Evaluation of the Global Environment: Rise of China; Russia-West Confrontation; and Emerging Threats – Şener Aktürk

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.21362.79042
E-ISSN: 2718­-0549

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Is the rivalry between China and the United States the primary fault line and the organising principle of the new world order?
By late 2021, the new organising principle of the emerging world order indeed seemed to be the rivalry between China and the United States. From the very beginning until the very end of his tenure, U.S. President Donald Trump (2016-2020) clearly targeted China as the main threat to US security while seeking unusually close relations with Russia. Those focusing on and perhaps exaggerating the idiosyncratic features of the Trump presidency were overlooking that his predecessor, Barack Obama, also sought “reset” with Russia and “pivot to Asia.” Moreover, Trump’s successor, Joe Biden, established AUKUS (Australia-UK-US) as a new security formation to contain China in September 2021, which, unsurprisingly, infuriated the Chinese leadership (Ward and McLeary 2021).

Similarly,
the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QSD), also known as “the Quad,” which
brings together Australia, India, Japan, and the United States, includes joint
military exercises among its participants and issued a statement on the spirit
of the Quad in March 2021 (White House 2021), and held its first Quad Plus
meeting with South Korea, New Zealand, and Vietnam. Initially, Biden also
sought a rapprochement with Russia when under his presidency U.S. waived the
sanctions on Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline (BBC 2021). In short, instead of a
radical break during the Trump presidency, it is very much possible to observe
many efforts at rapprochement with Russia and containment against China
throughout Obama, Trump, and Biden’s administrations, which arguably failed.
Encircling and containing China as the priority and enlisting Russia’s
assistance in such a strategy was the course of action leading Realist scholars
to recommend to the United States for more than two decades (Mearsheimer 2001;
2016). Symbolically, too, 2021 was the 30^th anniversary of the
dissolution of the Soviet Union, since the Belavezha Accords that legally
dissolved the Soviet Union were signed between the Russian president Boris
Yeltsin, Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk, and the Belarusian president
Stanislav Shushkevich on December 8, 2021, which in many ways laid the
foundation for the post-Cold War order (Rutland 2016). At least many observers
thought so until only two and a half months after this anniversary, when Russia
began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

Did Russia’s invasion
of Ukraine refocus the United States and the Western alliance on containing
Russia as the primary threat instead of China? If Russia’s invasion of Ukraine results in
refocusing the United States and the Western alliance on containing Russia as
the primary threat to global security, a significant realignment of world
politics around the Chinese threat may have been averted or at least postponed.
Since much of the media coverage of international events since February 2022 is
overwhelmingly focused on Ukraine, one might think that Russia indeed reclaimed
its status as the primary threat in the eyes of the Western alliance. On the
other hand, while the United States and the Western allies did not militarily
intervene, and they did not even threaten or suggest that they may militarily
intervene to stop Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, President Biden unequivocally
stated that the “U.S. would intervene militarily if China invaded Taiwan.”
(Restuccia, Thomas, Chin 2022) Thus, it is possible to conclude that despite
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the US is still focused on China to the point of
threatening to intervene if China attempts to invade Taiwan, whereas it refused
to intervene during Russia’s invasion of Ukrainian Crimea in 2014 or the
Russian invasion of the rest of Ukraine that began in February 2022. It is an
open question whether there is a red line for the United States or the rest of
the Western alliance regarding Russian expansionism in Europe, within or beyond
Ukraine. Of immediate concern is the status of Moldova, where the breakaway
region of Transnistria has been under Russian military protection for almost
three decades. Numerous observers, such as the Director of U.S. National
Intelligence Avril Haines, among others, suggest that Russia is seeking to link
Russian-occupied Crimea and Transnistria by occupying the remainder of
Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, including the regions of Kherson, Mykolaiv, and the
critical port city of Odesa (O’Brien 2022). Almost the entire area (oblast) of
Kherson has been occupied by Russia by the end of May 2022, with incursions
into the Mykloaiv region and sporadic missile attacks combined with a naval
blockade on Odesa lending credence to this speculation. The Russian occupation
of the entire Black Sea coast of Ukraine, followed by an incursion into
Moldova, would have dire consequences for the European and global security
environment.

