The New Cold War: China and Russia’s Blame Game

 



The New Cold War: China and Russia’s Blame Game

Since the end of the cold war, China and Russia have increasingly positioned themselves as the primary competitors with the United States for global influence in the modern world. Recently, tensions between the United States and China have escalated. This growing friction with China is centered around the subject of Taiwan, and this conflict serves as a means for China and Russia to align themselves in portraying themselves as global peacekeepers and the United States as an international bully.

China still views Taiwan as an island under the sovereignty of China, or the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), despite Taiwan being a functioning independent nation. The United States is a significant supporter of Taiwan, providing large amounts of military aid and support to bolster Taiwan’s position as an independent nation. Washington has been providing billions of dollars in aid to the island nation in the form of arms and military training in order to help deter Beijing from future aggression.

Recently, the CCP has deployed an unprecedented number of military aircraft into Taiwan’s airspace. This deployment of aircraft can be seen as both a provocation and an attempt to intimidate Taiwan and the United States. With China attempting to bolster its military presence surrounding Taiwan in combination with the CCP’s stance regarding its right to control the island nation, tensions have been heating up.

However, in a potentially shrewd diplomatic move, the CCP has been refusing to publicly call China’s relationship with the U.S. “competitive.” China has publicly articulated this point of view, in contrast to a U.S. diplomat Jake Sullivan publically describing this relationship by highlighting “the importance of maintaining open lines of communication to responsibly manage the competition.” Go here to learn more about the CCP and its strategy to misrepresent the U.S. publicly.

The CCP won’t admit publicly that the relationship between China and the U.S. is competitive. One of the CCP’s strategies has been to employ rhetoric that portrays China as the maintainer of international order and world peace and to portray the U.S. as the primary international aggressor. In other words, the CCP is attempting to lay claim to the moral high ground. The Russian government has been using a similar strategy. 

Russia has publicly stated that the U.S. is attempting to create a new Cold War. This is not a coincidence, given that China and Russia are the world’s two leading autocratic regimes. Both the CCP and Russia have rejected U.S.-led sanctions efforts against human-rights abusing authoritarian regimes, saying the U.S. only uses the “pretext of human rights” as international “bullying practices.” The world is currently engaged in a contest between democracies and autocratic regimes, as the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies suggests. It is not surprising that China and Russia are allied in an effort to portray the U.S. as the world’s enemy, given they are the world’s leading authoritarian regimes and share much in common. Among other things, the battle of the rhetoric surrounding the conflict over Taiwan serves as another way for China and Russia to attempt to align themselves against the United States.

Popular posts from this blog

NATO’s Final Frontier – Space?

Image
It appears that The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has agreed, at least in spirit, that space is a military ‘operational domain’ and decisions in the future should be made accordingly. This is a sharp contrast to the thinking decades ago, where European Space Agency’s (ESA) 22-members had stated that space ‘must’ remain non-militarized, even as the U.S. and Russians continued to covertly plan for the future wars in space, or use of space assets for dual purpose – instruments of experimentation and weapons of war. What changed? After all, the Russians and Americans both participated along with Europe, Japan and other nations in the ISS (International Space Station). Most all developed and even some less-than-developed nations have communication satellites. China has a robust space program, India too. After the cold-war with Russia we learned of secret and not so secret U.S. and Russian space weapons projects. Since then both China and India have downed their own satellites
Read more

Russia Continues Making Inroads into the Middle East: Saudi Arabia

Image
Recent events have tilted the Middle East in favor of growing Russian hegemony. As Putin continues to employ his power-grab strategies, he is successfully making inroads for Russian influence in the Middle East and Arab world. This emerging trend has been given space for growth as a result of a different world power shifting its influence away from the region. The U.S is withdrawing its physical presence from Syria and other areas in the Middle East, and as a consequence a power vacuum has emerged. Instead of many Middle Eastern countries or groups of people having greater influence over their own political futures as previous critics of U.S. foriegn policy might hope for, U.S. withdrawal is producing the opposite. Most of these smaller countries lack the capability to stand up to the influence of more powerful world and regional players who have an interest in the region. Between Iran, Russia, and Turkey, influence in the Arab world previously exerted by the U.S. is being more
Read more

Russian Cyber Security Threats Far From Over

Image
Every American Citizen, every large corporation, and every government agency down to the local level has in some way been affected by cyber hacking. Today, we are aware of the threat personally and we go out of our way to protect our personal information. Still, that doesn’t mean someone we do business with that has our personal data won’t fall victim to a cyber hack or attack. Regardless of what you believe the cyber hacking risks are, it is a present danger. It’s a reality. We’ve all heard by the media that Russia hacked our last presidential election , and while there is a lot of dispute about what actually happened in the Democratic National Committee hack, the incident does show the vulnerability to our most sacred trust – our free and fair elections. We don’t need to enumerate the endless times our personal financial data or at least our personal information has gotten into the hands of cybercriminals – we all remember the big Target Stores hack and the Experian Credit Agency
Read more