In an insightful Foreign Policy article of 1 May, Anatol Lieven, director of the Eurasia program at the Washington-DC-based Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, makes an exceptional stance that the United States is overhyping the contest for global supremacy with Russia and China.
Both Russia and China do not have the capacities (or demontrable intentions) to rival America's global hegemony. Witness America's extensive global military presence, with 4,790 U.S. military sites worldwide, including 375,000 military personnel in 66 defense locations in the Indo-Pacific. Reminiscent of Michael Beckley's Unrivalled: Why America Will Remain the World's Sole Superpower (2018), Lieven believes that America's primacy remains unseated.
Howecver, Lieven recants a fundamental rule of geopolitics and of war: that all real power is in the end local and relative. Witness, for example, America's disastrously futile wars over Iraq and Afghanistan. To a much greater extent, Russia and China are far more able to guard their core strategic interests jealously, undeterred by maximum U.S. coercion, risking a full-blown war.
Lieven argues that the United States with NATO is logistically unlikely to be able to entirely drive back Russia from Ukraine, a core Russian strategic interest. Hence the responsible strategy forward is to seek a sustainable peace over Ukraine by restraininbg NATO's eastward expansion.
Nor, according to Lieven, should the United States provoke a war with China over Taiwan:
"Taiwan should not be surrendered, but China should be repeatedly and publicly assured of U.S. adherence to the “One China” policy. Every provocative U.S. statement or action that calls this into question should be strenuously avoided.
Chinese sovereignty over the South China Sea should not be recognized, but it should also not be challenged—just as the United States does not recognize but also does not challenge Indian sovereignty over most of Kashmir, for example. Washington could also demonstrate goodwill and a desire for a reasonable compromise over the dispute over these islands between China and the Philippines by proposing solutions such as joint Sino-Filipino sovereignty."
It is to be seen how much of Lieven's take would be bought by the White House with America's powerful geostrategic elites. The U.S.bipartisan default position remains maximum pushback against both Russia and China on all fronts, save for some guardrails, regardless of the boiling Gaza War calling America's global leadership into question.
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