One might also ask why Russia does not prioritise (or at least publicly
does not seem to care much about) the Chinese threat to its east, in Siberia in
particular, and instead overwhelmingly focuses on the threat from the West.
Russia’s self-perception as a European great power and Russia’s recurrent fear
of “falling behind” European and Western competitors, which arguably
contributed to the Bolshevik Revolution, among other significant outcomes in
Russian history, maybe one of the reasons for Russia’s overwhelming focus on
the Western threat, which then has more to do with self-perception and identity
rather than the actual balance of power in Russia’s immediate neighbourhood.
What will happen to Russia in the wake of a possible defeat in Ukraine is an
intriguing question, and one may surmise that it will become more of an Asian
power with the loss of its influence over Ukraine.

Linking the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the emerging threat from the
rise of China, the U.S. “Secretary of State Antony Blinken said” that “the
Biden administration aims to lead the international bloc opposed to Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine into a broader coalition to counter what it sees as a more
serious, long-term threat to global order from China.” (Lee 2022) This prioritisation
was based on the assessment of not just intent but also capabilities, as
Blinken stated in the same speech very recently: “China is the only country
with both the intent to reshape the international order -and, increasingly, the
economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.” (Lee 2022)
The strategy of countering China and Russia simultaneously, as stated most
recently by Blinken, raises several further questions: Does China benefit from and/or
support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? Does China intend to occupy Taiwan soon? Does China see the Russian
invasion of Ukraine as a positive precedent for its goal of “reunification” by
annexing Taiwan? Summing up all these questions, is Russia a long-term ally or adversary of China, given their implicit
competition in Siberia, Central Asia, and elsewhere?

It is reasonable to suggest that China benefits from Russia’s invasion
and Ukrainian resistance in the short term for various reasons. First, the centre
of attention for the security concerns of the Western alliance moves away from
China and the Asia-Pacific and towards Eastern Europe, where it has
historically been. Second, Russia becomes more dependent on China as
international sanctions further isolate Russia from the global economy. For
example, China can buy an even larger share of Russia’s oil, natural gas, and
grain, probably at much lower prices than would have been the case in the
absence of Western economic sanctions on Russia. Third and relatedly, many
Russian oligarchs and others with transferable wealth can move their
investments to China instead of Western countries to evade imminent or
potential sanctions. Fourth, as the Russian military is increasingly weakened
in a war of attrition on the Ukrainian front, Chinese military strength
relative to Russia will continue to improve. China was already unrivalled
economically among all its neighbours and nearby polities in Asia, but as late
as 2019, Russia’s military strength was ranked second in the world after the
United States but ahead of China (Aktürk 2020, Table 3). However, with the
rapid decline in Russia’s economic and military power due to the war in
Ukraine, Chinese military power will most likely surpass Russia’s and will soon
become unrivalled across Asia. Such a development will have vast consequences
for the global security environment. China is very likely to attempt to annex Taiwan
within the next quarter-century at the latest since the current leader of
China, Xi Jinping, explicitly stated that “‘China’s complete reunification’ by
‘resolving the Taiwan question’ will be achieved by 2049, the centenary of the
founding of the People’s Republic of China.” (Erickson 2019, 74) Since Russia
is extremely unlikely to clash with China over the latter’s attempt at annexing
Taiwan, it is possible for the US-led Western alliance to simultaneously face a
revisionist Russia seeking to annex parts or all of Ukraine in Eastern Europe
and a revisionist China seeking to annex Taiwan in East Asia.

Some may critically note that China’s population did not increase but
rather declined for the first time in 60 years (Peng 2022). However, China
still accounts for over one-sixth of the world’s population. If population decline becomes a problem, the
government may adopt various pro-natalist policies just as many West and East
European countries, including Russia, have done. I would also note that there have
been alarmist reports and predictions about an imminent and drastic decline in
Germany’s population since the 1970s (at least). Yet, more than 40 years later,
Germany reached and surpassed 80 million people and remains the most populous
nation within the European Union by a large margin. In short, alarmist
predictions about “population decline” in advanced industrial great powers have
been widespread and somewhat exaggerated. 

