Return to Winter: Russia, China, and the New Cold War Against America (9 page)

Putin’s presentation of Russia as an honest broker was starkly at odds with the facts. Indeed, during the March 2013 chemical-weapons attack in Aleppo, when the Americans called for a UN investigation into the claims of both the government and the rebels, the Russians supported only the claims of the Assad government.
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Further, the Russian envoy to the UN openly mocked U.S. concerns by reminding the Americans of their erroneous claims about chemical weapons in Iraq a decade earlier.

Both Russia and China have vetoed proposed UN Security Council resolutions that sought to put pressure on Assad (and more recently, they helped block a Security Council resolution affirming the sovereignty and national borders of Ukraine). Russia has supplied $928 million in weapons to Syria since 1991.
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China, for its part has repeatedly said that it opposes forceful foreign intervention in Syria and has called for a political solution.
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Both Axis nations have generally been wary of what they perceive as American attempts at regime change.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration, still in “reset” mode, shows little sign that it understands the challenge the Axis poses or has any
intention of addressing it. The U.S. is withdrawing from the Middle East and retreating from commitments it made to allies there and in Western and Eastern Europe. Our disengagement from the world couldn’t come at a worse time.

CYBER WARFARE

In the area of cyber warfare, America has done somewhat better. Here, at least, American officials show some recognition of the enormity of the challenge facing us. In fall 2012, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned that the U.S. could someday face a “cyber Pearl Harbor.” Panetta also said, “It’s no secret that Russia and China have advanced cyber capabilities.” That was an understatement.

In fact, Russia and China are the world’s leading practitioners of cyber warfare. They work overtime to sabotage and subvert military, economic, and infrastructure assets of nations they view as adversaries—and to loot their systems of military intelligence, diplomatic information, and corporate trade secrets. The Russians have brought down the technology infrastructure of Georgia and Estonia; Chinese hackers affiliated with the Army of the People’s Republic have infamously been identified as the culprits in massive attacks on U.S. banking, security, infrastructure, and even military systems.

In his January 2012 unclassified Worldwide Threat Assessment before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper named Russia and China as the state actors most active in stealing secrets from the United States and attacking us through cyberspace.
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If Panetta’s dreaded cyber Pearl Harbor materializes, one or both of the Axis nations will almost certainly be behind it.

In a political sense, a cyber Pearl Harbor has already happened. The leaking of national-security secrets in June 2013 by Edward Snowden,
and the refuge he was given, first by the Chinese and then by the Russians, ought to remind skeptics of the potential costs and dangers we face in this area. Though both nations were careful to profess that they didn’t support Snowden’s actions, their protection of him should make clear, too, that Moscow and Beijing would take any chance available to undermine American power and international influence. And they don’t need to rely solely on their own efforts to do this.

In late September 2013, the U.S. announced that Iran had successfully hacked into unclassified Navy computers running email services and internal intranets. It showed a new sophistication from Iranian hackers, suggesting they now have the capability to break into U.S. military systems. They had previously focused their attacks on U.S. banks and other private networks, and the U.S. didn’t consider Iran a major cyber player. How did the Iranians ramp up their capabilities so quickly?

“They’re getting help from the Russians,” said cyber-security specialist and former State Department official James Lewis in a
Wall Street Journal
story that cited “current and former officials” who believe that the Iranians have developed “a growing partnership with Russian cybercriminals.”
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MILITARY AND NUCLEAR BUILDUPS

“What preserved peace, even in Cold War conditions,” Vladimir Putin has said, “was a balance of forces.”
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On the fundamental measure of national security—military readiness—the Axis nations are building up while the U.S. is slashing its defense budget through the imposed sequestration and other automatic cuts. While the U.S. pursues wholesale reductions, the Axis pursues wholesale augmentations; while we allow our equipment, materials, and technologies to degrade, they pursue constant upgrades. Perhaps
most worryingly, while the American president advocates so-called nuclear zero—a world without nuclear weapons—the Russians and Chinese bolster their atomic arsenals.

