After months of military buildup around Ukraine, Russia used military force to change the borders of a European country for the second time in eight years. During the early morning hours of February 24, 2022, Russia launched a missile attack against every major city in Ukraine except Lviv. These attacks were followed by a major Russian ground operation in the north, east, and south of Ukraine.
During the buildup to the crisis, one dangerous and recurring response from Western countries and American policymakers has been that the U.S. should sacrifice its security interest in Ukraine to align with Russia—so that Russia can either help, or at least not distract from, dealing with the threat from China. This is an approach that is doomed to fail and will do nothing to enhance the safety and security of the American people nor of their allies.
There are four main reasons why Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the West could never team up to deal with China:
- Many of Russia’s and China’s strategic goals in Europe overlap.
- Since coming to power in 1999, Putin has demonstrated that he cannot be a trusted partner of the West.
- For the foreseeable future, Russia will prioritize its resources and energy in Europe—not in Asia.
- Russian and Chinese economic relations are too important for Moscow.
The way to lessen the threat of the partnership between Russia and China is to make them less valuable to each other. Russia only has two assets that gives it real influence—military force and energy. NATO needs to strengthen its conventional and strategic deterrence: Every NATO nation must do its share, and the U.S. needs to ramp up its contribution to defending NATO’s eastern flank. The West needs to get serious about energy security. It needs affordable, reliable, and abundant energy without leaning on gas and oil from Russia. Without military and energy leverage, Russia is checkmated, and a less valuable partner for Beijing.
The U.S. should push back against China by standing with U.S. allies from Lithuania to Australia, confronting Chinese transgressions in the South and East China Seas and in the Taiwan Strait, tightening Chinese access to U.S.-developed technology, continuing to sanction China for its egregious human rights violations, and keeping China-based slave labor out of supply chains.
Washington should also work with its close allies and partners in the region—Australia, India, and Japan—to improve defense cooperation, and Washington should invest more in the U.S. military. Increasing the pressure on both Russia and China may initially push them together; in the long run, it will increase competition and tensions between them, driving them apart.
