By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, December 27, 2022
China sent 71 aircraft and seven ships toward
Taiwan in a 24-hour period, while Russia shelled the Kherson
region more than 70 times.
These acts of aggression — occurring 5,000 miles apart,
one in a grinding war of attrition, the other as part of an ongoing
political and diplomatic struggle that may well result in open hostilities —
are related.
It’s no accident that the two most dangerous powers in
the world, China and Russia, are aggrieved empires seeking to right what they
consider the wrongs that resulted in their humiliation and diminishment in the
19th and 20th centuries.
Whereas in the 2000s the most pressing problem of the
international system seemed to be malicious sub-national groups operating in
ungoverned spaces, now it is malicious would-be supranational entities seeking
to take over spaces governed by others.
In his masterly book Diplomacy, Henry
Kissinger observed, “Empires have no interest in operating within an international
system; they aspire to be the international system.”
The fall of the Roman Empire was a social and economic
catastrophe for the West, but it’s been a blessing that no such overawing
behemoth ever rose in its place.
Russia and China, in contrast, never lost their imperial
DNA, and have chips on their shoulders.
Russia achieved some success in its long-running ambition
to be considered a major European power through top-down reforms and military
conquest. It gobbled up an estimated 50 square miles a day across a couple of
centuries. But it lost the Crimean War in the mid 19th century, suffered an
ignominious defeat at the hands of Japan in 1905, and then experienced utter
cataclysm in World War I.
Marxism-Leninism was supposed to provide a way for
backward Russia to leapfrog the West. That didn’t happen, but Moscow
established a new Communist empire of considerable extent. Of course, this came
a cropper with defeat in the Cold War, an event that Vladimir Putin, notably,
considers “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
The man who has statues of Peter and Catherine the Great,
accomplished Russian imperialists, on display in the Kremlin considers an
independent Ukraine merely a tool of hostile Western forces and a wayward part
of Greater Russia. Such ideas — and a deep feeling of shame at Russia’s fall —
justify the brutish attempted occupation and dismemberment of Ukraine, a
cynical and crude operation even by Russian standards.
If Russia sought to be a respected member of the European
club, China believed it needn’t bother. It was the Middle Kingdom, the only
civilization in a world of barbarians who owed it tribute and deference. Its
sense of superiority was punctured by the Opium Wars in the middle of the 19th
century and, as with Russia, a shocking defeat in a conflict with Japan.
Eventually, China, too, turned to Marxism-Leninism. After
yet more humiliation and failure, the CCP now is fired with audacious visions
of a return to imperial grandeur.
President Xi Jinping is more or less explicit about it.
He has said that “since the Opium War of the 1840s the Chinese people have long
cherished a dream of realizing a great national rejuvenation.” Now, it is on
the cusp of providing “a new option for other countries” and “a Chinese
approach to solving the problems facing mankind.” In short, “it will be an era
that sees China moving closer to center stage.”
This is a vision of Middle Kingdom redux, although
couched in bloodless phrasing.
Xi views Taiwan much the same way as Putin views Ukraine:
It rightfully belongs to China, and retaking it will help salve the
geopolitical and psychological wounds of imperial China’s spectacular descent
into disaster and powerlessness. “We cannot lose even one inch of the territory
left behind by our ancestors,” Xi informed a U.S. official in 2018.
The war in Ukraine shows that when an autocrat ruling a
once-great empire speaks in such terms, it is time to arm the targeted state to
the teeth and dispense with all illusions.
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