HE GREATEST risk facing the twenty-first-century United States, short of an outright nuclear attack, is a two-front war involving its strongest military rivals, China and Russia. Such a conflict would entail a scale of national effort and risk unseen in generations, effectively pitting America against the resources of nearly half of the Eurasian landmass. It would stretch and likely exceed the current capabilities of the U.S. military, requiring great sacrifices of the American people with far-reaching consequences for U.S. influence, alliances, and prosperity. Should it escalate into a nuclear confrontation, it could possibly even imperil the country’s very existence.
Given these high stakes, avoiding a two-front war with China and Russia must rank among the foremost objectives of contemporary U.S. grand strategy. Yet the United States has been slow to comprehend this danger, let alone the implications it holds for U.S. policy. So far, Washington’s efforts to grapple with the “simultaneity” problem (as it’s called in Pentagon circles) have been overwhelmingly focused on the military side of the problem. The 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) replaced the two-war standard with a laser focus on fighting one major war with America’s most capable adversary—China. In its wake, a debate has erupted among defense intellectuals about how to handle a second-front contingency.
By comparison, there has been much less discussion of how, if at all, U.S. diplomacy should evolve to avert two-front war and, more broadly, alleviate the pressures of strategic simultaneity. While the Trump administration rightly inaugurated a more confrontational approach toward China, this was not accompanied by a rebalancing of diplomatic priorities and resources in other regions to complement the NDS’ justified focus on the Indo-Pacific. Nor does the Biden administration appear to be contemplating a redistribution of strategic focus and resources among regions. This misalignment in the objects of U.S. military and diplomatic power is neither desirable nor sustainable. America will have to limit the number of active rivalries requiring major U.S. military attention, improve the functionality of its existing alliances for offsetting the pressures of simultaneity, or significantly grow defense budgets—or some combination of the three.
In the current budgetary environment, though, the most likely outcome could well be the worst of all worlds—namely, that America will continue to try to overawe all threats without significantly improving the performance of its alliances while reducing real defense spending. Such an approach keeps U.S. power thinly spread and limits Washington’s bandwidth for managing policy tradeoffs among regions. This creates an ideal setting for an increasingly aligned Russia and China to conduct repeated stress tests of U.S. resolve in their respective neighborhoods and, when conditions are ripe, make synchronous grabs for, say, Taiwan and a Baltic state.
Averting such scenarios should not only or primarily be a concern for the U.S. military; it is also the job of U.S. diplomacy. Indeed, diplomacy in its highest form has historically been used for precisely this purpose, as an instrument for rearranging power in space and time to avoid fighting numerous enemies at once. This role—the sequencing of rivalries—should be the central preoccupation of American diplomacy today. Rather than trying to contain Russia and China simultaneously, the United States needs to find a way to stagger its contests with these two powers to ensure that it does not face both at the same time in a war.
While accomplishing this task will not be easy, COVID-19 may present an unexpected opportunity. By widening the power disparity between China and Russia, the pandemic has heightened Russia’s economic dependency on China as a source of capital, markets, and international political support. Paradoxically, the very fact of this deepening dependency is likely to increase Russian fear of becoming a sidecar to Beijing’s ambitions and create incentives for Moscow to reorient its foreign policy.
Within this paradox lies an opportunity for the United States. The aim of American diplomacy—and the crux of our strategy for avoiding a two-front war—should be to sharpen Russia’s dilemma and render that country less menacing to ourselves on a faster timeline than China is able to realize its ambitious military potential as a great power. Rather than attempting to woo or court Russia into a conciliatory stance, we should present it with a combination of insuperable obstacles to westward expansion (including, if necessary, by inflicting a far more serious defeat than it has heretofore experienced in Ukraine) while presenting new opportunities for cooperation, investment, and growth in Russia’s east. Simply put, the goal should be to alleviate America’s simultaneity problem by giving Russia incentives to be less of a European power—and more of an Asian one.
