The fact that China is America’s greatest geostrategic challenge is now so obvious as to have become cliché.
Yet over the past five years, the United States has expended great effort and astronomical sums of resources—not to mention deficit spending—on two potentially less threatening but more readily vilifiable adversaries, namely, Russia and now Iran. The war against Iran is explicit, with US forces engaged on the front-lines, while the conflict with Russia has been one waged by proxy, more or less make believe, using Ukraine and NATO as a prop though which the war’s financing has been funded by the US taxpayer, and the technology and matériel provisioned by America’s burgeoning defense tech firms.
Neither endeavor has been fully ratified by congressional approval or popular support. Neither conflict can be “won” in conventional terms. Still, the US has benefited greatly from the Ukraine conflict. The US has profited by replacing Russia as Germany’s gas station (with LNG now shipped directly from Houston or Newark), and has learned by trial and error how to wage war in the age of AI and autonomous drones.
When the US imposed comprehensive financial sanctions on Russia in 2022, it did not at all succeed in strangling the Russian economy. What the sanctions regime did do, very effectively, was to force Russia to integrate more deeply into China’s commercial, economic, monetary, and military orbit.
The Bear, shunned by the Eagle, was embraced by the Dragon, its longstanding geopolitical adversary, even when both were Communist nations. Inevitably, in its nature as a dragon, China will come to devour its prey. But not so long as Russia remains a useful foil and frontrunner against the US.
Here is the main point. To cast Russia as an adversary is a grave strategic error in light of China’s geostrategic objectives. To put in in the most simplistic terms possible:
If the endgame conflict to come is between the US and China, would the US be better off having Russia, the world’s largest nuclear power, second largest military (after the US), and nineth largest economy (fifth largest in Europe), with all her vast natural resources and human intellectual capital, on our side or China’s?
I’m not saying such a realignment would be easy, but it is possible. During World War II, the US and Britain were able to hold their noses and close their democratic eyes long enough to pragmatically align with Stalin’s Soviet Union to achieve a decisive military victory over Nazi Germany, one that would not have been possible without the USSR’s vast manpower and natural resources. Russia is no longer communist, totalitarian, or mercilessly atheistic, and indeed wants to be part of the future of the West.
Despite its tragic detours along the way, twenty-first century Russia remains European in culture and orientation, Christian in faith, and aligned with the West in its shared values. Indeed, in some cases more so than some members of the EU. While the US and the EU alike fear the boogeyman of Russian resurgence, Russia represents a powerful potential ally against the forces of totalitarianism, religious persecution, and economic slavery represented by China’s modern state, dead-set on undermining the United States’ economic leadership and global influence, and especially the ideal of liberty that America represents around the world.
When I wrote in 2022 predicting that sanctions warfare would backfire, punishing Europe more than Russia, I was labeled by a former business associate a “Putin stooge.” I brushed it off. Like being called a racist or a nazi, the epitaph has lost its sting in today’s cultural wars. I’m a patriotic American arguing for America’s best interest. And that is to have Russia in our corner.