While You Face Ukraine, Don’t Turn Your Back on China

How important is the fate of Ukraine—specifically, its heavily Russophone eastern sector, which Russia may seize as it seized the Crimea in 2014—to America’s national self-interest?

All news media, the White House, and the attention of Europe are riveted on the confrontation. Not unnatural for the crisis of the moment.

Meanwhile, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) prosecutes its 100-year strategy for replacing America as “world hegemon.”

But meanwhile, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) prosecutes its 100-year strategy for replacing America as “world hegemon,” not by missile-rattling and invasions—at least, for now—but by a month of world attention upon the Winter Olympics extravaganza in Beijing. The upsurge of Islam continues, most recently in Afghanistan, but always on many fronts including a civilian invasion of Europe.

In the United States, we face a renewed political drive against the remnants of a free economy and a cultural drive against the roots of America in Enlightenment principles.

And in the United States, we face a renewed political drive against the remnants of a free economy and a cultural drive against the roots of America in Enlightenment principles. To take an example, the Biden administration’s crackdown on U.S. oil production (including fracking) promises to make the soaring price of heating oil and fuel at the gas pump permanent. On another front in the same battle, the greens in the media, academia, government, and business work toward the same end.

Once, America could have afforded to champion freedom in Ukraine and today, as individuals, reporters, and media voices, we must continue to do so. But we are not the America that after winning World War II, for the next 40 years (1945 to 1991) faced down world communism until the Soviet Union disintegrated.

Ukraine exists in the region once hemmed-in by the Russian Empire, the German Empire, and the Austrian Empire. It was during the 1917 Bolshevik takeover, which was not a “revolution” but a putsch overthrowing Russia’s first democratically elected government, that the Red Army seized Ukraine, which in time became the Ukraine SSR. As did other adjacent European and Asian nations clawed into the new “union” of Soviet socialist “republics.” Russian Premier Vladimir Putin, of course, came of age in the regnant Soviet Union, what President Ronald Reagan called “the Evil Empire” of socialist republics but also Eastern European nations invaded after World War II. He had a 16-year career ending as lieutenant colonel in the KGB, successor to the long series of secret police organizations that terrorized citizens into submission.

Mr. Putin is on record as lamenting the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Empire and wishing he could reverse it.

Mr. Putin is on record as lamenting the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Empire and wishing he could reverse it. The collapse seemed inevitable to some but came to most as the greatest shock of the late Twentieth Century. In a matter of months, the constituents of the empire simply walked out of the Russian orbit. What Russia called the Warsaw Pact nations, but many called the “captive nations,” immediately sensed the collapse of Russian will to sustain Iron Curtain unity with tanks.

One after another, the Eastern European nations rushed to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which had stood off the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. Not a single Eastern European nation elected to remain allied to Russia in the Pact; all joined its antagonist in Europe.

But Ukraine was not a “captive nation” like Poland, East Germany, Hungary, and others. It was unwillingly a founding “Soviet Socialist Republic,” drawn into the Russian communist “experiment” back in the glory days of the “Russian Revolution.”

In 2017, Ukraine adopted a constitutional amendment that identified its international political future with membership in the European Union (EU) and the NATO military alliance to defend any member attacked by Russia. That triggered Putin’s heightened military threat to eastern Ukraine’s largely Russian-speaking Donbas region. For many decades, Russia had flooded the region, adjacent to Russia, with ethnic Russians.

Russia has no legitimate claim to any part of Ukraine.

Russia has no legitimate claim to any part of Ukraine. A super-aggressive, Bolshevik-dominated Russia, entranced by the Marxist-Leninist dream of world proletarian revolution, simply seized its neighbors. Passage of more than a century since the Bolshevik Revolution made those military annexations seem integral to Russia’s “sphere of influence.” To permit Ukraine to join NATO is to concede that the dream that began in Russia is today a dried husk, its last bits dropping away. One may guess that to Putin, bred in the era of Soviet power to threaten world apocalypse, Ukraine’s defection to NATO is history’s judgment on his life.

The conscience of most Americans identifies with Ukraine. Engulfed by the momentum the Red Army after the Bolshevik victory in the war that following the Leninist putsch, the Ukraine soon shared the catastrophe that was communism’s collectivization of agriculture. Famine swept the widely hailed new Russian collective farms. A rising Soviet apparatchik, Nikita Khrushchev, was sent by Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin to the loot Ukraine. There, he was responsible for stripping Ukraine of food to try to save Russian communism from the first famine in contemporary history.

The strategy failed, but 4.5 million Ukrainians died as ghastly nationwide starvation took hold. Years later, when then-Premier Khrushchev visited the United States during the Kennedy administration, a Congressional intelligence assessment called him “the butcher of the Ukraine.”