COMPETITION WITH more than one hostile peer in peacetime is not something that the United States has much experience navigating. The ability to outproduce, outgun, and outdistance multiple enemies, courtesy of America’s size, resources, and geography, was the key to U.S. success against all of its twentieth-century major power opponents.
Freedom from two-front pressures reached its apogee after the Cold War, when the United States found itself in a strategic environment devoid of any peer competitor. This nimiety of power was reflected in the Pentagon’s maintenance, from the early 1990s onward, of the so-called “two-war standard”—under which it planned for wars against regional powers in the Middle East and Asia simultaneously. In such a setting, there was little need to contemplate significant tradeoffs between the country’s major objectives. Because America could be militarily strong in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East at the same time, there was no need for it to develop positional diplomacy to support shifts of concentration between these regions.
By contrast with these greenhouse conditions, the defining characteristic of the emerging international landscape is the array of constraints that it presents to the exercise of American power. The rise of China confronts the United States with arguably the most capable adversary it has faced in its history as a global power. Most projections show China having, by 2030, an economy that will be between 1.5 and 2 times the size of America’s and a population more than four times as large. By 2049, Beijing has the stated intention of possessing a military that outclasses America’s. By some estimates, it has already reached parity in important categories of military power.
China’s rise is accompanied by other unfavorable permutations in the international system. Chief among these is Russia’s persistence as a militarily capable and politically motivated opponent. Russia’s significance is often downplayed because of its relative demographic and economic weakness. But Russia remains a great power by virtue of its physical size, population, and possession of one of the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals. Russia’s leaders, more than those of any other large power, identify their country’s interests in terms that are antagonistic to the United States. Indeed, as a growing list of hostile Russian actions demonstrate, Moscow is already waging a kind of war on America.
From a U.S. strategic perspective, it is the confluence of threats from these two large powers that presents the organizing challenge for the United States. The proposition here is not that the two will necessarily form a durable military alliance—though that is certainly possible. Rather, it is that these two large Eurasian states function in ways that tend to amplify threats from the other.
This takes the form, first, of synchrony, or action by both powers that threatens U.S. vital interests in different regions simultaneously. As the recent build-up of Russian forces in Ukraine and Chinese ships off the Spratlys showed, the physical location of large adversaries at opposite ends of Eurasia would make it difficult for the United States to draw upon the same military capabilities for responding to both adversaries.
Secondly, there is the distraction effect, whereby the actions of one of these states, even if uncoordinated, generate opportunities for the other that otherwise might not have existed. A move by Russia in the Baltics would create a favorable opening for China to move against Taiwan. This translates into a de facto second-mover advantage that would be very tempting for Beijing to exploit. And vice versa. Put differently, the very presence of a risk-acceptant Russia could catalyze a more aggressive China than might otherwise have been the case.
IT WOULD be easiest if the United States could be able to handle the two-front challenge either entirely or primarily by military means by simply adopting a supersized version of the two-war standard that it maintained after the Cold War. If this were possible, we would not need to worry overly much about developing diplomatic options to handle simultaneity because there would be no power gaps to address. We could safely assume the continued ability to deter, and if necessary, defeat, both powers at the same time.
But that is not the case. Under plausible levels of defense spending, the Pentagon can reasonably plan to defeat one major opponent in a future conflict. That reality is a byproduct of both of America’s projected resources for defense, which are declining in real terms as a result of political priorities in the federal budget, and the capabilities being fielded by our two top adversaries. Indeed, even if the United States increased its defense budget, it would not be able to simply overcome this problem, given the growth in Chinese military spending in particular.
