intends to be the most consequential leader of China in the modern era. Etching his name in stone alongside the Khans of old.
This puts the world on a bit of a collision course between democracy and authoritarianism. While the democratic nations in alliance are vastly more powerful, they hinge on the strength of the United States. And it requires the cooperation of many different people. Dictators can manage that with a few phone calls and handshakes.
Should the US become embroiled in civil war it might put the burden of such a contest upon the various lesser nations involved, such as those in NATO, plus Australia, Japan, and possibly India, along with various other smaller countries. One can easily speculate that should that civil war begin, and should China and Russia use that event as cover to continue their aggression, the various other nations would refrain from conflict on their own, and NATO would agree to concessions with Russia to avoid direct conflict.
So, can the United States conduct a two-front war against China and Russia, while fighting a civil war within its own borders? That is unknown. Much of that will depend on which party holds power in the Executive and Legislative branches. Because of the size of the nuclear arsenal possessed by the USA, it is likely NATO countries would involve themselves in such a civil war, if only to ensure the security of those weapons.
As it is in the interest of Russia and China that such an internal conflict arises in the US, we can expect them to continue to foment it.
The defense against that should necessarily include pressing for such instability within the borders of those nations as well.
The situation in Russian is untenable over the long haul. The sanctions imposed on Russia are crippling the economy and restricting the ability of them to get critical parts and technology they need to support their machinery and armament manufacturing. Russia has imposed large controls over their economy and the effect on the citizenry has been mitigated, but this cannot last. The loss of over one thousand international companies, along with the inability for Russia to access world funds, will become increasingly difficult for the populace to sustain. And the casualties they are experiencing in the war against Ukraine cannot long be covered up by the government.
In China they also have cracks in the stability they project to the world. Between vast amounts of general corruption and internal power conflicts, there is growing unrest within that country. There are huge failures in home building projects that were pre-purchased by consumers, and banks are having difficulty supplying money to their customers, with bank runs becoming commonplace.
The effects of the global Covid-19 pandemic have severely affected China, and this along with bad weather has harmed crop yields. This is particularly troubling because China already relies on many other countries to supply them with food products – grains in particular. These grains come from NATO or NATO friendly countries, such as Canada, the USA, and Australia. While China has been investing in various places in the world to increase their influence and ensure their food supply, at this time they cannot sustain their people should these countries become belligerents.
As I mentioned earlier, the US under President Biden has sewn up alliances and friendly relations with numerous Asian and Pacific countries who have traditional relationships with the west, and who feel increasingly under threat of being dominated by China in the years ahead. And while China has cut deals with many of the Pacific Ocean countries, particularly in Oceania, they have been haphazard and without coordination towards a goal.
President Xi has not left his country in over eighteen months, and many sense that he is afraid of a coup while away. He is on the verge of being reelected for a third term of five years, after the two-term limit was removed after his last election. His grip on the country seems secure, but his rise to power came with a campaign against corruption that hurt many of his political opponents. Those people have not forgotten. The tradition of corruption in China has not disappeared, and this may become Xi’s downfall.
Xi may well have intended to either coerce Taiwan into abandoning self-rule with threat of force, or to use such force had Donald Trump been reelected in the USA. Trump has frequently said that current President Biden was going to have to deal with China attacking Taiwan, and that this and the Russian attack on Ukraine wouldn’t have happened had he been elected. Of course this is nonsense, as it is clear that Trump showed great favor towards the leaders of both of those countries, and was toying with leaving NATO, which many insiders have said he would have done had he retained the Presidency. There is little doubt that Trump would have remained isolationist, and refuse to get involved.
It appears that Russian President Vladamir Putin overestimated the internal conflict in the US, and underestimated NATO’s resilience, as well as Biden’s ability to build support for Ukraine. He also seems to have been misled by his own intelligence agencies, who promised him an easy victory over the power structure in Ukraine, as well as significant aid from paramilitary groups within Ukraine that were friendly towards Russia.
Xi does not seem to be making that same mistake. He seems more willing to wait and see what the outcome of the next two elections will say about the direction of the US. Should authoritarians retake power, this would make his position against Taiwan stronger. And should the Democratic Party remain in power, and an insurgency arise causing great civil unrest or civil war, this would also give him greater confidence in launching such an invasion.
Xi’s own political power and internal difficulties might force him to act sooner out of fear that waiting might weaken his support.
The best approach the US and allies can pursue, as I see it, is to covertly try to foment the downfall of Xi in China, by creating chaos internally, either by stoking the economic and cultural unrest, or by creating the fear among other Chinese leaders that he will launch them into a massively destructive war against Taiwan – or both.
And in Russia it seems inevitable that Putin will fall, though it is unlikely his replacement will be much better, it may at least cause an end to the attack on Ukraine. Which would bolster support for Biden, and thus democracy in America.
And strengthening democracy in America is the most important of all results. Without a doubt, the failure of democracy in the United States would be a harbinger of doom for freedom the world over, as there is little doubt that it could be sustained long without the anchor that the US provides.