Keywords

1 The Problem Set

Thirty years since the end of the Cold War, the global security landscape reflects none of the early post-1990 optimism about the inevitable triumph of the liberal world order, with Fukuyama’s prediction of the “end of history” (Fukuyama, 1992) or Friedman’s thesis that the “world is flat” (Friedman, 2005) striking one as wishful thinking. Today, the United States is confronted by two near-peer military competitors: Putin’s Russia that is intent on revising the post-Cold War settlement, and Xi’s China that is determined to replace the system America has built with one centered around communist China’s economic and political structures, to include a redefinition of the values that have undergirded the US global role. This challenge comes at a time when American power has been depleted by two decades of warfare in secondary theaters, while trillions have been spent on failed nation building projects in Afghanistan and the Middle East. The Global War on Terror has also reformatted the Joint Force away from peer-to-peer high intensity conflict to focus on counterinsurgency operations. It has also been restructured to fight one major theater war and one secondary campaign. A reorganization of the United States military is already underway, with the program “Army 2035” aimed at refitting the US military for cross-domain high intensity conflict with a near-peer competitor (Army Modernization Strategy, 2019).

The last three decades have also witnessed a series of misguided US economic decisions that, in the name of neoliberal economics and globalist ideology, have resulted in a massive transfer of US technology and manufacturing to communist China, with the attendant deindustrialization of America and a decline of its middle class. Today, the Chinese economy, although still nominally smaller than the US economy, in PPP terms is already bigger than America’s. Decades of unfettered access granted to Chinese researchers and graduate students to US top research universities and laboratories, combined with the ongoing theft of intellectual property, have allowed the PRC to leapfrog past the United States in several fields of R&D critical to next generation weapon systems.

In the process and through mercantilist policies and state intervention, China has leveraged its expanding manufacturing base to establish a radically centralized global supply chain network that has created US and global dependence on the PRC in critical areas, from medicines to sophisticated electronics. At the same time, America’s business elites’ commitment to globalist ideology and to offshoring has eliminated redundancies in the US defense sector—reducing capacity and leaving the United States’ military increasingly dependent on single-point-of-failure supply chains for its equipment. In short, because of our greed and geostrategic myopia encapsulated in fashionable post-Cold War shibboleths, China has emerged as the greatest threat to both the United States and to the global order America has created and maintained. In order to underscore the gravity of the situation, in January 2021, during his confirmation hearings in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, described China as a “pacing threat” for the US military (Shelbourne, 2021).

Russia poses a more straightforward challenge to the United States than China does: it rests primarily in the military domain and the country’s ability to leverage its position as the dominant supplier of energy to Europe. Since the beginning of the Putin presidency, Russia has undergone two military modernization cycles, investing selectively in key technologies and intensifying regular exercises to increase the overall operational readiness of the force. New generations of Russian manned and unmanned armor, investments in command-and-control systems, air and naval power, cyber and space have tilted the balance along NATO’s eastern flank in Russia’s favor. The seizure of Crimea in 2014 and the subsequent invasion of Donetsk and Luhansk, as well as Russian operations in Syria, showed Putin’s willingness to leverage military power to change the security equation in Europe and the Middle East. This emphasis on the political utility of the military points to Putin’s longer-term strategic design, i.e., his determination to leverage Russia’s military modernization to pressure the post-Soviet near-abroad and to bring Russia fully back into the European political arena. Putin showed his hand in February 2022 when he ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.  

In order to underscore Moscow’s military muscle, in September 2021, Russia and Belarus completed their joint Zapad 2021 military maneuvers, the largest such exercise along NATO’s eastern flank since the end of the Cold War. Officially, two hundred thousand soldiers took part in multiple drills that covered the majority of the European portion of the Russian Federation, exercising an offensive scenario against NATO and showcasing new military technology. The exercise witnessed the first large scale deployment of the Uran-9 robot tank and the use of the newly upgraded BMPT “Terminator” tank support fighting vehicle, among others. Russia also exercised its entire Baltic Fleet air force, deployed 290 tanks and 15 ships, tested command and control systems, drilled suppressing the enemy’s communications, and practiced scenarios for defending against drones. Most importantly during this Zapad 2021, Russia and Belarus exercised Joint Air Defense and Air Force Training and Combat Center, underscoring that Moscow has full control over the Belarusian armed forces, thereby further complicating NATO’s operational planning (Adomeit, 2021). In fact, in February 2022 Russia relied on Belarusian territory as a staging area for its attack on Kyiv and the northern region of Ukraine.  