The changing fiscal and strategic realities led the Pentagon in 2018 to abandon the old two-war standard and to concentrate on China as the pacing threat. In practical terms, this means that, for the foreseeable future, the U.S. military will prioritize planning and resources for war in the western Pacific rather than Europe or the Middle East. This is not just a rhetorical shift; it means that the Pentagon will make fewer of the kinds of weapons used for land warfare or counterinsurgency and more of those used for aerospace and naval warfare, and less money and people for U.S. military commands in Europe and the Middle East to support United States Indo-Pacific Command. It also presumably means that, as Elbridge Colby has pointed out, even in the event that Russia moved first—say, against a Baltic state—the Pentagon would see a very powerful reason to reserve the bulk of its fighting strength for countering an opportunistic move by China in the western Pacific.
If America possesses a military that is geared for war with one but not the other of its two great-power rivals, then America will have to rely on something other than only or primarily the U.S. military to cover its liabilities in what, by default, becomes the secondary theater: Europe. In that theater, it can be reasonably assumed that the United States will continue to maintain forces, but that these will be less and less adequate for deterrence or defeating Russia in a regional conflict. The job of diplomacy is to help cover these liabilities by bringing about international political configurations that better align finite American military and economic power with the primary threat. It can do so in two basic ways, which are not mutually exclusive.
One is to build and operate effective coalitions of allies and partners in one or both regions for taking on more of the military burden vis-à-vis the two threats. Since the United States possesses extensive allies and partners in both regions, this becomes mainly about getting better value out of those relationships. Such an effort has been underway for several years and will inevitably continue. Successive administrations have sought to increase burden-sharing among allies and partners in both Europe and Asia. The tactics can be debated (Barack Obama used charm and shaming, Donald Trump used pressure, often to better effect; both pursued the same end) but recent experience suggests that, for the foreseeable future, allies may not take on the scale of defense burden that would be needed to significantly offset the U.S. military burden in their neighborhood vis-à-vis Russia and China.
THE OTHER way diplomacy can help manage the gap between military resources and threats is by rendering one of the major rivals less threatening—in particular, by sequencing. While unfamiliar terrain for the post-Cold War United States, using diplomacy to sequence threats has in fact been the preferred method of averting two-front wars for great powers throughout history. The strategy has taken many forms, but generally boils down to three options.
Option 1: “Flip” the weaker. Perhaps the most common form of sequencing is to align with the weaker of two rivals in order to concentrate resources on the stronger. This is the method that Edwardian Britain used when it recruited Tsarist Russia—against which it had waged a decades-long cold war in Central Asia no less intense than our own—into an alliance against Imperial Germany.
This option is the most familiar to Americans from what was, arguably, our only episode in big-league sequencing: President Richard M. Nixon’s China gambit. Whenever the China-Russia problem is raised, this strategy is invariably discussed, except with Russia now cast as the rival to be courted and “flipped” in order for the United States to concentrate on China. The appeal of this option is obvious: as the largest and most formidable of China’s landward neighbors, a friendly (to us)—or even unaligned Russia—would force China to divert attention from the coasts (and competition with the United States) to its land frontiers. Perhaps it is for this reason that successive administrations have attempted to ease tensions with Russia to support a shift of emphasis to the Indo-Pacific.
The problem with this approach is that Russia does not need it. When Henry Kissinger approached China, Beijing needed the opening as much or more than the United States because it feared attack by the USSR. Similarly, when the British brokered the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, Russia had just suffered a devastating defeat by Japan and needed relief from the resulting intense military, budgetary, and domestic pressures. It shared with Britain the common and very compelling threat of Imperial Germany. And the two had something tangible (Persia, Afghanistan, and Tibet) to barter over as a means of cementing the deal.
None of these conditions are present in U.S.-Russia relations today. Russia has not recently suffered a defeat or major setback; indeed, Vladimir Putin is riding high. Contrary to misconception, there is nothing tangible, at least as Russia would define it, over which the United States and Russia can constructively barter. Setting aside the moral considerations of say, a partition of Ukraine, any such understanding would lack enforceability and almost inevitably result in Moscow moving the geopolitical line of contact a few degrees of longitude to the west, to Poland or Romania. Were this to happen, the United States would likely find the pressure on the NDS’ intended secondary theater heightened rather than alleviated.
