Is the Russian invasion of Ukraine just the first in a series of conflicts that will make Europe look more and more like the Middle East in the coming years? A Chinese academic – who wished to remain anonymous – asked me that question last week, and his reasoning showed how differently non-Westerns view a war that is shaking up Europe’s geopolitical order.
The conversations I have with Chinese academics to understand how they see the world show that they reason from a fundamentally different position than many of their colleagues in the West. Not only are they more inclined to blame the war in Ukraine on NATO expansion than on the Kremlin, but many of their strategic assumptions are essentially the opposite of ours.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mark Leonard is director of the European Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Age of Unpeace: How Connectivity Causes Conflict.
While Europeans and Americans view the conflict as a turning point in world history, the Chinese simply see it as a military intervention — of even less importance than those in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan of the past 75 years. In their eyes, the only real difference is that this time it is not the West that intervenes somewhere.
Post-American World
Moreover, while many in Europe think this war marks America’s return to the world stage, Chinese intellectuals see it as further confirmation of the dawn of a post-American world. In their view, the end of US rule has created a vacuum that is now being filled by Russia.
Where Westerners see an attack on the rules-based order, my Chinese friends see the emergence of a more pluralistic world—one in which the end of American rule allows other regional and sub-regional projects. Their argument is that the rules-based order has always been lacking in legitimacy: Western powers have established those rules and have never been very keen to change them when it suits them (as in Kosovo and Iraq).
From these arguments I come to the analogy with the Middle East. My Chinese interlocutor does not regard the situation in Ukraine as a war of aggression between sovereign countries, but rather as a realignment of postcolonial borders at the end of Western autocracy. Just like in the Middle East, countries question the boundaries that the West has drawn there after the First World War.
Indirect War
Yet the most striking parallel is that the conflict in Ukraine is regarded by many as an indirect war. Like the wars in Syria, Yemen and Lebanon, the one in Ukraine has been fueled and abused by major powers. Who benefits the most? At least not Russia, Ukraine or Europe, according to my Chinese friends. Ultimately, the United States and China have the most to gain, and both approach the conflict as an indirect war within their wider rivalry.
The Americans have taken advantage of it by binding the Europeans, Japanese and Koreans to a new ranking of US-imposed priorities and by isolating Russia and forcing China to open up about their position on issues of territorial integrity. In turn, China has benefited from putting Russia in an even more subordinate position and by urging more countries in the Global South not to take sides.
While European leaders pose as 21st-century Churchills, the Chinese see them merely as pawns in a larger geopolitical game. All the academics I spoke to agreed that the war in Ukraine is a rather insignificant distraction compared to the short-term covid-19 disruption and the long-term US-China power struggle.
Modesty
Of course there is much to argue against the points of my Chinese interlocutor. Europeans have more say than he believes, and the West’s strong response to Russian aggression could prevent this war from becoming the first in a long series of border conflicts (such as the decade-long wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s). ).
Still, the fact that Chinese observers interpret things so differently than we do should make us think. At the very least, we in the West should think more about how the rest of the world sees us. Of course, it’s tempting to dismiss the Chinese arguments as obligatory points of discussion, designed not to anger a hostile, undemocratic regime (public discussions about Ukraine are heavily censored in China). But perhaps some modesty would not be out of place.
The fact that Chinese observers have such a radically different perspective may explain why the West has not received near-universal support for sanctions against Russia. At a time when the ‘boss-in-the-house’ policy is on the rise, it shouldn’t surprise us that other governments don’t consider Ukraine as important. While we see a heroic self-defense of the rules-based order, others see the last throes of Western supremacy in a world that is fast becoming multipolar.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
Translation: Leo Reijnen