Zapad 2021 was an impressive show of force, and as such it was more than a military drill; it was a psychological operation aimed at sending an unequivocal message that Russia commands sufficient military power to credibly threaten the alliance’s eastern flank. It also delivered an internal message, communicating to Russian citizens that their country was once again a great power, and that the balance of forces in Europe had shifted in Russia’s favor. Not all of this was bluster and propaganda, although the subpar performance of the Russian military during the 2022 invasion of Ukraine surprised Western analysts. Still, two decades of selective investment in military modernization has allowed Russia to develop a range of new technologies, while most of European NATO has remained effectively disarmed. Today, Moscow has more room to leverage new Russian military capabilities for political gain than at any point since 1990. Putin’s tightening grip on Belarus has further undermined Ukraine’s security while increasing the threat posed by Russia to Poland, the Baltic States and the entire eastern flank of the alliance. Putin’s 2022 decision to invade Ukraine showed once again that he was determined to rely on military power to score geopolitical wins.

2 The Key Assumptions

In geostrategic terms, the core of the current security challenge Russia and China pose to the United States and the world’s democracies rests on their increased alignment when it comes to strategic objectives and deepening military cooperation, driven by their shared interest in breaking the United States’ global military dominance and fracturing the existing alliance system in Europe and Asia. This chapter approaches the problem of developing a workable strategy to counter this effort with four initial assumptions. First, though unequal in terms of their relative power and with different national interests, Russia and China have become de facto allies, brought together by their shared opposition to the United States and the order America has created and sustained. Hence, American grand strategy going forward must factor in the reality that any action taken against either of the two powers will likely trigger a reaction from both. Simply put, if the United States focuses on one theater—the Indo-Pacific, and one adversary—China, as has been increasingly the case in the last 5 years, this opens up opportunities for Russia in the other key theater, i.e., Europe, and possibly, though to a lesser degree, in the MENA region. Conversely, the Russian 2022 invasion of Ukraine may be seen by Beijing as a near-term opportunity to pressure the United States in the Indo-Pacific.  

Second, my analysis stipulates that the foundation of any successful strategy toward Russia must include restoring the military capabilities of European NATO allies, for if confronted in the Indo-Pacific, the United States—with its high-end enablers and the strategic nuclear deterrent remaining in Europe—must nonetheless be able to rely on its NATO allies for the preponderance of conventional military power required to ensure that deterrence on the Continent holds as US military assets are drawn into Asia. Hence, I argue that NATO needs to shift its internal conversation away from “burden sharing” to what I have called elsewhere “burden transferring” (Michta, 2021b).

Third, I stipulate that no strategy for dealing with Russia and the PRC will be successful until and unless the United States decouples its strategically vital supply chains from China, re-shores critical manufacturing back to the United States, and works to develop a diffuse supply chain network for non-critical supplies, with redundancies built-in to sustain us in case of war. This third stipulation is admittedly the most contentious and difficult to actuate not only because the American business community remains deeply invested in manufacturing in and selling to China, but also because of how differently the United States sees China compared to our European allies. The European Union, especially Germany, sees the PRC as a strategic challenge, but also as its principal trading partner and a key economic opportunity for future growth (“Germany and China: Bilateral Relations”, 2021). Getting to a transatlantic consensus on China is arguably the most difficult challenge confronting the United States and its allies going forward. I posit that the United States has no path forward to victory unless it decisively disaggregates the China-centric global supply network.