While all signs point to a strengthening Russian-Chinese relationship and more formalized cooperation and coordination, the United States is pulling back from its commitments and leaving allies from Japan in the Far East to Poland in Eastern Europe worried and vulnerable. As we have seen in Ukraine, the Russians have already taken advantage of this vulnerability. In the Far East, it may only be a matter of time before the Chinese attempt to do the same. While the Russians and Chinese make demands, the United States makes concessions. And while the Russians and Chinese pursue what they dubiously call “a new, more just world order,” the United States backs away from world leadership, hiding behind the illusion of “leading from behind.” It all adds up to a calamitous American message: The U.S. simply has no coherent national defense strategy.

Obama’s broader disarmament agenda, both in offensive and defensive capabilities, is at odds with treaty commitments he made to our allies. His anti-nuclear ambitions are music to the ears of the Axis, but they leave the U.S. increasingly vulnerable. As former Senator John Kyl puts it: “The U.S. is now stuck with numbers and technology capable of dealing only with low-level threats.”
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On the other side, things couldn’t be more different. Putin gave Xi an honor he has allowed no other foreign leader: a visit to Russia’s strategic-defense command headquarters and “war room.” He even let Chinese media film the visit, as Xi observed giant computer screens of military intelligence.
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One key aspect of the Sino-Russian strategic partnership, military exchange, involves Russian arms sales to China and high-technology sharing. China’s weapons purchases from Russia over the past 20 years account for $29 billion of its $34 billion in arms imports.
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For the
Russians, this ongoing exchange has two major objectives: bolstering the former Soviet defense-industrial complex following the USSR’s collapse, and arming a country that shares the goal of weakening U.S. control in the region.

The Chinese, meanwhile, have grown their military power exponentially over the last two decades, projecting force across Asia to the borders of India, with new naval ports imposed on client countries. Some Western estimates put Chinese military spending second only to the Americans’, at $200 billion annually,
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having grown from $20 billion 10 years ago.
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The Chinese have even begun threatening stalwart Western allies in the Pacific and East Asia—warning Australia, for example, that it would be “caught in the crossfire” if the nation went ahead with plans to offer a base for U.S. Marines.
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The Chinese have bullied the Philippines over the Spratly Islands, and they are engaged in a tense provocation with Japan over the disputed Senkaku Islands (called the Diaoyu Islands by China)—an ongoing battle which has made starkly clear America’s declining power in the region. By the late 2020s—a little more than a decade from now—Chinese ships should outnumber American ships in the Pacific.
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In July 2013, an armada of Chinese and Russian warships sailed through the Sea of Japan in joint naval exercises that included live firing. Beijing called it the largest joint exercise the Chinese military had ever undertaken with another country. The Chinese fleet commander said the goal was to strengthen “strategic trust” with Russia—and that seems to be how it was received. “This shows unprecedented good relations between China and Russia,” said Professor Wang Ning, a Russian Studies specialist at the Shanghai International Studies University. “It shows that the two countries will support each other on the global stage.”
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All of this plays neatly into what has come to be called the China Dream: a goal shared by both top military leaders and Communist Party officials to surpass the U.S. as the world’s preeminent military
superpower by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist revolution. Xi calls it simply “the dream of a strong nation,” but the dream is inseparable from military prowess.

“To achieve the great revival of the Chinese nation, we must ensure there is unison between a prosperous country and strong military,” Xi has said.
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He has spared no resource to focus the military on “combat readiness” and “fighting and winning wars.” No one need spell out whom the war would be fought against. There is only one candidate: the United States, China’s only Pacific and East Asian rival.

