WHEN COMPARING CHINA TO RUSSIA: CHINA WINS HANDS DOWN

…Shanghai’s Pudong Int’l Airport;  One of the most modern in the world

 

By some measures, China has the world’s largest economy.

 

The new president-elect has made it clear that he wants to have an accommodating attitude toward Russia and Putin while being strongly against China.

 

That is very interesting, because China is, for the most part, very comfortable with the US-led international system, while Russia is against it and would like to stop it

 

What is even more interesting is that President Obama was wrong when he mocked Mitt Romney in the 2012 who had said that Russia was the “United States’ No. 1 geopolitical foe.”  Even though Romney was proven correct, the president was correct that Russia truly is a “regional power in economic decline.”

 

Since 2012, Russia as an economic power has continued to go downhill.  All Russia has on the positive side are large levels of oil reserves and weapons manufacturing.  But as to their economy, their state spending has risen from 35% of gross domestic product (GDP) to a staggering 70%. The Russian ruble has basically collapsed and the country’s debt is now rated as “junk” by Moody’s.

 

But being a former head of the KGB, (Russia’s CIA), Putin is making the best use of what strengths Russia has despite its economic decline.  It does have a formidable military and its intelligence services are top notch.  It also uses its veto in the UN Security Council ambitiously and sometimes devastatingly.  It has found a new way to leverage its strength in cyberwarfare.

 

The US-CIA has been gaining a fuller picture of Russia’s use of its power, which began years ago with its operations in Russia, and then in Georgia, Ukraine, Poland, Germany and other European countries.  But lately, it has shown itself in the United States during this last presidential campaign

 

In each case, Moscow has directed a complete strategy, including its hacking, trolling, fake news and counterintelligence aimed at discrediting targeted politicians in all of these countries, now including the US. They have interfered with election campaigns and have tilted many elections. These efforts are sometimes used in conjunction with their more traditional military force, as in Ukraine and Georgia.  But when you observe Russia’s operations over the past three years, NATO’s former supreme commander, Gen. Philip Breedlove, noted this summer that Moscow’s growing offensive efforts “are of a breadth and complexity that the European continent has not seen since the end of World War II.”

 

On the other hand, the power that the new president-elect has targeted, China, is instead a true economic superpower. While their growth has slowed substantially, it is already, by some measures, the world’s largest economy.  In 1990, China’s military was less than 2% of their global GDP;.  But today, it is about 15% (almost 10 times Russia’s share). It spends $215 billion on its military, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, about three times Russia’s defense budget. And its foreign reserves total more than $3 trillion, about eight times Russia’s.

 

In a tweet this month, Donald Trump said that he accepted a call from Taiwan’s president because the country buys billions of dollars of goods from the United States. If that’s the measurement, please note that last year mainland China bought $162 billion of goods and services from the United States, that’s about four times as much as Taiwan.

 

The difference between Russia and China is black versus white. 

 

China has asserted it’s strength in a typical Asian approach.  They have been comfortable with the world in which they have grown rich, and they are wary of overturning the system into which they are entering.  While Trump is accusing China of devaluing its currency, for the last year Beijing has been trying to do just the opposite. It has been spending tens of billions of dollars to prop up the yuan (their Dollar) so that it is seen as a stable and viable international value.

 

Whether on climate change or peacekeeping, China has been willing to play a more constructive role in recent years than ever before. It also has far greater capacity to engage in hacking attacks using cyber operations than does Russia. And it makes extensive use of these tactics in military and economic espionage. But it has not, so far, been seen to engaged in anything such as destabilizing a nation’s politics as Russia’s efforts for undermining the Western democratic order.

 

But one must look at what has occurred in each of these countries over the past decades.

 

China’s view of the world over the past two decades has been fundamentally approachable, having grown to major wealth and power over that period. But Putin, on the other hand, he believes that the end of Soviet communism in 1989 was the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century” and that Russia has been humiliated ever since.

 

Putin’s goal appears to be to overturn the US-created international order, even if this means total international chaos.

 

But today’s question is, “Why would an American president-elect want to help Moscow achieve that goal?”

 

Good question.

Copyright G.Ater  2016