Option 2: Defer competition with the stronger. A second sequencing strategy is to delay rivalry with the stronger of two opponents in order to deal conclusively with the weaker. The mid-sixteenth-century Republic of Venice employed such a strategy to deflect the threat of the rising Ottoman Empire and deal conclusively with its mainland rival Milan. A similar logic guided Britain’s ill-fated quest in the 1930s to appease Germany in order to prioritize naval resources for the Far East and buy time for rearmament in Europe.
In today’s context, a deferment strategy would require America to palliate disputes with China and avoid outright military collisions with Beijing in order to concentrate pressure on Russia, with a view to eventually shifting attention to China at a later date. Taken to its logical extension, this strategy would require at least a partial reconsideration of the NDS’ hyper concentration on China. If pursued on the historical pattern, it could potentially even entail an effort to enlist a “responsible stakeholder” China, at least tactically and temporarily, in the effort to isolate what is the more truculent Russia.
The obvious problem with this option is that the window of opportunity it requires vis-à-vis China has probably already closed. The ideal time for such an approach would have been earlier in the previous decade, after Russia had already embarked upon its aggressive course but when China remained a nominally constructive player and the balance of power remained favorable to the United States. Since then, the U.S.-China dynamic has deteriorated in ways that make a prolonged period of tranquility in that relationship hard to imagine. Crucially, this is more and more because of the decision on Beijing’s part to relinquish a hide-and-bide posture and align closely with Moscow, and by its increasing material strength vis-à-vis the West. Against this backdrop, taking a softer U.S. line on, say, Taiwan, might encourage rather than deflect Chinese ambition while impairing Washington’s ability to recruit the regional coalitions upon which its long-term prospects in Asia ultimately rest. As the 1930s British example shows, the results of such a miscalculation could be catastrophic, potentially even hastening the advent of the two-front war that the strategy was intended to avoid.
Option 3: Co-opt both rivals. The third and most difficult, but perhaps most elegant, solution for the simultaneity problem has been to transcend it entirely—to negate its pressures by co-opting both rivals into cooperative structures that prevent or mitigate conflict. This was the method that the nineteenth-century Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich used to enmesh Austria’s flanking rivals, France and Russia, in a system of concert diplomacy that kept the peace in Europe for almost a century.
The modern equivalent of Metternich’s strategy would be for America to use international institutions to engage China and Russia in the pursuit of win-win outcomes on shared global problems. That is what the Biden administration appears to have had in mind in its efforts to find common ground with Beijing and Moscow on “transnational” problems like climate change.
Cooperation with geopolitical rivals can be beneficial when the resulting structures are built on stable power relationships and shared interests. But neither of these conditions are present in U.S. relations with China and Russia. Both powers maintain active revisionist claims, the fulfillment of which are, from their perspectives, a prerequisite to achieving their full potential as great powers. Both correctly see the underlying power relationships upon which current institutions rest as being in flux and, in China’s case, changing in their favor. For both, international institutions are a means by which to pursue power politics and constrain U.S. power. As such, U.S. efforts to jointly tackle, say, climate change, are attractive insofar as they entail self-damaging U.S. concessions with which China can feign compliance while waiting on the correlation of power to shift more decisively to Beijing’s advantage.
IN SUM, none of the classic sequencing strategies pursued by past great powers perfectly fits America’s circumstances today. Russia is too hostile to be “flipped,” China is too far along in its rise to be deferred, and both powers’ demands are too expansive and incompatible for either to be effectively co-opted.
The common denominator in all three cases is the extent to which U.S. relations with its rivals have hardened into patterns of confrontation and escalation. If anything, the emerging pattern in world affairs, with antagonistic and increasingly irreconcilable blocs, more closely resembles the lead-up to World War I rather than the flexible diplomacy and shifting coalitions of earlier centuries.
