Obama has often defended his approach by pointing to the growing isolationist sentiments of the American electorate. Polls do show such leanings, as they have for years, but the case for engagement remains compelling—and needs only a president who can make the public argument for it. Indeed, in an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll in which respondents voiced isolationist sentiments, 55 percent nonetheless agreed that it was important for the U.S. to project an “image of strength.”81 In our view, this suggests that isolationist sentiment is only skin-deep. We believe that, recent discouragements aside, most Americans still identify with assertion over accommodation—and with standing up for our principles, our values, and our broader interests.
This should not be confused with advocacy of endless war or of an overly intrusive United States. Rather, what we must do is offer credible deterrence again. As this book went to press, the Justice Department announced the indictment of five officers of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army for violations of cyber security. The charges are almost certainly symbolic—Beijing isn’t going to extradite these gentlemen to Washington for a trial—and more important, they are incomplete. We made no mention of going after government officials or Chinese businesses that enable and facilitate these hackers. However, at least the charges suggest accountability, recognition, and acknowledgment; all are essential if America is to grasp what it faces and begin fighting back.
In this book, we have outlined a bold and multifaceted set of initiatives the U.S. should implement if we are to begin restoring our place in the world as the bulwark of freedom, liberty, and democracy. Yet no matter how many good ideas are offered, strong leadership remains essential. The Obama administration has been hesitant, halting, and hamstrung.
This simply must change. Unless the United States rebuilds a robust defense, clearly asserts its interests and values, assures its allies, and offers unapologetic leadership, we will fail. And our failure will carry with it a huge price: the collapse of the post–World War II international architecture. To avoid such a scenario, the United States—still the world’s only “indispensable nation”—must reassume its rightful role as the world’s only superpower.
Superpowers, as Robert Kagan wrote recently, “Don’t get to retire.”82
Time is short, but it is not too late—yet.
Preface to the Paperback Edition
Authors’ note: We are writing this updated preface to the new edition of The Russia-China Axis, now titled “Return to Winter: Russia, China, and the New Cold War Against America,” in early summer 2015—at a time when events around the world only strengthen our convictions about the arguments we make in this book. What follows is a brief overview of what has occurred since the book’s first edition appeared last year.
One year ago, when we published The Russia-China Axis, we felt strongly that we had written a book compelling in its analysis, accurate in its appraisal, and prescient in its warning that the United States was at mounting risk from a new, anti-Western alliance between Moscow and Beijing. We believed that the new Russia-China partnership, across every international front, spelled enormous risk for the United States and the Western democracies, and we tried to sound the alarm that the West, especially America, has shown no strategy and no will to take it on. In our view, the United States and its allies are at greater risk than at any time since the end of the Cold War.
A year later, at the risk of sounding immodest, we can only say: We were right.
Across every front, Russia and China continue on the march. The Russians changed the borders of Europe for the first time since World War II, with their illegal annexation of Crimea, and they are poised to destabilize and possibly even annex substantial additional parts of Eastern Ukraine. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as large parts of the Arctic, appear to be next on Putin’s hit list. Moscow is increasing its defense budget exponentially and upgrading its nuclear arsenal, and sending the message regularly to Washington and the European capitals that it is ready to confront us. Even as the Obama administration has tried to celebrate its ill-considered nuclear agreement with Iran, for example, Russian president Vladimir Putin has sold Tehran a missile-defense system that will fortify the Iranians against retaliatory attacks should they violate the agreement’s terms—an inevitability, to those who see the regime’s intentions clearly. Even more alarming has been Russia’s escalating military involvement in Syria, where it has deployed troops and heavy weapons to provide support for Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
Meanwhile, the Chinese are pursuing outright expansionism in the East China Sea and the South China Sea, where they are flouting international law and making brazen claims that, if conceded, would put one of the world’s primary shipping lanes almost entirely under Chinese direction. Beijing is also engaging in a massive military buildup—especially of its naval forces—and is aggressively upgrading its nuclear posture. And Beijing continues to tolerate a nuclear North Korea, arguably putting the world at risk.
Russia and China are adept practitioners of the dark arts of cyber warfare. Both countries have been implicated in recent years in major attacks against American targets. And both Beijing and Moscow have moved boldly—and with distressing effectiveness—to make common cause, politically and economically, with American adversaries around the world, from the Middle East to Latin America.
More quietly yet equally if not more troubling, Russia and China have pursued systematic economic expansionism internationally—including in the West, and including in America’s backyard. Chinese and Russian state-owned firms, their subsidiaries, and shell companies operating under different names have headquarters or offices in hundreds of locations around the world, constituting what a consultant to Western defense organizations calls “the fifth theater”—economic and financial. Meanwhile, at the state level, China and Russia are busy forging economic deals around the world, whether in Africa, where the Chinese have become the continent’s largest trading partner and are leading massive infrastructure investment, or in Latin America (Monroe Doctrine be damned), where the Chinese have become the continent’s top export market and leading creditor. And the Russians have busily pursued economic and trade deals, including significant sales of military hardware to U.S. adversaries.
The Russians and Chinese are tightening their economic relationship with each other, too. In 2014, they signed a $400 billion natural-gas pipeline deal that Putin called “an epochal event” in relations between the two countries. This year, the state-owned China Railway Group announced that it would partner with Russia in constructing a high-speed rail connection between Moscow and Kazan, one of Russia’s largest cities.
No wonder Putin exulted that Russian-Chinese relations have reached a level “unprecedented in history.”1
What unites all of these efforts is a common goal: to thwart the United States and the Western alliance at every turn, providing a counterweight in the form of a more autocratic, anti-Western system of political arrangements and individual rights. We wrote The Russia-China Axis to offer readers a glimpse at how this all worked and to raise the alarm about how ill-prepared the United States seems to be to confront it. Since the first edition appeared last year, the assertiveness and sometimes outright provocation of the two partners has continued—individually, or in tandem with each other or with rogue actors—and the consequences for the United States and its allies grow graver by the day.
Yet the challenge that Russia and China present still seems largely unrecognized by our political leaders, to say nothing of the public at large. We must confront it if America is going to maintain its preeminent position in the world. That task is made incalculably more difficult by a dynamic that we have observed, and lamented, for years: Chinese and Russian aggression, assertiveness, and strategic clarity, on the one hand; and American retrenchment, lack of commitment, and strategic ineptitude, on the other. We see it across the board—whether in our wholly inadequate and uncommitted effort to fight ISIS, our refusal to engage in tough diplomacy with Iran on the nuclear deal, or in our passive and ineffective global diplomacy, with our own allies and also as regards the shrewd and determined moves that Putin and