Expect increasing assertiveness from Beijing and Moscow as both governments seek to lock in competitive advantages.
Beijing and Moscow will seek to lock in competitive advantages and also to right what they bill are historical wrongs before economic and demographics headwinds further slow their material progress and the West regains its foundation.
Both China and Russia maintain worldviews where they’re rightfully dominant in their regions and able to form regional politics and economics to match their security and material interests.
Both have moved aggressively in latest years to exert more considerable influence in their regions, to contest the US geopolitically, and also to force Washington to accept exclusionary regional spheres of influence—a situation that the US has historically opposed.
National Security and Energy Interests of Rising and Declining Powers
For instance, China views the continuing presence of the US Navy in the Western Pacific, the centrality of US alliances in the region, and US protection of Taiwan as obsolete and representative of the continuation of China’s “one hundred years of humiliation.” Recent cooperation has been tactical and is likely to come back to competition if Beijing jeopardizes China’s dramatic growth has highlighted greater gaps between poor and rich.
Russian interests in Central Asia and as Beijing enjoys options for inexpensive energy supply beyond Russia. Furthermore, it isn’t clear whether there’s a mutually acceptable boundary between what Russia and China consider their natural spheres of influence.
India navigates its path
In the meantime, India’s growing economic power and profile in the region will further complicate these calculations, as New Delhi navigates relations with Beijing, Moscow, and Washington to shield its own expanding interests. Russian assertiveness will harden viewpoints in the Baltics along with other portions of Europe, escalating the potential risk of conflict.
Russia will seek, and sometimes feign, international cooperation, although openly challenging norms and rules it perceives as a counter to its interests and providing support for leaders of fellow “handled democracies” which promote resistance to American policies and personal tastes.
Moscow has little stake in the rules of the international economics and may be counted on to take actions that weaken the United States’ and European Union’s institutional advantages. Moscow will test NATO and resolve, seeking to undermine Western authenticity; it will attempt to exploit splits between Europe’s both north and south and east and west, and also to drive a wedge between the US and the EU.
Likewise, Moscow will become more active in the Middle East and these areas of the world wherein it believes it can check US influence. Lastly, Russia will Stay dedicated to atomic weapons as a deterrent and as a counter to stronger conventional military forces, as well as it’s ticket to superpower status.
Russian military doctrine allegedly includes the limited use of nuclear weapons in a situation where Russia’s vital interests are at stake to “de-escalate” a conflict by demonstrating that continued conventional conflict risks escalating the emergency to a large-scale nuclear exchange.
About the Author
Joshua Ball is VP of Marketing at Codio and a Senior Fellow at the National Institute for Deterrence Studies. He also serves as Executive Editor of Global Security Review and in the U.S. Marine Corps Cyber Auxiliary. Joshua holds a MA of International Relations from the University of St Andrews.