Much more than the differing views on China, the invasion of Ukraine
exposed the radical differences in various Western states’ attitudes vis-à-vis
Russia and thus, led many to question the existence of a Western alliance
altogether: Is there a Western
alliance as of 2022? More specifically, are France and Germany primarily interested
in containing and rolling back Russia’s military-political interventions beyond
its borders, or are they seeking a rapprochement with Russia even in the
aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? Very different
attitudes vis-à-vis Russia prevailed already well before the latter invaded
Ukraine: For example, both France and Russia supported the Libyan warlord
Haftar against the UN-recognized Government of National Accord (GNA) in
Tripoli, and Germany continued to deepen its energy dependence on Russia with
new pipelines, and both countries opposed plans to offer a Membership Action
Plan for Georgia and Ukraine’s NATO membership as far back as in the Bucharest
Summit of 2008. Even months after the invasion began, French president Macron
“said that the West should not ‘humiliate’ Russian President Vladimir Putin in
Ukraine” and suggested “that Ukraine cede some of its territories to Russia to
help Putin save face.” (Galindo 2022) Both Macron and German Chancellor Olaf
Scholz have been accused of timidity in the face of Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine.

European and broader Western disunity in the face of Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine brings back another concern that predated 2022 and was expressed with a
catchy neologism coined during the Munich Security Conference in February 2020:
Westlessness (Munich Security
Conference 2020). At the conference, while European leaders were much more
concerned about “the state of Western unity,” in line with the grand strategic
shift discussed above in this discussion paper, “the size of the Chinese threat
to the Western community was perceived as much more pronounced by US
representatives than their European peers.” (Munich Security Conference 2020)
The transatlantic divide in interpreting the global environment and the emerging
threats is captured in great part in this contrast: “Western disunity”,
especially in the aftermath of the United Kingdom’s exit from the European
Union, the so-called “Brexit,” haunts European policymakers, whereas the US
still perceives the world locked in a contest between the West and the Rest. As
a major development symptomatic of fundamental disagreements within broader
Europe, Brexit alone should have been sufficient to challenge the existence of
a unified West.

What are the
preferences and the role of the United Kingdom in the aftermath of Brexit? A very influential report formulated and
endorsed by a commission after Brexit that included leading policymakers from
Australia, Canada, India, Indonesia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, South
Korea, Sri Lanka, the United Kingdom, and the United States suggested “a new UK
strategy in the Indo-Pacific Region,” titled, “A Very British Tilt.” (Policy
Exchange 2020) The Commission was chaired by the former Prime Minister of Canada,
Stephen Harper, and the report’s foreword was written by the former Prime
Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe. The report can be interpreted as an attempt to
create a broadly liberal democratic bloc of countries to contain possible
Chinese expansionist threats. The reports emphasise that the UK’s “critically-important special relationship with the United
States is increasingly affected by American grand strategic decisions and
concerns related to China, whether directly as with the Huawei case, or
indirectly as a consequence of new US military-economic policies that focus on
a ‘free and open Indo-Pacific’” (emphasis in the original, Policy Exchange
2020, 20). In short, post-Brexit, Britain appears to be on board with a new US
grand strategy aimed at containing China, as the initiatives such as AUKUS and
high-level strategic formulations such as the Policy Exchange report suggest.