There is, however, one force that could change this pattern and spur a moment of creativity in international alignments: fear. Historically, fear of a rising power has been, far and away, the primary motivation for states to realign their priorities. Advocates of détente with Russia (option 1) are correct to see that that country is likely to be more subject to the effects of fear, due to its weaker power position. To date, Russia’s willingness to cooperate with rather than counterbalance China has coincided with Beijing’s pursuit of a “hide-and-bide” foreign policy. But as China converts its growing economic heft into greater military power and political influence, Russia’s fear of subordination to China will inevitably grow.
From an American strategic perspective, the big question is: when will that occur? Advocates of deferring competition with China (option 2) are right that that country has not yet realized its full military potential. This creates a window of opportunity for U.S. diplomacy to effect permutations that would place us in a more favorable position. At the same time, we cannot let up our military guard in the western Pacific during this period, as such an alleviation could tempt the Chinese to attempt a break-out now—by, say, trying to grab Taiwan—before the United States can realize the force upgrades envisioned under the NDS. Thus, America needs Russia’s fear of China to mature on a faster timeline than China’s aspirations for meeting key military capability targets vis-à-vis the United States can be realized.
That may, in fact, be what is now happening. The moment of truth for Russia on China is being accelerated by two factors. First, the COVID-19 pandemic, which has significantly widened the power disparity between the two Eurasian powers. Whereas China has seen historic growth over the past year, Russia has experienced a severe contraction, which is likely to prove sustained. The effects can be seen not least in Russian budgetary debates, where for the first time the momentum seems to be shifting to advocates of tapping Russian reserve funds to provide stimulatory spending on infrastructure, likely at the expense of defense.
The second factor is Western sanctions, one practical consequence of which has been to push Russia toward greater reliance on Chinese finance and markets. Nowhere is this more keenly felt than in the Russian Far East, Siberia, and Central Asia, where China’s bid to become the dominant investor in industries and infrastructure increasingly threatens Russian interests and sovereignty.
In both cases, the paradox is that it is Russia’s deepening dependence on China that will increase Russian fear and fuel its need for strategic alternatives. The dilemma facing the Kremlin will be whether to continue to abet China’s rise and risk becoming a sidecar to Beijing’s ambitions or to seek to counterbalance its power.
Within this paradox lies an opportunity for the United States. The goal of our diplomacy toward Russia—and the crux of our strategy for avoiding a two-front war—should be to sharpen Russia’s dilemma and ensure that, as its fear of China ripens, it has viable options for a foreign policy other than aggression toward the West. Such an approach would not operate on the premise that the United States can court or woo Russia into a conciliatory stance. To the contrary, its premise would be that to the extent that any reduction in tensions with Russia is still possible, it will be because Russia’s leaders decide on the basis of a cold-blooded read of their own interests that détente with the West meets Russia’s security needs better than their present, aggressive policies do.
Rather than asking “at what cost” would we achieve détente with Russia, such an approach would ask “under what conditions” can we imagine Russia choosing that path for itself and focus on defining and setting those conditions. The more Russia sees the path of westward expansion blocked and the more it sees practical alternatives to Chinese dominance in the east, the less it will be at odds with our fundamental interests and the more it will be at odds with China. In this sense, the late Zbigniew Brzezinski had it backwards: we shouldn’t want Russia to become more Western in its geopolitical vocation; we should want it to become more Eastern.