My fourth stipulation is that in order to overcome its relative power deficit after two decades of the global war on terrorism and three decades of globalization, the United States must leverage its alliances and partnerships worldwide in key theaters. An alternative approach that seeks to break up the Sino-Russian alliance, often referred to as “Kissinger in reverse,” posits that the United States should work with its Asian allies, especially Japan and South Korea, to bring about a reorientation of the Russian policy azimuth from West to East. This concept, recently articulated by Wess Mitchell, would encourage Japanese and South Korean investment in Russia’s Far East to create a counterweight to increasing Chinese economic domination in Asia (Mitchell, 2021). Mitchell argues persuasively that in order to avoid a two-front war, the United States should aim to assist in the alignment of Russia with other Asian states concerned about China’s rise. This is a compelling argument, but one predicated on the imperative that NATO would rebuild its defenses to a point where the likelihood of further Russian westward expansion would be effectively foreclosed. Absent this factor, I see any strategy that seeks to entice Russia to reorient itself toward the West as prohibitively risky, as its benefits in Asia would be nullified by Putin exploiting continued expansion opportunities in the West. Finally, in light of Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine and Washington’s decision to support Kyiv across the board, both with weapons and economic assistance, any US-Russian rapprochement is impossible in the foreseeable future.

3 Building a Workable Strategy

The overall geostrategic problem confronting the United States in its strategic competition with Russia is relatively straightforward, i.e., one that requires revisiting containment from the previous era combined with “political area denial” when it comes to Russian influence behind NATO’s fence. For the military containment piece, our NATO allies will need to field real exercised military capabilities which, combined with the US strategic nuclear umbrella and high-end enablers, ensure deterrence in Europe holds even if America is pulled into a kinetic conflict in the Indo-Pacific. Here, the challenge is to get the politics on defense in Europe aligned with the requirements in the theater rather than incessantly debating whether/when individual NATO allies meet the Wales Pledge of spending 2% of their GDP on defense. I have argued for some time that the 2% pledge should be abandoned, as it has become a political fig leaf that has allowed governments to avoid making meaningful decisions on defense (Michta, 2021a). Simply put, the United States does not have a large enough military to increase its presence several folds on the Continent. For NATO to remain viable, Europe must rebuild its defenses and ensure those forces remain interoperable with US forces currently deployed there and those that would be brought in as reinforcement in a crisis.

Hence, the problem of whether the United States and its European NATO allies can deal effectively with the threat Russia poses to Europe is fundamentally political. Its resolution depends on which course of action the European political class will take in the coming years, with the decision window being small and shrinking. The choice Europe faces is straightforward: either reinvest in NATO or pursue the chimera of “strategic autonomy.” The former would be orders of magnitude more cost effective, as the United States would continue to provide strategic level nuclear deterrence and high-end strategic enablers. The latter would require key Europeans to spend 6–7% of their GDP on defense and would still lack at the high-end of nuclear and next generation capabilities. Case in point: despite much talk of “Permanent Structured Cooperation “(PESCO), a “Coordinated Annual Review on Defence” (CARD), and the European Defense Fund, Europe will not have its fifth-generation aircraft designed and built for at least another decade, nor could a French nuclear deterrent replace America’s. The key to America’s success will be how Germany sees its place in Europe, especially now that post-Brexit the European Union is much more continental than at any point since the 1970s. Indeed, Germany’s economic weight gives Berlin special prerogatives when it comes to EU foreign and security policy. The United States legacy military infrastructure in Europe is in Germany, and although Washington has been investing in countries along NATO’s eastern flank, including the new V Corps Headquarters in Poznan, Poland, rotational forward presence in Poland and tailored presence in Romania, if Germany does not step up on its own defense, operational planning in Europe will suffer. The shock caused across Europe by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 seems to have finally awakened the Continent to the Russian threat. Shortly after the invasion, Chancellor Scholz announced an additional 100 billion euro in emergency defense spending and the decision to buy the F-35 aircraft from the United States.  

And yet, the idea that by recognizing Europe’s strategic autonomy the US can get the Continent to rearm seems to be gaining ground. Recently Hans Binnendijk and Alexander Vershbow advocated for a transatlantic agreement of Europe’s strategic autonomy, arguing that the United States should drop its objections to the project and treat it as a means to ensure “greater European strategic responsibility” (Binnendijk & Vershbow, 2021). The authors maintain that the criterion for European contributions under strategic autonomy would be one-half of NATO’s currently agreed upon “level of ambition,” translating into Europe’s capabilities needed to conduct three near simultaneous small operations and one major operation on its own. They admit that considering Europe’s lack of high-end enablers, low readiness rates, and its fragmented military industrial complex, this would take a considerable amount of time. While this argument might offer yet another inducement to the Europeans to modernize their military, the decision to rearm is fundamentally a political decision. No amount of US diplomatic concessions on strategic autonomy is likely to make them change their mind, for it reflects their larger political priorities going forward. In short, anything that takes away from the urgently needed focus on restoring NATO’s defenses and readiness is in the final analysis going to be counterproductive and end in failure. The 2022 war in Ukraine underscored this point yet again.