If Russia, which used
to be considered the second or the third military power globally, is being
significantly weakened due to its invasion of Ukraine, which country or
countries are likely to rise as the other major powers following China and the
United States soon? France and the United
Kingdom, the other two members of the United States Security Council (UNSC),
are unlikely to become the third and fourth major powers in what appears to be
an increasingly multipolar world, primarily due to the limited size of their
core states with a relatively small territory (between quarter-million and half
a million square kilometres) in comparative perspective and their current
populations around 67 million each. On the other hand, despite these
limitations of their size (demographic, territorial, and other), France and the
United Kingdom are still able to project military power worldwide across
numerous seas and oceans, in part due to their overseas territories, a concrete
legacy of their recent imperial past. As for new great powers that have the
potential to eclipse the old European great powers, Brazil, with a territory
larger than eight million square kilometres of territory and a population
exceeding 200 million, and India, with a territory larger than three million
square kilometres and a population exceeding 1.3 billion, are more likely candidates
to be new great powers and potential regional hegemons in South America and
South Asia, respectively. Power, however, is always relational, and the
existence of the United States in North America and the existence of China
north of the Himalayas might suffice to stymie any hegemonic aspirations Brazil
and India might have or develop over time, respectively. It is also essential
to bear in mind that many states around the world (perhaps even the majority)
are neither formally allied with the United States nor with China or Russia, an
important fact that we may lose sight of in analyses that excessively focus on
Europe, East Asia, or the Middle East, three regions of supreme significance
for the U.S.-Russia and U.S.-Chinese rivalry.

            Another
major puzzle with regards to the global environment in the near future is
whether Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will result in a negotiated settlement
that includes recognition of any border changes in favour of Russia or not. If,
for example, any territory such as Crimea that Russia militarily occupied and
annexed is internationally recognised as part of Russia in a peace settlement,
this may serve as a precedent for many other attempts at annexation through
occupation elsewhere around the world. In a nutshell, the proverbial Pandora’s
Box may be opened to break the taboo of border changes through annexations if
Crimea (or any other Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory) is legally recognised
and accepted as Russia’s territory in a postwar settlement. In short, if the Russian
invasion of Ukraine ends with a settlement that internationally recognises
Crimea (and perhaps even other Ukrainian territories) as part of Russia, this
would likely open the gate for other annexations elsewhere. 

The questions regarding the future status of annexed territories and de
facto states constitute only one dimension of the heated debates and
discussions about the crisis of the liberal international order (Ikenberry
2018; Mearsheimer 2018). According to leading Neorealist critics, the liberal
international order was “bound to fail,” in part because the unipolarity in the
global distribution of power that it relied on ended around 2016: “the world became multipolar in or
close to 2016, and… the shift away from unipolarity is a death sentence for the
liberal international order, which is in the process of collapsing and will be
replaced by realist orders.” (Mearsheimer 2019, 8-9) From such a perspective,
it may be no coincidence that the UK’s exit from the European Union and Trump’s
election to the US presidency both took place in 2016, a critical turning point
in world history after which the collapse of the US-led liberal international
order accelerated.

A central element in the
crisis and collapse of the liberal international order has been the deep
disagreements on “first principles”, the a priori values which different
actors at every level of the international system (states, societies, groups,
individuals, organisations, etc.) hold (Mearsheimer 2018). From the definition
and structure of the family to the notions of religion and permissible
religious rituals, there are profound and seemingly insurmountable differences
in the values held dear by different segments of humanity. Any effort to impose
a particular understanding of “the good life” by any actor, be it the United
States, European Union, China, or Russia, is indeed “bound to fail”
(Mearsheimer 2019) and has repeatedly failed.

Deep disagreements over different
conceptions of the “good life” are also reflected in differences over different
concepts of democracy. The most acute, consequential, and world-historical
event where these differences became relevant has been the Arab Spring, a
series of anti-authoritarian uprisings that shook Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria,
Yemen, Bahrain, and Algeria, Lebanon, and Iraq, among others. For example,
Turkey, the oldest competitive multiparty democracy in the Muslim world, had a
radically different attitude vis-à-vis the Arab Spring than the Western and
especially European powers. “Against the background of the EU’s unwillingness
to continue membership negotiations after 2005, the Arab Spring provided Turkey
with an opportunity to reaffirm its newly-found democratic identity and to
become the leading advocate of democracy across the Middle East.” (Aktürk 2017,
88) While the US and other Western powers supported democratisation in the
Middle East at least rhetorically in the first year or two of the Arab Spring,
they eventually embraced the old and new dictatorships in the Arab Middle East,
with the 2013 military coup in Egypt serving as a turning point. Turkey, in
contrast, doubled down on its opposition to the Egyptian and Syrian military
dictatorships led by el-Sisi and al-Assad, respectively.