OF COURSE, it is not in America’s power to choose an eastern path for Russia. What is within our power is to shape the incentives for Russia to make this choice for itself. In practical terms, that would require the United States to form a coherent—but in effect bifurcated—Russia policy, with one plank focused on Russia-in-Europe and the other, largely distinct plank focused on Russia-in-Asia. The leitmotif of the Russia-in-Europe policy should be adamantine resistance to Russian expansion culminating in a decisive defeat for Russia’s present aims in Europe’s borderlands. If history is any indication, Russia only takes détente with an adversary seriously after it has been forced to do so by a defeat or serious setback. This was as much a precondition for Ronald Reagan’s success at Reykjavík after the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan as it was for the English statesmen who brokered the Anglo-Russian entente after Russia’s defeat at Port Arthur in 1905. Attempts to reach détente before Russia has suffered such a setback are not only likely to fail, they are also likely to be counterproductive insofar as they implicitly concede territory and validate the wager of Russia’s current leaders that renewed empire in the west is achievable by force of arms.
The equivalent of Port Arthur or Afghanistan today is Ukraine. The United States should wish to see Russia suffer a military rebuff of sufficient magnitude to prompt its leaders to reassess their assumptions about the permissiveness of the post-Soviet space as a preferred zone of strategic expansion. America can help bring about this outcome much as it did in Afghanistan: by providing locals the means to better resist Russia at higher volumes than it has done to date and encouraging European allies to do the same. And we should significantly raise the costs for cyber and other attacks on the United States, including via reciprocal attacks on Russian critical infrastructure and by sanctioning Putin’s inner circle and the secondary market for Russian bonds.
This pain, however, must have a goal beyond simply punishment; namely, to inflict a defeat for strategic effect, with the calculated aim of convincing Russia that its chosen path of westward expansion is closed. By contrast, U.S. policy toward Russia-in-Asia should be calibrated to encourage a redirection of Russia’s focus and energies in this direction. Such a policy would consist of economic, military, and political planks.
Economically, the United States should create incentives for its Asian allies and partners to prevent China from gaining an economic monopoly in the Russian Far East, Siberia, and Central Asia. The country best positioned to do so is Japan, which possesses the proximity, capital, and demonstrated desire to compete with China in these regions. Indeed, the Abe government’s Eurasian strategy aimed explicitly to prevent a Sino-Russian combination and devoted more than $30 billion toward the regions in question. Rather than stymieing these efforts as U.S. policy has tended to do, we should encourage them. A good starting point would be to create targeted exemptions from U.S. sanctions for Asian allies and partners whose firms are attracted to Russia’s east. Over time such an arrangement could evolve into a broader “three peninsulas” framework, modeled on the Three Seas Initiative in Central Europe and aimed at developing alternatives to the Belt and Road Initiative. The aim should be to introduce strategic competition in the form of investment from America’s Asia-Pacific allies and partners, and thereby deprive China of its current monopoly status. The military plank of the new U.S. policy would entail easing U.S. opposition to Russian arms sales to any country in the Indo-Pacific theater that seeks to acquire those weapons to resist Chinese expansion. There is no reason that the United States should wish to sanction companies or individuals in India—a strategically vital country that America is trying to court—when the weapons triggering the sanctions are aimed at the common foe of China. Sanctions waivers could include reasonable safeguards for U.S. weapons systems operating alongside one another in the same country—though, in many cases, it may actually be in the U.S. interest to see the states in question continue buying Russian weapons that are cheaper, easier to operate, and already familiar to local militaries, rather than opt for more advanced Western weaponry. Reducing U.S. obstacles to this outcome could prove useful, not only in removing a source of friction with these regional allies and partners but in introducing new points of friction between Russia and China.
The political plank of the policy would aim to assist in the alignment of Russia with other Asian states concerned about China’s rise. Regional allies like Japan and South Korea have long advocated for such an approach. Should conditions allow, it’s not unimaginable that the United States could even reprise its role from the early twentieth century in helping Russia and Japan resolve outstanding territorial disputes such as that over the Kuril Islands, progress on which was a major objective of the Abe government’s efforts to build a common Russo-Japanese front vis-à-vis China. These are efforts the United States, given the proximity of Alaska to the territories in question, should want to see succeed. The aim should be to create a barrier to China’s further development as a north Pacific/Arctic power—objectives which Moscow shares.