The second key challenge besides rebuilding Europe’s military capabilities to deter Russia that must be addressed by the European allies is infrastructure, both in terms of access and the requisite quality needed to move heavy equipment across the European theater. Here, China’s growing presence on the Continent, including its acquisition of critical pieces of European infrastructure, especially ports, has raised questions about NATO’s ability to receive American reinforcements and to move them across the theater in an all-out crisis. Furthermore, the failure for 30 years to factor in key defense requirements when developing and/or maintaining existing rail, roads and bridges means that it is no longer the case (as it was during the Cold War) that every overpass, road and bridge is rated to carry heavy armor. Meanwhile American and European tanks are heavier and trailers are bigger. In short, Europe needs to undertake major reinvestment in its infrastructure to ensure that NATO’s militaries can exercise across the theater. Likewise, national security priorities need to be put at the top once again when governments make decisions on foreign investment in their countries, especially from China and Russia.

NATO remains hamstrung by infrastructure deficiencies not only in Western Europe, but also in Central Europe, where the legacy East-West imperial infrastructure continues to limit options available to military planners when it comes to military mobility. The corridor from the Baltic Sea, through Central Europe and into the Balkans up to and including the Adriatic has an estimated $1.5 trillion deficit in infrastructure investments. The impact is felt the most when it comes to infrastructure running North-South—something the Three Seas Initiative is seeking to address (Mosbacher, 2020). In 2020, the United States committed $1 billion to the Three Seas project but raising funds for the initiative has been slow, with Germany (which holds an observer status) pushing to redirect it toward green energy projects. Investing in the Three Seas, especially in infrastructure projects that enhance military mobility, should be an important part of NATO’s strategy going forward to ensure deterrence holds.

The “political area denial” component of this strategy puts at the center the direction of Europe’s political evolution, especially when it comes to its relations with Russia, but also China. It is time to finally recognize that the emergence of Europe, “whole, free and at peace” to quote President George H. W. Bush (Hunter, 2008), was made possible not because our liberal values triumphed in the end, but because Russia could not keep up with the West in key indices of hard power and was effectively expelled from Central Europe, laying the ground for subsequent NATO and EU enlargements. The 2011 decision by Berlin to allow for the construction of the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea to carry Russian gas directly to Germany, bypassing transit countries in Central and Eastern Europe, was symbolic of Russia’s gradual return to Europe. The 2021 completion of Nord Stream 2, which made Russia the largest supplier of energy to Europe and by extension, Germany the largest distributor of Russian gas, marked a qualitative leap in Russia’s economic and political influence on the Continent. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 should serve as a wake up call for Berlin to change fundamentally its Russia policy.

Limiting Russia’s and China’s influence in Europe will require a strategic shift in how key European countries, especially Germany but also France, view not only the future of their relationship with Russia, but also the extent to which they will be willing to factor in the greater security concerns of countries along NATO’s eastern flank. The ongoing fracturing of the intra-EU consensus on the key issue of European federalism in all its aspects is likely to make “area-denial” to Russian influence in Europe ever more difficult, deepening the inroads Putin has already made in a number of countries, especially when it comes to energy.

In contrast to Russia, where the problem set is rather straightforward, developing a workable strategy on China requires first and foremost a recognition that Beijing is now not only a challenge for the United States and its Indo-Pacific allies, but also that it will be a decisive factor shaping Europe’s future—something that key European governments have consistently refused to acknowledge. And yet, if the democratic West is to succeed in its competition with China, any workable strategy must be based on the imperative of “hard decoupling,” i.e., the strategic decision taken across the transatlantic community to disentangle our supply chains from China.