            Radical changes in interstate
military threats are not the only emerging or potential threats in the current
global environment. New pandemics, food and water shortages that may lead to
famines, terrorism, demographic imbalances and mass population movements, and
the shrinkage of habitable land due to climate crises, including global
warming, may be counted among many non-military and unconventional potential
threats at present. The coronavirus pandemic was a global stress test in many
ways. Many international academic journals in the social sciences devoted
entire special issues to examining the cross-national impact of the pandemic,
in part inquiring as to which states and societies survived the pandemic with
the least damage and why (International
Organization 2020; Nationalities
Papers 2022; Problems of
Post-Communism 2022). Simple binaries such as democracies versus
autocracies, conservatives versus liberals, religious versus secular, and advanced
industrial versus developing countries, do not seem to correlate with and
explain the relative success and failure of different countries in tackling the
pandemic challenges.

What might be the next
most significant unconventional security threat? Food
shortages and potential famines might be the next significant unconventional
security threat, as numerous publications have recently pointed out. As in the
case of the coronavirus pandemic, China is singled out as the main culprit for
such a global food shortage. Thus, such a disaster may also have geopolitical
repercussions for the emerging Sino-American competition worldwide. In late
December 2021, Nikkei Asia reported
that “China hoards over half the world’s grain, pushing up global prices” and
speculated that “testy ties with U.S. and Australia could be prodding China to
boost food reserves” (Watanabe and Munakata 2021). As such, the Chinese
hoarding and the consequent hikes in food prices that are pushing some
countries to the brink of famines have geopolitical origins since China fears
that its new geopolitical adversaries -Australia and the United States- which
are also two of the largest agricultural producers and exporters in the world,
might use food supplies to punish China in the near future. Two weeks later, Bloomberg reported that Chinese hoarding
is partly responsible for the rising food prices worldwide, reaching their
highest level in a decade (Minter 2022). These concerns were voiced, and
decade-long price peaks were reached already before Russia invaded Ukraine, which is particularly concerning
since Russia has been the leading exporter of grain worldwide, and Ukraine has
also been a significant source of grain for Europe and the world. In April
2022, the Economist also emphasised
that geopolitical concerns such as the “rows with Australia and Canada have
made Chinese officials worry that copious amounts of grain the two countries
supply might one day be cut off.” (Economist
2022a) Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been particularly threatening not
only for Europe but for the world as it worsened these already worrying trends
in the global food supply. “Together, the two countries supply 12% of traded
calories” and “India said it would suspend exports because of an alarming
heatwave”, prompting the Economist to
warn of “the coming food catastrophe” in its cover story in May 2022 (Economist 2022b). With almost 250
million people “on the brink of famine” (Economist
2022b) and following shortly after a 2-year-long pandemic, the next most
significant unconventional global security threat may indeed be a food
catastrophe. This would also follow the pattern of unconventional conflicts
between major powers short of interstate war and somewhat akin to proxy wars,
whereby the relative resolve and resilience of competing for superpowers such
as China and the United States are tested in the face of adversity. Such a
competition over food supplies would also favour emerging powers with large
arable land, fertile soil, high agricultural-industrial capacity, and large
populations, such as Brazil and India, as some of the traditional or historic
great powers of the European core, such as France and Russia, continue to
decline in relative terms.

Domestic conflicts
concerning ethnoreligious minorities, including within some of the largest and
rising great powers, are likely to play a greater role in shaping the global
political and security environment as well as international relations in the
near future. Two of the
most apparent domestic conflicts involving millions of people with vast
humanitarian and security risks within great powers are the persecution of
Uyghurs in China and Muslims in India. The mass internment of more than a
million Uyghurs, a Turkic Muslim ethnoreligious group indigenous to the
Xinjiang region of China, also known as Eastern Turkestan, attracted
significant international coverage and scrutiny, although with minimal access
to the region itself due to the totalitarian control of the Communist party-state
that effectively isolated the region from the world. China’s very well-documented
“war on the Uyghurs” (Roberts 2020) led many scholars to justifiably “fear an
Uyghur genocide in Xinjiang” (Finley 2021). It is very unlikely that any
outside power, including a relatively small middle power such as Turkey with ethnolinguistic
and religious ties to the Uyghurs, can convince, let alone coerce the Chinese
government to change its policies vis-à-vis Uyghurs. Probably the only country
that may have some leverage over China in the current world system is
undoubtedly the United States, and it remains to be seen whether the United
States will use that leverage in a tangible way to convince or coerce the
Chinese government to substantially change its policies toward the Uyghurs.

