| Rockstar |
03-27-23 03:03 PM |
Here’s the article. I had to use a VPN and pretend I was from the Netherlands.
Supporting Ukraine Helps the U.S. against China
Quote:
By DALIBOR ROHAC
March 27, 2023 6:30 AM
Advocating that we abandon Ukraine is not a sign of ‘realism.’ It betrays a lack of seriousness about America’s strategic rivalry with China.
One wonders what Senator Josh Hawley and a growing chorus of Ukraine-skeptical Republicans think of the trip of Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida to Kyiv and Warsaw last week as Xi and Putin conducted their lovefest in the Kremlin.
In a recent speech, the senator dismissed as “magical thinking” by Washington’s foreign-policy “uniparty” the idea that security in Eastern Europe and in the Indo-Pacific were connected. Cut Ukraine loose, he proposes, and focus on the real challenge to the United States: China.
The flaw in the argument is not just that the Russian threat to Eastern Europe would not go away if the United States decided simply to look elsewhere. If the United States abandoned Ukraine, Germany and France would not “put their minds to it” and “shoulder a greater burden of defending themselves and supporting Ukraine,” as Elbridge Colby of the Marathon Initiative and Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation write hopefully. Instead, U.S. withdrawal would be an excuse for doing less — paving the way to some version of China’s “peace plan,” empowering both Moscow and Beijing.
More important, abandoning Ukraine would kill any chance of bringing Europeans on board with our efforts to confront and contain China over the course of this century. The EU is the world’s third-largest economy and wields, albeit clumsily, enormous regulatory and standard-setting powers. Where Europeans stand is critical to the effectiveness of our own responses to Huawei, TikTok, or Chinese technological theft. The United States may try to sanction China until the cows come home, but unless Europeans turn away, too, Beijing will continue to have access to a massive advanced market offering a cornucopia of cutting-edge technologies.
As it happens, the Baltics and the Czech Republic, the EU member states that are the most concerned about Russian expansionism, are the ones pushing the European conversation on China in a U.S.-friendly direction.
From March 25–30, for example, the speaker of the Czech Republic’s lower house, Markéta Pekarová Adamová, is leading a delegation of 150 Czech lawmakers, business leaders, academics, and artists on a visit to Taiwan. Truly unprecedented in its scale, her visit follows a trip made in 2020 by Miloš Vystrčil, the speaker of the Czech senate. There he famously declared, in a Kennedy-esque fashion, that he was Taiwanese.
Pekarová-Adamová is bound to meet with the same reaction from Beijing as did Vystrčil, who was warned by the Chinese foreign minister that he would “pay a heavy price for his short-sighted behavior and political opportunism.”
These are not simply manifestations of solidarity between two small democratic nations living in tight geopolitical spots. There is another, implied audience for these trips: policy-makers in Washington.
Just like Lithuanians, who decided to put up with a host of Chinese sanctions — including a ban on all imports from Lithuania — for allowing Taiwan’s representative office, an embassy in all but name, to open in Vilnius, the Czechs are signaling to the United States that they are not indifferent to Taiwan’s future and China’s security challenge in the Indo-Pacific.
Senator Hawley has a point when he says that “if our resources are tied up in Ukraine, those are resources we can’t use to deter a Taiwan invasion.” Yet the serious, adult response to the underlying problem is to ensure that more resources are directed at expanding our defense industrial base and restoring it to its Cold War–era size — not to alienate those governments in Europe that are stepping up both to help Ukraine (in per GDP terms, Lithuania’s and the Czech Republic’s assistance far exceeds that of the United States) and to confront China.
It may be tempting to dismiss the Balts, the Czechs, and a handful of Scandinavians as insignificant players. But building a European anti-Beijing coalition has to start somewhere. Leaving Ukraine to its own devices would be guaranteed to destroy our deep, painstakingly built relationship with Poland, which is currently sitting on the fence on China-related questions.
Just like our withdrawal from Afghanistan, it would be a signal of America’s lack of seriousness and would put a massive target on the back of any European leader wanting to join forces with the United States to confront China. Advocating that we abandon Ukraine is not a sign of “realism.” Quite the contrary — it betrays a lack of seriousness about America’s strategic rivalry with China.
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