Decoupling is the sine qua non of Western strategy going forward but only the first necessary step on the road to what is and will remain an enduring competition between the United States and China for years to come. This competition is not only over markets or technology; rather, it requires confronting what Michael Pillsbury has called China’s “thoroughgoing revisionism” (Pillsbury, 2015) aimed at reordering both the global distribution of power and the normative structures in place since 1945. The West must recognize that we are facing a communist state whose ideology has always been at its core totalitarian and whose power we have nurtured and enlarged through our misguided policy assumptions that rationalized simple corporate greed. The transatlantic community must recognize and agree that what has been underway since the end of the Cold War is the second, and possibly decisive stage of conflict between liberal democracy and communism, one that the West is entering with much greater handicaps than it did post-1945. Liberal democracies must recognize that they are in an existential struggle for the survival of our institutions and our way of life.

The imperative of decoupling from China and re-shoring our key industries goes beyond the question of supply chains. Over the past four decades we have given China practically unrestricted access to our social, corporate, government, and educational institutions. This has allowed Beijing both to train its weapons designers at the best American universities and research centers, and to develop sophisticated information campaigns and ever-more brazen industrial espionage operations to tap into our technology and know-how. As we have learned recently, Beijing has even contracted directly with our scientists and researchers for cutting-edge research to be transferred exclusively to China.

An effective strategy against Chinese surveillance state capitalism will also require shoring up the young generation’s commitment to traditional democratic values and freedoms. China has effectively exploited to its advantage the current fissures within US society, with messaging that their political and economic models provide a superior alternative to democratic capitalism. We need to cut off this access and instead target Chinese society with messaging of our own, modelled on the successful media campaigns aimed at the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War decades. Last but not least, the mantras of “free trade” and “globalization” of the past three decades need to be discarded, as they can no longer serve as an excuse for the business class to pursue narrow corporate interest disconnected from national security considerations; American companies are free to maximize their wealth provided their decisions do not impair the nation’s defenses.

4 Conclusions

Today, Russia is seen by the US as primarily a military problem set, while China is seen as both an economic and military problem set, as well as increasingly an ideological challenge whose system Beijing touts as superior to liberal democracy. The problem of developing a workable Russia-China strategy is fundamentally political because the United States and its key European allies come to the table with fundamentally different threat assessments. In the case of Russia, the divergence is caused by the progressive regionalization of European security optics. The countries along NATO’s eastern flank see Russia as an urgent threat, while countries deeper within Europe, especially Germany and France, see Russia as a problem set that can be managed primarily through political and economic means. The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought Europe closer together, but it has not completely eradicated those divergent national priorities when it comes to the Continent’s security and defense.  

When it comes to China, the prospect of the West developing a workable strategy hinges on the fundamental question of whether consensus can be reached on the nature of the threat China poses to liberal democracies. China has managed to create real dependencies when it comes to the West’s core supply chains, making the near-term consequences of hard decoupling potentially quite painful, with attendant political costs to Western governments. Likewise, the interpenetration of the Western and Chinese business communities has created arguably the most powerful lobbying machine to date, capable of warping our processes to bend them to their will. Any effort to develop a cohesive China strategy will require steely determination on the part of Western governments for it to succeed.

The Russian and Chinese challenge to the West is interrelated, as the two are in effect aligned in their opposition to the US-led international order. The West must come to terms with the scope of this threat, for unlike during the Cold War when the Soviet Union was the principal challenge while China remained a regional player, we are now confronting two near-peer competitors and two theaters of great power confrontation—one in Europe, the other in the Indo-Pacific. The United States military is overstretched and structured to fight in one major theater and one secondary smaller campaign. This means that the key to a successful Russia-China strategy lies in Europe, for as America refocuses on the Indo-Pacific, the European allies must assume the burden of ensuring that, in the event of a kinetic conflict in Asia that would pull most US resources there, deterrence in Europe will hold. In a poignant reversal of the situation the West confronted in 1945, when its freedom rested on America’s guarantees to Europe, today the security of the transatlantic community depends on what Europe’s leaders will do, i.e., whether they rearm, restoring NATO to its former status of a cohesive fighting alliance, or do nothing and allow the transatlantic link to atrophy and, ultimately, break in a crisis. Declarations by various European governments in the wake of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine to reinvest in defense show promise; however, the question remains: Will this commitment hold in years to come?