Written by N.S. Lyons |
Monday, November 27, 2023
What we call Wokeism was predated by its previous iteration “political correctness” in the 1990s and political correctness itself was predated a generation before by the New Left. The New Left was composed of both an identitarian vein and an environmental vein and the two veins have been operating symbiotically since. (Think of hippies reading Silent Spring on their way to Montgomery.) I used to think of Woke as primarily identitarian, but the correlation of beliefs between identitarians and environmentalists seems so high that the movements for some reason appear to see themselves as compatible and symbiotic.

Note: A while ago reader Charles Pincourt contacted me with some thoughts on the nature of the “Woke” revolution and its challenge to liberalism and civilization. I found that we disagreed in ways that made for an interesting discussion, so we decided to turn the conversation into a mini-debate series of short essays for you all, below. Charles views Woke – through the lens of Friedrich Hayek – as a radically collectivist threat to classical liberalism, while I suggest Woke is instead better viewed as radically individualist, and a product of liberalism itself. This is an important distinction, because it will necessarily shape how we ought to best respond to the challenge.

Charles Pincourt: Woke Is a Collectivist Ideology
In the Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek describes the illiberal nature of totalitarian regimes using the Soviet Union and the Third Reich as iconic examples. When the book was written in the mid-1940s these regimes were (and continue to this day to be) considered antithetical to one another on account of where they fell on the political spectrum. Hayek, however, explains that the regimes were much more alike than they were different. What they had in common, and what characterized them more profoundly, was that they were collectivist regimes. The common and most defining feature of collectivist systems according to Hayek is the “deliberate organization of the labors of society for a definite social goal.” What distinguishes different collectivist regimes is the “nature of the goal to which they want to direct the efforts of society.” That collectivist systems seek to organize the “labors of society” towards a singular goal leads them to an “all-overriding desire to give the group the maximum of power to achieve these ends.” This implies a moral or ethical system that places the one goal above all other competing, and thereby subordinate, goals. As a result, the “ends justify the means” “becomes necessarily the supreme rule” to reach the societal goal.
As a result, Communism and National Socialism were not antithetical to each other. They were, rather, the same system albeit with different “definite goals.” The true antithesis to both these systems, and to collectivist systems more broadly for Hayek, is liberalism. To Hayek, liberalism is defined by an inclination towards the individual – and indeed all individuals – relative to the collective, and the many freedoms and negative rights this implies. These rights and freedoms (rights and freedoms that we expect and are accustomed to in the Anglosphere) include: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of movement, and freedom from arbitrary imprisonment. The latter is particularly important since it harkens to another critical characteristic of liberalism: the rule of law. Hayek explains that, while often misunderstood and misconstrued, the rule of law is simply the principle that the law applies to all individuals equally, that all individuals are equal before the law, and, as importantly, that laws also apply to the state. It is typically easier to understand the liberal rule of law not through its definition, but through its ideal manifestation. Under the rule of law, individuals know how the state will act in any circumstance, and that the state will act in the same way towards all individuals. If an individual breaks a law, they know what the consequences will be. As important, the individual knows what the state will not do, e.g. arbitrarily violate their fundamental freedoms.
It would be easy to think that this all sound like ancient history, no longer relevant almost 80 years after the fall of the Third Reich and 30 years after the fall of the Soviet Union. Thinking this way is wrong and could be catastrophic. We are now living in a time where a contemporary collectivist movement has obtained control of almost all elite institutions, including the executive branch, the Senate, the legacy media, our universities, and the most influential corporate boardrooms. That collectivist movement is known by the name, of course, of “Woke.”
Unlike the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, Woke currently has two “definite goals:” Identitarianism and radical Environmentalism. Identitarianism seeks to retributively redistribute resources from so-called oppressor to so-called oppressed identities. Environmentalism, meanwhile, seeks to eliminate the so-called environmental impact that humans have on the natural world irrespective of the impact on humans themselves.
These two definite goals are both necessarily collectivist. The Identitarian collectivist strain relies on categories into which individuals are placed and which are ranked along an oppressor-oppressed continuum. The categories are used to justify whether resources or opportunities should be provided to, or denied, members of the different categories. Environmental collectivism starts from an assumption that individuals will not, on their own, behave to sufficiently reduce or eliminate their production of various environmental pollutants or effects, such as greenhouse gas emissions. That people will not on their own behave appropriately justifies increasingly invasive and restrictive collective coercion.
While on the face of it the definite goals seem very different, the two collectivist movements have found common cause in their desire to accumulate power to organize “the labors of society for a [their] definite social goal.” Increasingly this is done through the subordination of individual freedoms. This is seen in the contemporary Anglosphere informally, and more ominously and increasingly, formally, through legislation or the administrative state.
Informally, the subordination of individual freedoms such as those of speech and conscience is observed daily around the Anglosphere. People are publicly shamed, “canceled,” lose their livelihoods, etc. for expressing views contrary to the diktats of Woke collectivism. Moreover, Woke collectivists find evidence for insufficient progress towards ever-more fine-grained indicators of their definite goals. The response to this is to find more and more ways to subordinate personal freedoms and the rule of law to achieve these goals. Identitarians advocate, enshrine, implement, and legislate different forms of affirmative action whose goal is to ensure that people are treated unequally according to their group identities. Radical environmentalists, on the other hand, try everything from banning plastic bags, to replacing automobile with bicycle lanes, to setting automobile emissions standards that are only achievable by electric vehicles.
As noted by Hayek, the most notorious past examples of collectivist regimes (Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union) were characterized by singular definite goals: Nazi Germany with German “racial” supremacy and the USSR with communism. The current Woke collectivist movement on the other hand is characterized by the competing Identitarian and Environmentalist streams. Given the collectivist orientations of both these movements, one wonders whether their coalition can be maintained. Should Woke collectivism continue to gain more control over the levers of power in the West then, given the different definite goals of these two movements, won’t there eventually and necessarily be a conflict between them? The answer seems obviously to be yes, therefore begging the question: “which would win?”
While both streams of Woke collectivism are fanatical, they don’t appear to be equally so. For example, while questioning the narrative of apocalyptic human-induced climate change may result in a Twitter storm and the loss of current or future research funding, there are no cases of tenured professors being fired for such Environmental Woke-heretical views. The same is not true for those challenging Identitarian doctrines – indeed most cases of tenured professors or other high-profile cases of being fired seem to be due to Identitarian transgressions.
Similarly, both streams of Woke collectivism are able to co-opt almost any domain, although not to the same extent. Environmental collectivism does this to almost any area of enquiry through the adoption of the word “sustainable”: from sustainable investing to sustainable architecture. Likewise, Identitarian collectivism is able to subordinate any discipline with the word “justice” such as corporate justice or educational justice. Importantly, however, while Identitarian collectivism has been able to subordinate Environmental collectivism through the term “environmental justice,” the opposite is not true – there is no racial environmentalism.
Both of these examples point to a more effective, extreme, and ruthless militancy that Identitarian collectivism appears able and willing to impose upon unbelievers. As a result, if I had to make a bet, I would put my money on Identitarian collectivism as the winner in a face-off with Environmental collectivism. That collectivist movements seem to coalesce around one definite goal, suggests that an impending clash may soon be at hand.
Personally, I am against collectivism in any form, be it Identitarian, Environmental, or Cuddly Stuffed Animal collectivism. At the same time, the most threatening collectivist strain currently appears to be Identitarian collectivism. Given the power that the Woke collectivist coalition now has, it needs to be fought and overcome if we are to keep our society free. If we are unable to, we may very well end up living under an Identitarian collectivist regime – only this time it will not be called National Socialism.
N.S. Lyons: Woke Is Individualist
Charles, I find your classification of racial idenitarianism and radical environmentalism as the two competing “pillars” of “Woke” to be particularly interesting, and want to hone in on that. This is because I think this classification misidentifies the true competing forces among the Woke, and in doing so accidentally elides its true origin and character, and therefore the broader nature of the challenge to our societies. Obviously this diagnosis is important to get right because the answer will structure how we should respond.
To me, the existing internal divide among the Woke doesn’t appear to be between identitarian racialism and environmentalism (the latter of which notably long predates Wokeism and seems to have simply agglomerated itself to Woke via common association among the people involved in Progressive political movements). Instead the obvious divide seems to clearly be between the two big camps of Race and Trans.
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Written by N.S. Lyons |
Tuesday, May 17, 2022
When that next global economic crisis arrives, the future direction of world order is likely to ultimately come down to which of the major power-blocs comes out the other side better off. And that will depend on which has the greater resilience, internal coherence, and governance capacity to persevere through a major systemic shock and emerge in a position to lead.

