Coronavirus: China, Russia make a play for a new order

Beijing and Moscow are taking advantage of the chaos arising from the COVID-19 pandemic to reposition themselves.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin are working to deepen their countries’ influence on traditional Western allies. Picture: AFP.

Academic publishing timelines being what they are, I finished The Dragons and the Snakes — the book about how adversaries have evolved since the Cold War — a year ago, well before the coronavirus crisis. Yet that crisis, along with the oil shock triggered by Moscow’s sudden exit from its OPEC-Plus deal with Saudi Arabia and the resulting collapse in global oil prices, reinforces several of the book’s arguments.

It shows how dangerously dependent on communist China our manufacturing base and supply chains have become, and how overly reliant Western nations are on Russian oil and gas. It illustrates how our narrow definition of warfare (which does not consider strategic supply-chain man­ipulation, health-system destabil­isation or the “oil weapon” as acts of war) contrasts with the understanding in Beijing and Moscow, where strategists include these actions and others in a much broader conception of conflict.

And the chaotic pandemic response highlights how the international community — once relatively unified under the leadership of Western democracies, co-operating through institutions such as the UN and the EU — has fractured. Lockdowns, travel bans and border closures have thrown globalisation into reverse. And as I pointed out in part one of the themes in my book last month, the collapse of confidence in experts and institutions, as with the loss of trust in Washington by many formerly staunch US allies, has much to do with the failure of US-led military interventions during the past two decades.

For all its tactical brilliance, the hyper-conventional, hi-tech, high-cost precision warfare practised by the US and its allies (including Australia) has utterly failed to deliver strategic success in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria or the broader war on terrorism. Unsurprisingly, voters have tired of “experts” telling them how lucky they are to have such an exquisite military force, supposedly the best in history, when they can see for themselves how badly that force has failed to resolve a string of inconclusive, exhausting wars since 9/11, and how irrelevant it is to present challenges. Experts of all stripes — and the elites and institutions they represent — are thus experiencing a well-deserved credibility gap, one that the current crisis lays bare.

During the past two decades our tunnel vision on terrorism, as we struggled to extricate ourselves from a Middle Eastern morass of our own making, allowed adversaries to adapt around us, sidestepping our advanced military capabilities. Russia, China, North Korea and Iran evolved ways of operating outside the bounds of conventional war, doing just enough, and operating ambiguously enough, to achieve their ­objectives without triggering a Western military response. Simultaneously the explosion of internet and mobile phone connec­tivity, and the emergence of advanced consumer electronics such as GPS, smartphones, drones and 3D printers, gave non-state groups (terrorists, criminals or guerrillas) levels of lethality, precision and transnational reach that once were open only to nation states.

In the book I outline three possible responses to this loss of Western military primacy and our resulting civilisational crisis of confidence. The first is to do more of the same, continue our present course, but spend more and do it harder. This is a fair description of the US reaction to the pandemic: throwing money at the problem (the biggest bailout in US history at $US2.2 trillion, or $3.6 trillion, larger than Australia’s economy, was approved last week) while militarising the response (Donald Trump now describes himself as a “wartime president”).

This is a bipartisan reflex: both Democratic presidential candidates, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, also have called for mobilising the military without explaining how, exactly, the armed forces can help.

It’s worth noting that for all its enormous cost — this year’s US defence budget is $US738bn — the American military is ill-suited for this kind of crisis, while the US Strategic National Stockpile includes only 1 per cent of the masks and other equipment needed for the sustained pandemic that increasingly looks inevitable. More broadly, if your adversary has already figured out how to render your conventional military ­irrelevant, it’s not clear how more of the same can help.

A second response, then, is to accept the inevitability of decline, to “embrace the suck” in military slang, make the best of a bad situation and seek a soft landing. Barack Obama and Trump, using starkly different language, pursued versions of the same approach — though each man undoubtedly would recoil at the comparison. Obama’s rhetoric of “leading from behind”, the Pacific pivot, and ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan collided with reality in the form of the Arab Spring, the failed Libyan intervention and the rise of Islamic State. Trump’s “America First” rhetoric is very different but his policies — relying on allies to prosecute wars against terrorists, the Syria withdrawal, the attempted Afghan peace deal and the insistence that NATO do more — amount to the same strategy.

US President Donald Trump, like predecessor Barack Obama, is trying to make the best of a bad situation and seek a soft landing. Picture: AFP.

