Russia Ain’t a Chinese Sidecar

I want to draw your attention to an article by A. Wess Mitchell that appeared in the National Interest in August 2021. The article, A Strategy for Avoiding Two-Front War, is an excellent summary of how the US foreign policy elite view the world — i.e., the United States faces two formidable enemies, Russia and China, and we need to figure out a way to screw them over and maintain our hegemony. But Mitchell is not engaged in an academic exercise… he prepared a version of this paper for the Pentagon Office of Net Assessment in fall 2020. This was a road map for the war in Ukraine — i.e., provoke Russia into attacking Ukraine and then, with Western help, beat the hell out of them.

I learned of this article today while listening to Alexander Mercouris. Mr. Mitchell is an intelligent, well-educated man, but he is captive to an ideology and world view that plagues the Deep State. He conjures up a Manichean-world, portraying Russia and China as ravenous imperialists hell-bent on devouring the peace loving countries of the world, while touting the United States as the force for good. He ignores the fact that the United States, not Russia or China, has been the one country during the last 70-years that has launched multiple color revolutions and relentlessly attacked and pillaged scores of nations around the world. His piece has one purpose — create a straw man, only in this case it is straw men, to justify US military expansion, but doing so under the guise of diplomacy.

Mitchell correctly acknowledges that the United States lacks the military strength and resources to simultaneously engage both Russia and China. At least he is not insane. He discusses three diplomatic options that could be employed to contain Russia and China:

Option 1: “Flip” the weaker. Perhaps the most common form of sequencing is to align with the weaker of two rivals in order to concentrate resources on the stronger. This is the method that Edwardian Britain used when it recruited Tsarist Russia—against which it had waged a decades-long cold war in Central Asia no less intense than our own—into an alliance against Imperial Germany.

Option 2: Defer competition with the stronger. A second sequencing strategy is to delay rivalry with the stronger of two opponents in order to deal conclusively with the weaker. The mid-sixteenth-century Republic of Venice employed such a strategy to deflect the threat of the rising Ottoman Empire and deal conclusively with its mainland rival Milan. A similar logic guided Britain’s ill-fated quest in the 1930s to appease Germany in order to prioritize naval resources for the Far East and buy time for rearmament in Europe.

Option 3: Co-opt both rivals. The third and most difficult, but perhaps most elegant, solution for the simultaneity problem has been to transcend it entirely—to negate its pressures by co-opting both rivals into cooperative structures that prevent or mitigate conflict. This was the method that the nineteenth-century Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich used to enmesh Austria’s flanking rivals, France and Russia, in a system of concert diplomacy that kept the peace in Europe for almost a century.

So what does Mr. Mitchell propose? The war in Ukraine:

The leitmotif of the Russia-in-Europe policy should be adamantine resistance to Russian expansion culminating in a decisive defeat for Russia’s present aims in Europe’s borderlands. If history is any indication, Russia only takes détente with an adversary seriously after it has been forced to do so by a defeat or serious setback. This was as much a precondition for Ronald Reagan’s success at Reykjavík after the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan as it was for the English statesmen who brokered the Anglo-Russian entente after Russia’s defeat at Port Arthur in 1905. Attempts to reach détente before Russia has suffered such a setback are not only likely to fail, they are also likely to be counterproductive insofar as they implicitly concede territory and validate the wager of Russia’s current leaders that renewed empire in the west is achievable by force of arms.

The equivalent of Port Arthur or Afghanistan today is Ukraine. The United States should wish to see Russia suffer a military rebuff of sufficient magnitude to prompt its leaders to reassess their assumptions about the permissiveness of the post-Soviet space as a preferred zone of strategic expansion. America can help bring about this outcome much as it did in Afghanistan: by providing locals the means to better resist Russia at higher volumes than it has done to date and encouraging European allies to do the same. And we should significantly raise the costs for cyber and other attacks on the United States, including via reciprocal attacks on Russian critical infrastructure and by sanctioning Putin’s inner circle and the secondary market for Russian bonds.

This pain, however, must have a goal beyond simply punishment; namely, to inflict a defeat for strategic effect, with the calculated aim of convincing Russia that its chosen path of westward expansion is closed. By contrast, U.S. policy toward Russia-in-Asia should be calibrated to encourage a redirection of Russia’s focus and energies in this direction. Such a policy would consist of economic, military, and political planks.

There you have it. If you think the ghouls at the Pentagon tossed this paper into the trash or filed it away in a cavernous warehouse, you are naive. Mr. Mitchell provided the raison d’etre for provoking Russia into attacking Ukraine, and the strategy for supplying Ukraine with weapons, intelligence and money.

This article is laced with many false, wrongheaded assumptions. For example, Mitchell assumes that Russia’s economy is weak and incapable of matching Western military output. Whoops! How did that turn out?

Another misguided, erroneous assumption — and it is not unique to Mr. Mitchell, it also is embraced by most of the Deep State strategists — is that Russia is the prison-bitch with respect to China, and can eventually be convinced to break with Beijing. Mitch writes:

By widening the power disparity between China and Russia, the pandemic has heightened Russia’s economic dependency on China as a source of capital, markets, and international political support. Paradoxically, the very fact of this deepening dependency is likely to increase Russian fear of becoming a sidecar to Beijing’s ambitions and create incentives for Moscow to reorient its foreign policy.

I have been astounded by the number of US experts and pundits who fervently believe that the relationship between Russia and China is superficial and temporary. They genuinely believe that the United States can cynically play Russia off against China, and that neither country is smart enough to discern the US ploy. I asked Foreign Minister Lavrov about this very thing. He scoffed at the notion. While Lavrov noted that Russia and China, by virtue of their respective histories, have some differences, they are fundamentally united to counter the imperialist ambitions of the West. Russia and China have entered into a comprehensive, strategic partnership that encompasses defense, manufacturing, trade, finance and diplomacy.

The war in Ukraine, the genocidal policy of Israel in West Asia, the threat to destroy Iran and the tariff war against China are not separate, unrelated conflicts. The Russian and Chinese leaders understand this and are acting in concert to counter the US divide-and-conquer strategy. That is why Russia and China conducted a joint-military exercise with Iran in the first week of March. That is why Russian, Chinese and Iranian diplomats met twice in March — first in Beijing and then, a week ago, in Moscow. They are coordinating policies and discussing strategies for dealing with the threat posed by the United States. I do not think that Donald Trump and his team of bobble heads comprehend this.