Further south in India, often referred to as the largest democracy in the
world, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Hindu nationalist government has cast
two hundred million Muslims as internal enemies” (Filkins 2019). After becoming
Prime Minister in 2014, Modi won a landslide victory in 2019, giving him
another five years in power to pursue his Hindu religious nationalist agenda
(Chotiner 2019). This was followed by sporadic anti-Muslim violence for many
years, with at least 34 Muslims killed in Delhi in a single episode in 2020 (Democracy Now 2020). According to some
accounts, “the Hinduization of India is nearly complete” by May 2022 poses
tremendous risks for the roughly 200 million Muslims and millions of Christians
who are marginalised and persecuted in this process (Serhan 2022). The
persecution of ethnoreligious minorities, particularly Muslims, and the
corresponding humanitarian, societal, and security risks are not limited to
Asian great powers. When we turn to the major Western powers, France is usually
singled out as the Western great power where the Muslim minority is
systematically discriminated against. The vast discrimination against French
Muslims is very much observable in the labour market (Adida, Laitin, Valfort
2010), and French Muslims are the most underrepresented politically across 26
European countries (Aktürk and Katliarou 2021).

Moreover, French “prisons [are] filled with Muslims” (Moore 2008), and
according to many critics, “‘Secular’ is a French word for ‘Anti-Muslim’”
(Gobry 2018). These factors explain “why France sparks such anger in the Muslim
world” (Charlton 2020) compared to other Western states. As the incarceration
rates of French Muslims and the endemic protests demonstrate, the marginalisation
of French Muslims, the largest Muslim minority in the Western world, will
likely continue to be a political and societal soft underbelly and a security
risk in the future.

In conclusion, there is a near-consensus that the global environment in
the 21^st century, and perhaps even beyond, will be characterised by
the competition between rising China and the United States. Apart from the high
risks of a conventional military conflict between the two superpowers over
China’s possible attempt to annex Taiwan, probably sometime before 2049, there
are other unconventional risks of global proportions concerning a food
catastrophe and famines worldwide because China hoarded grain and other
essential foodstuffs. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is exacting a heavy toll on
the Russian military and the economy, which was already under stress for the
last eight years due to the international sanctions on Russia’s occupation and
annexation of Crimea in early 2014. Western disunity, as evidenced by the
remarkably different attitudes toward Russia among some EU member states,
combined with the UK’s new global strategy after Brexit, which includes the
“Indo-Pacific with a British tilt” in synch with the US strategy of containing
China, are important elements of the current global environment. New powers
from the Global South with large arable and fertile lands, agricultural and
industrial capacity, and very sizeable populations, such as Brazil and India, will
likely play a more significant role in the future. Rising food prices due to
increasing demand from China lead to risks of famines worldwide, and the
discrimination and marginalisation of very sizeable ethnoreligious minorities
in several great powers, including China, France, and India, also pose
seemingly domestic risks that may nonetheless have international spillover
effects.

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This paper was originally presented at the Global Leadership Forum workshop on “Peace and Stability in the Neighbourhood”, co-organized by the Global Academy and the School of Government and Leadership (ULMER), Bahçeşehir University, at Zifin Hotel, Giresun, on June 11, 2022, and supported by GA_Panorama, Cifal İstanbul, and the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR).

To cite this work: Şener Aktürk, “ Evaluation of the Global Environment: Rise of China; Russia-West Confrontation; and Emerging Threats ”, Panorama, Online, 22 July 2022, https://www.uikpanorama.com/blog/2022/07/22/glo/

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