This is not an exhaustive list. There are other areas, such as arms control and the Arctic itself, where overlaps in U.S.-Russian interests may eventually be found, albeit on a more modest scale. The point is not to oversell the prospect for progress in any of these areas but rather to advocate for the United States to carve out a carefully defined set of issues specific to Asia where a greater Russian presence and focus would benefit the United States and then create incentives for that to happen even as we seek the defeat of Russia’s agenda in the West.
AN EASTWARD reorientation of Russia’s foreign policy is not as far-fetched as it might at first seem. Earlier great powers have used similar techniques to encourage competitors to refocus their energies away from collisions with their own. In the 1870s and 80s, Otto von Bismarck pushed Austria, following its defeat at Sadowa, away from its centuries-old focus on Germany toward a new vocation as a Balkan power. Great Britain successfully encouraged Russia to refocus its attention away from India’s northwestern frontier following the defeat in 1905, and achieved a similar feat in helping to reorient France’s attention away from Egypt following its rebuke at Fashoda.
A U.S. strategy along similar lines would not, of course, be risk-free. The current Russian leadership could simply pocket the benefits of Japanese investment in Vladivostok or arms sales to India and use these proceeds to fund aggression in the west. To work, the strategy would require the door to westward expansion to be slammed—hard. The worst of all worlds would be to open up opportunities for Russia in its east while going soft in the west. An effective pivot requires a fulcrum, and Ukraine is that fulcrum.
But the risks of the strategy have to be weighed against the risks of failure to “turn off” one of the two theaters requiring significant U.S. military attention in the event of a major crisis. The greatest of those risks would be a two-front war itself. Another is the risk that the threat of such a war could eventually tempt the United States into trying to appease or barter with Russia on its western frontier—a course that is fraught with moral hazard and could paradoxically complicate America’s ability to militarily prioritize the western Pacific. The strategy advocated here would not require the United States to defer a robust defense of its interests in Asia; Indeed, the strategy’s European component can be pursued using current U.S. force levels there—or eventually even less, as the Europeans step up more and more.
This strategy would, in any event, mark an improvement over the current U.S. approach, which seems to operate on the premise that the United States can continue running its foreign policy in ways that are fundamentally out of alignment with its military resources—or that America will be able to someday return to Cold War-era defense spending levels. It would work with the momentum and logic of current U.S. Russia policy and need not come at the expense of America’s emphasis on democracy and human rights in relations with that country. In fact, the focus on the development of “carrots” in the east could be made conditional on specific forms of Russian behavior in a number of fields, as circumstances warrant. But nor does the strategy’s success hinge on the assumption of regime change; to a greater extent than current policy, it would harness punitive measures like sanctions to a coherent goal (reorienting Russia eastward) that, critically, includes a positive component (the development of Russia’s neglected east). It also has the merit of working with, rather than against, the interests and desires of U.S. allies in Asia without coming at the expense of the interests of European allies or the independence and security of Europe’s frontline states.
A virtue of the proposed strategy is that it is active rather than passive. It would take the United States out of the position of waiting idly for opportunities to emerge to “drive wedges” between Russia and China. Instead, it would involve an active political program that harnesses the various instruments of U.S. national power (diplomacy, financial, military, alliances) toward a tangible goal.
But perhaps the greatest selling point for the strategy is that it would make the most of America’s window of opportunity to sequence the Russian and Chinese threats. That window is closing quickly. The deepening dependency of Russia on China bodes ill for the United States in a future conflict. We should use the time available to bring U.S. power to bear in the most efficacious ways possible to avert a two-front war.
A. Wess Mitchell is a former Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and is now a principal and co-founder at The Marathon Initiative, a think-tank dedicated to the study of great power competition. This essay draws upon elements of a report that he prepared for the Pentagon Office of Net Assessment in fall 2020.