Ukraine, then, has a brave, relentlessly striving, and tragic modern history. Now, its hope for a stable European future is caught up in Russia’s last stand as a world power. With 100,000 Russian troops on Ukraine’s border, Putin a few days ago staged a little drama with Russia’s nuclear-warhead-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles. The message is that no decisive military stand against Russian invasion of Ukraine is possible. In the end, neither NATO nor Russia will accept defeat without resorting to nuclear weapons. And that (we hope) is unthinkable.

So Putin will take the Donbas region, if he is wiling to pay the price in economic sanctions. Indeed, although unlikely, he could take Kiev and thus the whole of Ukraine. Europe and the United States, including NATO, will not force a true military showdown.

All this distracts U.S. attention from the coming showdown with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which has tolerated a market economy—abetted by the greatest industrial espionage in history against America—to prepare to replace America as world “hegemon.” It is the only international position that China, once known as the Middle Kingdom between Heaven and the rest of the world, will tolerate. To restore China to that status is recognized by the CCP as the ultimate and only justification in the eyes of the Chinese people of permanent CCP one-party dictatorship.

The threat from Soviet Russia that dominated the Twentieth Century is dead. What we see in the Ukraine confrontation is the former USSR’s desperate lunge for some garb to cover its nakedness. The only international peril is that if Russia after Putin breaks up into warring factions fighting for national control, the Soviet nuclear arsenal at all levels will be up for grabs.

Symbolically, and as a second precedent for Russian wars of territorial conquest, occupation of another region of Ukraine has some importance. But Ukraine is one of the last targets of such aggrandizement that is not a member nation of NATO. (Which is why, of course, Ukraine had made NATO membership its top priority.)

America cannot afford, today, a full-fledged showdown over the Donbas region—nor can America’s NATO allies. If the “free world,” as it was once called, has the resources and fortitude for one final “cold war” crusade, the target should be communism’s power in China. That is a case that has been made elsewhere with irrefutable evidence and logic, recognized by the Trump administration but ignored utterly by President Biden’s and the Democratic leadership.

Championing Ukraine should not become another distraction from the coming struggle against the CCP’s bid for world leadership.

The news, reported recently (February 20), suggests the kind of surprises we can expect as the CCP strategy for supplanting America’s international leadership unfolds. The report also suggests that Putin’s wish to revive Russia as a communist power may become an unexpected reality. The New York Times said that Russian Premier Putin and Xi Jinping, president of the PRC and general secretary of the CCP, have entered a pact to launch “a new type of cold war” (Times phraseology). Others called it a new pact to “deepen defense ties.”

The pact followed a year of increasing joint Russian-Chinese military operations including intimidating feints at Japan and South Korea. Both recently joined forces to urge the United Nations to lift sanctions on North Korea. Cooperation reportedly has accelerated since Russia’s annexation of the Crimea. Russia is China’s biggest supplier of military hardware and China Russia’s chief trading partner.

“It’s the strongest, closest and best relationship that the two countries have had since at least the mid-1950s. And possibly ever,” said Nigel Gould-Davies, Senior Fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).

He said: “They also have a strong shared interest in undermining the states and alliances, beyond their own borders, that embody liberal values. So, their main common interest is…ideological… to undermine the democratic and liberal West.”

Ayn Rand raised the alarm about such a dangerous turn of events in a 1972 Ayn Rand Letter, “The Shanghai Gesture,” about President Richard Nixon’s trip to “open China” to the West. She complimented Nixon on his intent to ally with China against the Soviets. But she warned not to “build up China” into a world economic and military power that then might do an about face on its “rupture” with the Soviet Union and suddenly ally with Russia against the United States.

In the years since, it would seem, the CCP remembered the idea, while America forgot.

Too late, now.

Related Posts:

1. Who Will Shift the Overton Windows?
2. How Shaw’s “Fabian Gradualist” Socialism Became Admiration for Stalin and Hitler
3. Is a Free Society a Multiple Paradigm Ideal?

   

About the Author: Walter Donway

Walter Donway has written and edited for Savvy Street since its inception in 2014. His essays and interpretative commentaries on breakthrough books have dealt with philosophy, politics, literature, science, history, psychology, and personalities. His new novel, "Retaking College Hill,” became Amazon’s #1 bestseller in political fiction. This year, the Atlas Society published his Pocket Guide to The Fountainhead and Romanticism Reborn--essays on the Romantic movement in literature and its 20th Century revival in Ayn Rand's novels. His collections of essays and short stories and his "Collected Poems" are available on Amazon. He lives in East Hampton with his wife, Robin.