Both presidents have sought to disengage from wars of occupation, adopt a light-footprint posture abroad, demand more of allies and refocus at home. So far Trump seems as unsuccessful as Obama, suggesting that the structure of the international system (created by the US and its Cold War allies in their own image) drives US behaviour more than the personality of any given president. For the same reason, a strategy of “embracing the suck” seems unlikely to work.

Moving away from the US-dominated system implies transition to a successor: another great power, a set of international institutions or a concert of powers. For this to work, any successor would have to be willing to assume the burden of global stability, capable of doing so, and friendly enough to be acceptable to the US as the current superpower. To put it bluntly, no such successor exists: China is not interested in assuming the US global role, Russia lacks the capacity to do so, neither is friendly enough that Washington would agree, and international institutions are too weak.

This leaves a third option: playing for time, attempting to sustain the global system until an acceptable successor can emerge. In the book I call this the “Byzantine option” in reference to Byzantium, which managed to survive for more than a millennium after the fall of Rome. The Byzantines selectively copied their adversaries, optimised for longevity, got out of the business of occupying and attempting to govern entire remote provinces as the Romans had done, mastered certain advanced niche technologies (notably, the fearsome defensive weapon known as Greek fire) and focused on robust governance and societal resilience at home. They hung on until the middle of the 15th century, bridging classical antiquity and the Renaissance.

For the US this might translate into domestic political reconciliation, genuine partnerships with self-reliant allies, the use of relatively small, agile military forces in short-notice crises while avoiding large-scale wars of occupation, and continued dominance of certain cyber, space and nuclear technologies. More important, broadening the concept of conflict to include the kinds of “non-military war operations” (as Chinese strategists call them) discussed earlier would enable the US to compete in areas where its adversaries have had a free run to date.

For Australia, the challenge is one of maintaining both regional stability and our capacity to support a global order of liberal, democratic values, fair trade and free enterprise that furthers our interests, even as the Western-dominated world we have known slips away. The solution is not primarily military.

After the pandemic, in the wake of bushfires, floods and drought, in anticipation of a deep recession, our focus almost certainly should be on societal resilience, home affairs, and economic and social recovery. Issues such as critical infrastructure protection, public health capacity, domestic manufacturing and supply-chain assurance, cyber defence, state emergency services and border security will require more attention.

Domestic policing and intelligence agencies will be even more important, as will robust legal and political restraints to assure civil liberties and freedoms of speech and assembly in the face of a government with vastly expanded post-pandemic powers.

In the traditional military sphere, missile defence and information warfare, space capabilities (given how heavily Australia relies on space-based communications), protection of natural resources, and rapid responses to support Australian society during natural or man-made disasters will be core capabilities. Australia’s contributions to international and regional efforts — through special operations forces, amphibious expeditionary operations, a navy capable of global power projection to protect our shipping routes and ­sources of trade and supply, and air forces able to secure our airspace and hold their own as part of an allied effort — will remain important, but in this area Australia is already reasonably well off. It is in the portfolios of home affairs, domestic resilience and economic recovery that the greatest efforts will be needed.

Though I think the “Byzantine option” is probably our best bet, this too may not work. Indeed, we seem to be on the cusp of a radical reordering of the global system as we have known it.

In the past three weeks, as COVID-19 death tolls in Spain and Italy exceeded those in China, Beijing has exploited the crisis to extend its influence, touting the alleged superiority of its authoritarian system over more open and liberal Western approaches. Chinese advisers are working with Italian officials to suppress the virus, and shipments of masks, ventilators and therapeutic supplies are making their way (for a price) from China to several European nations.

Beijing has offered assistance to Pacific and Asian nations as it recovers from the initial wave of the virus, while Western countries lock down and turn inward. As the full impact of the virus strikes across Africa, spreads in Pakistan and reaches Latin America, we can expect China to deepen its influence in these areas even as Europe, Australasia and the Amer­icas find themselves swamped.

Russia, meanwhile, has sent a military medical team to northern Italy, the first such deployment to a NATO member in living memory and a sign that China is not the only player keen to exploit the crisis to improve its position in competition with the West.

The world that emerges from this year’s turmoil will therefore almost certainly look very different from anything that has come before. But we still will face a formidable mix of domestic and international challenges. Warfare increasingly will take place in a crowded, cluttered, highly connected, overwhelmingly urban and coastal environment.

And whatever our response may be, resilience and the preservation of democratic freedoms at home will be paramount as we confront state and non-state adversaries (former CIA director Jim Woolsey’s dragons and snakes) at the same time, and in many of the same places.

This is the final of a two-part series exploring key ideas in David Kilcullen’s new book, The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West (Scribe).