Barack Obama: The Russian Risk and Chinese Challenge

The crisis in Ukraine, the deadly war in Syria and the deadlock in the Middle East will not distract the leading world power from its priorities. The swaying of Asia toward the planet’s center of gravity is so quick and so inevitable that the increasingly alarming twists and turns that agitate the Old World are rather insignificant with regard to the future that lies further to the east.

The four-day tour in Asia that Barack Obama has just begun in Japan is, for us Europeans, a lesson in humility. It demonstrates that America, the single global power, is thinking logically. The announcement of this trip last October, given the budgetary dead end in Congress, had raised some questions. It did not question the “pivot” of American diplomacy to the Pacific — not more than the recent developments in Ukraine in any case.

Russia tried in vain to eradicate the rules of the international game in Crimea, taking our continent back to times when we changed the outline of country borders by force. We are no longer the center of the world. After the fiasco of the Association Treaty proposed by Viktor Yanoukovich, European diplomacy has become so significant that, from now on, the fate of Ukraine will be in the hands of Moscow and Washington. As for the United States, if they must reassure their NATO allies, will they not go as far as to “re-pivot” to Asia in order to redirect it toward Europe, asked the Polish minister of defense.

However, en route to the East, Barack Obama will not escape the effects of the Ukrainian crisis. The Japanese are right to be worried about what may happen in Beijing. If Moscow can seize Crimea with impunity, why would Beijing not act the same way to concretize its territorial claims in the China Sea? Indeed, Ukraine is not a NATO member, whereas the United States is linked to Japan by a defense treaty. The new American tendency to avoid conflicts does nothing to reassure its allies.

There is a great difference between the revisionist behavior of Russia in Europe and more cautious expansionism of China’s boom in Asia. In both cases, however, the status quo and regional stability is deliberately questioned by a power that believes, sometimes within its rights and with all desire for revenge set aside, that it has legitimate interests beyond its borders. In both cases, authoritarian regimes, dealing with the management of a delicate internal mutation, choose to stir nationalism in order to portray to the outside world the frustrations of an increasingly more difficult-to-satisfy opinion. In both cases, the United States and its allies do not really know how to adjust to the new order.

The blow of the “Eastern Partnership” in Asia dealt by Vladimir Putin in Ukraine to European politics has a pending unilateral establishment by Beijing, last November, of an aerial identification defense zone in the South China Sea. As they have not been opposed, these two acts have transformed the strategic balance that had been maintained for years in Europe and Asia.

Vladimir Putin’s dream of a “Eurasia” under the heel of the Kremlin, and its aspirations to be treated as equal by Washington as it was during the Cold War, are a feeble echo of the “Chinese dream” of a return to the past glory of the Middle Kingdom, put forward by Xi Jinping, president of the People’s Republic of China, and also of his oft-expressed desire to establish “a new kind of relationship between great powers” with the United States. The American president is no fool. Russia, he said March 23 at The Hague, is merely a “regional power” and “is threatening some of its immediate neighbors—not out of strength, but out of weakness.” It does not represent “the number one security threat for the United States.” He would no doubt be hesitant to choose such words with regard to China, which has its whole future in front of it.

Since the end of the Cold War, the global equilibrium has depended on security guarantees offered by a dominating America. When a real risk of destabilization appears, it will turn out that these assurances are shockingly fragile. How can the increasing power of adversaries be contained? What can be done to sufficiently reassure allies without exacerbating tensions? In Asia, like in Europe, Barack Obama has no other option than to rely more heavily on the abilities of the country’s allies to fend for themselves.