Five Reasons The Ukraine War Could Force A Rethink Of Washington’s Pivot To Asia

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has greatly complicated U.S. military and diplomatic calculations, but it doesn’t seem to have changed official Washington’s belief that China is the greater threat.

A fact sheet distributed by the Pentagon describing the Biden administration’s national defense strategy describes the U.S. approach to deterring aggression as “prioritizing the PRC challenge in the Indo-Pacific, then the Russian challenge in Europe.”

That ranking of future dangers may not survive the Biden years, because the aggression Vladimir Putin has unleashed in Eastern Europe presents a more pressing military problem than anything Beijing is doing in the East. Putin describes the Ukraine invasion as signaling the emergence of an alternative world order—one in which America does not dominate.

He also seldom misses an opportunity to remind the world that Russia possesses a nuclear arsenal capable of wiping out the West in a few hours. That kind of rhetoric goes far beyond anything China’s President Xi has uttered in public.

Talk is cheap, but there are more substantive reasons to suspect that Washington’s pivot to Asia will need to be reassessed. Here are five of them.

Geography. China and Russia have similar histories of empire-building that stretch back for many centuries, but the geographical circumstances that dictate their security goals are different. European Russia occupies a vast plain that stretches almost unbroken from the Ural Mountains to the North Sea. There are few topographical barriers to westward expansion (see map).

China, on the other hand, is hemmed in on all sides by major geographical obstacles—mountains, deserts, and, of course, the Pacific Ocean. One reason Taiwan bulks so large in Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy is that the small island nation is the only place Beijing’s military might plausibly seek to occupy in this decade.

Not so Russia: in the absence of credible Western defenses, its military could move to occupy any number of neighboring countries from Moldova to Finland. Putin’s rhetoric encourages the belief that Ukraine might be just the beginning in a new era of empire-building.

Leaders. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are both aging dictators who are reluctant to relinquish power. Appealing to popular resentment of past wrongs supposedly perpetrated by foreign powers is one tool in their efforts to remain leaders of their respective nations.

However, President Xi’s approach to growing Beijing’s global stature is grounded in a multifaceted plan that does not focus mainly on military power. Putin’s approach in recent years has been centered on using force to reclaim lost territory.

Ishaan Tharoor writes in the Washington Post that Putin’s neo-imperialist mindset is grounded in “a narrative of mythic destiny that supersedes any geopolitical imperative and which has set Russia on a collision course with the West.”

President Xi no doubt has his own conception of China’s manifest destiny, but it isn’t about seizing territory beyond Taiwan. Unlike Putin, who likens himself to the conqueror Peter the Great, Xi is not about to compare himself with the Qing emperors who doubled China’s size. The success of his plan does not hinge on overt conquest of neighboring states.

Character of the threat. Putin’s preoccupation with the military aspects of power derives in part from the weakness of the other tools at his disposal. Russia’s extractive economy, which relies heavily on the export of fossil fuels, is not competitive with the West in advanced technology.

In any conventional war with the West, Russia would be quickly defeated owing to its lack of sophisticated weapons and economic resources. Putin’s frequent allusion to Moscow’s nuclear arsenal is thus an expression of weakness, a reflection that even in the military realm, his nation is no match for its Western rivals so long as they remain unified.

Beijing’s story is different. Since it first joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, China has become the world’s greatest industrial power, surpassing the combined manufacturing capacity of America, Japan and Western Europe. Its indigenous technological capabilities have made steady progress, and in some areas now lead the world.

If China simply stays on the economic vector it has established over the last two decades, it will become the dominant global power even without a first-rate military. That is not an option for Russia. Its efforts to keep up have faltered, and thus it is left with only the military to pursue Putin’s dream of restored greatness.

Intensity of the threat. Although China is rapidly building up it forces, the military threat it poses beyond Taiwan is largely hypothetical. In Russia’s case, the military threat is obvious and could persist for generations.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg both warned in the last week that the Ukraine war could continue for a long time, perhaps years. Even when hostilities cease, Russian troops will still sit on the borders of half a dozen NATO countries.

The danger of war thus is not going away in Europe regardless of how Putin’s latest campaign of aggression fares. The intensity of the current conflict makes Moscow’s moves impossible to ignore, whereas the military threat posed by China in the Western Pacific is more nebulous.

Even if Beijing’s current military expansion continues, the main challenge posed by China will continue to be economic and technological in character. No amount of U.S. military power in the Western Pacific will change the fact that China routinely commercializes new innovations ahead of America, and is graduating eight time as many STEM students from its universities.

Tractability of the threat. To the extent that China does pose a regional military threat, the solutions are relatively easy to envision. For instance, permanently deploying a U.S. Army armored brigade to Taiwan would probably be sufficient to deter invasion from what used to be called the “Mainland.”

The solution is Europe are far more challenging, because the vast distances and geographical barriers that insulate countries like Japan from China do not exist in Europe. A lightning attack by Moscow on several neighboring countries could succeed before America even managed to mobilize. And any Western response would have to contemplate the presence of over a thousand Russian tactical nuclear weapons in the region.

Thus, the danger posed by Russia in Eastern Europe will increasingly come to dominate Washington’s strategic calculations. China, having more options and a subtler leadership, will be able to continue rising in the East without stirring up the kind of concerns that Putin has engendered.

The Pentagon’s pivot to Asia thus is likely to be diluted, even if the rhetoric coming out Washington suggests otherwise.