As deadly missiles rain upon Ukraine from a fateful and ill-conceived decision by Vladimir Putin to invade, one prominent country stands with the Russian dictator: China.
The condemnation of NATO’s expansion is the condemnation of European democracy’s self-defense. That stance against democratic defense is central to China’s emerging alliance systems.
The three dictatorships claim that NATO is offensive, even though it’s clearly defensive. They ignore the right of people and countries everywhere to choose their own leaders in fair elections. They reject the right of nations to choose their own defensive alliances based on shared democratic values. They thereby flout the U.N. 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
For Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran, the normal laws of decency that all nations follow are thrown out the window. Xi seeks to control the world. Tehran has fallen in line. And Putin is doing his best as a second-tier partner by striking the first blow for our illiberal future.
What Putin does today to Ukraine, Xi will do tomorrow to Taiwan. Tehran will do the same in Iraq and Syria. The three ongoing fights are inextricably linked as the world’s dictators-in-chief seek ever more power, held by hubristically assuming NATO and friends are too cowardly to oppose them militarily.
They think that making their countries sanction-proof by intertwining their economies, diverting their trade to one another, and denominating their contracts increasingly in the yuan instead of the dollar, will keep their new conquests safe.
“Among their concerns, these people said, was the risk of financial and trade penalties imposed by Washington in response to any help that Beijing might extend to help Russia evade U.S. sanctions,” the outlet reported.
Indeed, the United States and its allies can—and must—sanction Russia along with China for its enabling role in the invasion. Without Xi’s promise to help Russia financially, Putin couldn’t have made the decision to invade.
The NATO response to the Russian invasion more generally can’t be in isolation from the China threat. To do so would ignore the core of the illiberal alliance system in Beijing. Democracies around the world that wish to defend themselves against these rising authoritarians must have a comprehensive strategy—at the core of which is removing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from its coordinating role.
The United States has talked about this since President Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia,” still incomplete two administrations later. U.S. alliance systems are bifurcated between NATO in Europe, and our hub-and-spokes in Asia, which are so brittle that without the United States, it would fall apart. What’s more, the Ukraine crisis threatens to derail that pivot, which perhaps not coincidentally is exactly what the CCP wants.
“If Ukraine is invaded, the shock will echo around the world,” said Johnson, who warned that autocratic regimes in Asia and further afield would “draw the conclusion that aggression pays and that might is right.”
No longer can NATO think that the protection of its members is limited to Europe. As long as China, with an economy that’s approximately 10 times that of Russia, continues to pull the strings with dictators around the world, NATO must address the root of the problem in Asia.
Despite the temptation to focus on the televised violence likely to unfold daily from Ukraine over the next weeks, we need to take the larger strategic view and look at the source of that violence, which is Beijing’s influential antipathy for both democracy and the world’s most powerful democratic alliance: NATO.
