A two-front test of wills: Defeating Russia and deterring China

Last October, a group of 30 congressional Democrats wrote to President Biden quoting his commitment to avoid direct military conflict with Russia and “World War III, something we must strive to prevent.”

They noted Biden’s call for an end to the fighting: “There’s going to have to be a negotiated settlement here [but] Vladimir Putin doesn’t have a way out right now, and I’m trying to figure out what we do about that,” he said.

They urged the president to push for immediate negotiations, saying, “It is America’s responsibility to pursue every diplomatic avenue to support such a solution that is acceptable to the people of Ukraine.”  

Though some administration statements also seemed to be pressing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to scale back his intentions to expel Russian forces from all occupied Ukrainian territory, the letter was widely seen as undermining Ukraine’s position and caused a strong backlash in the Congress and the White House. It was retracted days later. 

On the Republican side, a smaller number of House members also began to waver regarding support for Ukraine, voicing concerns about the escalating financial costs of the conflict and seeking greater accountability for U.S. funding.

Despite these outliers, overwhelming majorities of both parties in the House and Senate strongly support the U.S. weapons flow to Ukraine and, if anything, criticize it as being too slow and limited.  

Last week, however, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) went beyond the financial issue and derogated the U.S. effort directly on national security grounds. He argued that managing and utilizing America’s finite military capacities is a zero-sum game and he criticized those who want to spend resources now in Ukraine, instead of husbanding them for a possible conflict with China.  “They want us to believe we can fight an endless proxy war in Ukraine,” he said. “And somehow, this won’t impact our ability to deter China from invading Taiwan.”  

While most observers lament the nation’s political divisions, Hawley complains of the opposite — the bipartisan consensus that prevails on defending both Ukraine and Taiwan. “Curiously enough, this story of American omnicompetence isn’t really partisan,” he said “… [N]eoconservatives on the right, and liberal globalists on the left … make up the ‘Uniparty’ — the D.C. establishment that transcends all changing administrations.”

Hawley employs language that resonates with longstanding leftist attacks on the United States.  “We hear a lot these days about something called the ‘rules-based international order,’” he said. “… It is a kind of American liberal empire. … That imperial project failed. It failed disastrously.”

China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin agree with Hawley’s condemnation of moralistic American overreach. “[T]he advocacy of democracy and human rights must not be used to put pressure on other countries. … Such attempts at hegemony pose serious threats to global and regional peace and stability and undermine the stability of the world order,” they declared in their joint statement proclaiming a “no-limits strategic partnership” weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. 

Hawley’s broadside at the “Uniparty’s” strategic foreign policy failures is only half-right. He correctly identifies the colossal misjudgment on China, saying: “All the way back in December 2001, we admitted China into the World Trade Organization [WTO]. The Uniparty wanted to believe that … maybe we could democratize China. Maybe, if we brought China into the global economic order, horrors like Tiananmen Square could be a thing of the past. … That was a catastrophic mistake.” 

When I testified against China’s entry into WTO before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2000, Chairman Jesse Helms asked if I thought its admission “would change China.” I said I feared “it would change us.”

Yet, in the past six years, the foreign policy establishment has revised its assessment of both China’s growing capabilities and its hostile intentions. The precedent-breaking policies and speeches by officials in the Trump administration, extended through Biden’s alliance-building and focus on the existential competition between democracies and dictatorships, have governments around the world responding to China’s threats in order to protect the very rules-based international order that Hawley mocks.  

The so-called Uniparty is finally getting China right — though important segments of the business community in the U.S. and abroad still put profits before national security interests.

Similarly, regarding Ukraine, the foreign policy establishment has awakened to the need to confront Putin’s revanchist ambitions — after allowing him to invade and occupy large swaths of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014. 

But Hawley sees no nexus between the aggression of one dictator and that of another, even when they pledge support for each other’s ambitions — or when the same tyrant carries out his aggression in phases, as Putin did, or incrementally, as Xi is doing.

“Right now, we have Uniparty leaders and former NATO brass telling us that defending Ukraine is basically the same thing as deterring China — that if one dictator is allowed to seize territory by force, it’ll embolden others, and so stopping Vladimir Putin is basically the same thing as stopping Xi Jinping,” Hawley said.

“This is the Uniparty’s magical thinking at work. It’s rooted in the fanciful idea that if we want to stop tyrants, all we need to do is show them we’re not afraid — that if we stand up to one bully, all the others will just slink away. That’s Hollywood. That’s not reality.”  

That’s also not exactly what anyone is saying. The history of World War II, the Korean War and the Cold War shows what happens when aggression goes unchecked — the world gets more of it, not less. 

When Xi sides with Russia on Ukraine— “[China] oppose[s] further enlargement of NATO and call[s] on the North Atlantic Alliance to abandon its ideologized cold war approaches” — and when Putin “confirms that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China” — the interconnection between revanchist Russian and Chinese Communist Party aggression could not be clearer.

But Hawley does make a valid point on NATO burden-sharing: “We cannot meet Ukrainian, Taiwanese and our own military requirements all at the same time, for the foreseeable future. And, frankly, we shouldn’t have to. Some of the world’s wealthiest nations are our allies in Europe. But right now, we’re the only ones doing the heavy lifting. In fact, we’ve sent more weapons to Ukraine than all of Europe has, combined.”  

While other NATO members are doing more than they have in decades, thanks to the efforts of the Trump and Biden administrations and Putin’s latest blatant aggression, they need to do more as long as the Russian threat to their individual and collective security persists. But more than weapons, the Western will to resist aggression will determine the outcome. To avoid a two-front war, the West must win the two-front test of wills.

Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He served in the Pentagon when Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia and was involved in Department of Defense discussions about the U.S. response. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.