“In my opinion,” writes General Liu Yazhou, “the competition between China and the U.S. in the 21st century should be a race, that is, a contest to see whose development results are better, whose comprehensive national power can rise faster, and to finally decide who can become the champion country to lead world progress.”
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Meanwhile, Russia is using its petro-wealth to rebuild its conventional military while also modernizing—and greatly expanding—its nuclear arsenal. Already, Russia’s nuclear weapons outnumber America’s. The 2008 Georgian war made clear, or should have made clear, that the Russians intend to reclaim the entirety of their old Soviet sphere of influence. The West’s failure to lift a hand to help a democratic ally in that struggle emboldened Russian confidence.

“TELL VLADIMIR”: THE U.S. ABDICATION ON MISSILE DEFENSE

On the surface, it was a customary scene: a pool of journalists waiting for the start of a news conference with President Obama and Russia’s then-president, Dmitri Medvedev, in March 2012. But sitting close together beforehand, the two leaders shared an impromptu exchange inadvertently caught by a “hot” microphone.

“It’s important for him to give me space,” Obama told Medvedev, referring to Vladimir Putin, who had just won election to succeed
Medvedev as Russia’s next president. “This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.”

“I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir,” Medvedev said.

Then, as the two men sat back in their chairs, barely audible over the videotape, Obama could be heard saying, sotto voce: “Tell Vladimir.”

Obama and Medvedev were trying to iron out a long-running dispute between the two countries on American plans to deploy a missile-defense system in Eastern Europe—a system that the U.S. conceived mainly as protection against Iranian nuclear ambitions. The United States insisted that the missile-defense shield was intended to counter Iranian nuclear ambitions; Russia claimed that the real target of American missile-defense plans was Moscow. What mostly spooked the Russians about the American plan was the missile shield’s final phase, then in development, which would allow the U.S. to use interceptors to shoot down long-range ICBMs, a core part of Russia’s nuclear arsenal. Those U.S. plans angered Putin, who saw them as an encroachment on his sphere of influence and a betrayal of his cooperation with the West after 9/11—much as he had seen a betrayal in the American plans to expand NATO. He made clear that he would resist the American missile-defense effort at any cost.

“When we talk about the missile-defense system, our American partners keep telling us, ‘This is not directed against you,’” Putin said. “But what happens if Mr. Romney, who believes us to be America’s No. 1 foe, is elected as president of the United States? In that case, the missile-defense system will definitely be directed against Russia as it is technologically configured exactly for this purpose.”
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General Nikolai Makarov, who was then Russia’s chief of the general staff, said of the missile-defense standoff: “A decision to use destructive force preemptively will be taken if the situation worsens.”
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Happily for the Russians, the situation didn’t worsen: In March 2013, just before the Xi-Putin summit meeting, President Obama blindsided them, and American allies, with a unilateral retreat on missile defense. The U.S. announced that it would deploy 14 new missile interceptors on the West Coast or in Alaska, in response to the increasingly bellicose words and deeds of North Korea—but that the U.S. would pay for this redeployment by canceling the last phase of the planned missile shield in Poland and Romania. That last phase, which involved interceptors, had concerned Putin most. Thus the United States, in the absence of any concessions from Russia, had scuttled the most vital aspects of its missile-defense plan for Eastern Europe. (Some GOP senators are urging the administration to reconsider the policy and restart the Bush-era plan for the missile shield, especially in light of the Kremlin’s aggression against Ukraine.
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The announcement illustrated how strategically off-balance the U.S. remains under President Obama. The missile-defense shield had been geared to protect the region against prospective Iranian nukes, which Iran pursues with Russian assistance. There is no sign that the Iranian danger has lessened; on the contrary, it has grown. Thus, the shield is more needed than ever, but with North Korea acting up, the U.S. merely pulled resources from one dangerous area and shifted them to another. This is not leadership; this is lurching from crisis to crisis.

It’s hard to overstate the magnitude of Obama’s capitulation—one, it’s important to note, that came as a surprise to the Russians, who had no inkling that the U.S. was about to back down. The move telegraphed, yet again, that America lacks a clear strategy and sense of what it is trying to accomplish in the world. Meanwhile, Russia and China show every sign of having clear plans.