Return to Winter. Douglas E. Schoen
echoing the language Russia has used to justify intervention in Ukraine.18 On May 11, in a referendum widely denounced by the West, 90 percent of voters in the eastern Ukraine provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk voted for secession from Ukraine.19 Pro-Russian activists were soon saying that they wanted to become part of Russia; annexation might be only a matter of time.
Regardless of what ultimately happens in Ukraine, the Russian seizure of Crimea has fundamentally changed the international power balance. Despite the sanctions that have been put in place, Russian aggression and assertiveness have yet to be deterred, and the United States and its European allies have no clear consensus on how to proceed. For the first time, the essential principles of the NATO alliance have been called into question—with implications for Eastern and Central Europe, and indeed for the world.
While the world anxiously watched the Ukraine situation, an 80-ship Chinese fleet sailed into waters claimed by Vietnam to install a billion-dollar oil rig in the energy-rich South China Sea. When Vietnam’s coast guard arrived, the Chinese flotilla responded with force, ramming at least one Vietnamese ship and firing water cannons at others.20 Then, later in May, a Chinese vessel rammed and sank a Vietnamese fishing boat in the disputed waters.21 China claims 90 percent of the South China Sea as its own, rejecting the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and staking claims to dozens of islands and reefs that Beijing claims are historically Chinese.22
New examples of Chinese assertiveness in regional waters occur regularly. As this book went to press, Chinese jet fighters armed with missiles “buzzed” two Japanese reconnaissance planes in the two countries’ overlapping air-defense zones over the East China Sea. The Chinese fighters got within 100 feet of the Japanese planes, in what the Japanese defense minister described as a dangerous act that would increase tensions between the two nations.23 Those tensions have been rising for years. In late 2013, China unilaterally imposed an “air-defense identification zone” in the East China Sea in airspace that overlaps with Japanese and South Korean airspace, and it threatened any aircraft that penetrated the zone.24 The incident with the Japanese planes could mark a new and more dangerous stage in the standoff.
China has been acting more provocatively toward its Asian neighbors for years. Beijing recently began a construction project in the disputed Spratly Islands, despite a long-standing agreement with the Philippines and other nations in the region not to build on these disputed landmasses. The Philippines filed a formal protest, and the action worsened relations with Vietnam, already angered by the oil-rig incident. It wasn’t clear what the Chinese were building in the Spratlys—only that Beijing insisted that its right to do so was purely a matter of “Chinese sovereignty.”25 In March 2014, China blockaded Philippine marines stationed on Second Thomas Shoal, an uninhabited atoll China claims for itself.26
While some foreign-policy observers may believe that Beijing is acting recklessly, it’s more likely that these provocations are all part of a broader strategy to undermine U.S. authority in the region by picking small, winnable fights. “China is seeking to prove to its neighbors that containment cannot work and that the U.S. cannot be relied upon to defend them,” wrote David Pilling in the Financial Times. “If it can do so, they and Washington will have to acknowledge that the status quo is untenable. It is a dangerous strategy. It is also a clever one.”27
“China is deliberately doing these things to demonstrate the unsustainability of the American position of having a good relationship with China and maintaining its alliances in Asia, which constitute the leadership of the United States in Asia,” says Professor Hugh White, a former senior Australian defense official.28
Russia and China are also formidable combatants in one of the 21st century’s primary battlegrounds: cyber warfare. The Justice Department’s May 2014 indictment of five Chinese officers of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) for cyber espionage only confirms what has been poorly understood up until now, but which we assert vigorously in Chapter 3: that a state-sponsored cyber war against the United States is being directed at the highest levels of the Chinese government. Russia, too, is a key cyber player: Hackers almost certainly affiliated with Moscow have been behind some of the most destructive private-sector cyber attacks of recent years.
Americans had only to note the two countries in which Edward Snowden stopped when he was on the run from the United States after he leaked American intelligence secrets: first China, then Russia, where he was eventually granted asylum. Those who dismiss the strong likelihood that Snowden was an agent of either the Russians or the Chinese are deluding themselves.
As Russia and China flex their muscle, rogue nations have often looked to one or both of them for support—tacit or explicit. Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad stands in a stronger position than he has for years, thanks in no small part to Vladimir Putin’s staunch support. President Obama threatened Assad with missile strikes in August 2013 after the dictator used chemical weapons against rebel groups and civilians, but at the last moment Obama completely reversed himself, making the term “red line” into an international synonym for spinelessness.
Likewise, the Islamic theocracy that runs Iran is closing in on achieving its goal of becoming a nuclear power. This time, it hasn’t been American irresolution that is to blame, but American commitment—a commitment to a fatally flawed nuclear accord that will all but assure the Iranians of getting what they want. Finally, a new Defense Intelligence Agency report shows that North Korea has nuclear weapons capable of delivery by ballistic missiles. The murderous regime, propped up by China, threatens the peace and stability not only of Asia, but the world.
All these challenges are serious, complex, and multifaceted, and it would be foolhardy to assume that even under the finest leadership, the United States could solve them all with the best conceivable outcomes in each case. At the same time, however, there is no question that these problems have been exacerbated and made much more dangerous and destabilizing by failed American leadership—or, more accurately, by an abdication of American leadership.
AMERICA IN RETREAT
It’s not often that congressional leaders emerge from a White House meeting with the president of the United States and call their visit “bizarre,” but that’s how Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee described his sit-down with Obama-administration national-security officials in May 2014. Listening to them talk about Syria, Afghanistan, and the Nigerian Islamist terror group Boko Haram, Corker was amazed by how far off course American foreign policy had drifted. “I realized last night that the administration has no policy in Syria, has no strategy in Syria,” Corker said.29
It isn’t just Syria, either. The Obama administration has no clear counterterror policy in the wake of Snowden’s damaging leaks of national-security information in 2013. It has no clear coordination with American allies and no coherent approach to upgrading and modernizing our defenses. It has no articulated doctrine on when, where, and how to use force in the world, and how to offer credible deterrents to antidemocratic regimes and groups.
Consider that Obama ran for reelection in 2012 in substantial part on his foreign-policy record, touting especially his decision to order the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. Al-Qaeda, the president said often, was “on the run,” and the War on Terror was winding down. “This war, like all wars, must end,” he said in a speech at the National Defense University in 2013. Only recently has he begun to acknowledge the obvious: that the terrorism threat is not declining but growing around the world, not only in Afghanistan and Iraq but also throughout the Middle East and Africa. Writing in the New York Times, Mark Landler rightly underscored the contradiction of a president whose view of the world has “darkened,” even as he has “settled on a minimalist foreign policy.”30
Indeed, just days after he had pledged in his 2014 commencement address at West Point to tackle terrorism anew, Obama announced the release of five senior Taliban commanders in exchange for American POW Bowe Bergdahl.31 Serious questions surround Bergdahl’s capture in 2009 and whether his actions constituted desertion. But even if Bergdahl had been an unambiguous hero, the president’s decision to free dangerous, high-ranking Taliban fighters would be profoundly troubling. Simply put, it is too high a price to pay,