Act I: Catastrophe
The art of war is of vital importance to the State. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.—The first two lines of Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War”
The Dream
What did Vladimir Putin tell Xi Jinping when they met in the cold, blustery first days of February in Beijing? In a ceremony afterwards the two leaders signed a joint-statement condemning the geopolitical audacity of the United States and NATO while declaring the China-Russia relationship to have “no limits.” This was also at this moment when, at least according to American intelligence, Putin promised Xi he would refrain from military action against Ukraine until the end of the 2022 Beijing Olympic Games, which were then about to commence. Whether this is true or not it is impossible to say, though Russia’s tanks did roll across the border into Ukraine just four days after the games concluded. But in either case the question remains: on the eve of war, what did Putin say was actually about to go down?
We will never know the words they exchanged, but it nonetheless seems possible to point what the two leaders probably thought was about to happen. That’s because neither of the two men has ever been particularly shy about saying what they want. And, beyond all of Putin’s personal fixations with pushing back NATO, and “regathering the Russian lands,” and reuniting the wayward Slavs of Ukraine with the motherland, and generally going down in history as the second coming of Peter the Great, these two leaders have been very transparent about long sharing an even broader dream for their countries.
That dream was described explicitly in their February joint statement, much the same as it has been in many similar previous documents: to “advance multipolarity and promote the democratization of international relations”; to put a stop to “Certain states’ attempts to impose their own ‘democratic standards’ on other countries” through “bullying, unilateral sanctions, and extraterritorial application of [domestic law]”; and ultimately to see a “transformation of the global governance architecture and world order.” In other words: to finally free themselves from the hegemonic post-Cold War global dominance of the United States and the “liberal international order” that it has led since 1945.
But February 2022 came at a unique time because it was the moment, as the document put it, at which “a trend has emerged towards redistribution of power in the world.” This was a moment in which, as Xi has described it, “the East is rising, the West declining.” The United States and its dominion appeared be on its last legs.
And it’s not hard to understand why they might have looked at the West and seen it as collectively decadent, weak, and—let’s be honest—often completely deranged. The Western core of the liberal international order was manifestly divided (internally within Europe, between Europe and America, and within Western societies), lazily comfortable with its dependence on Russian energy imports and Chinese export markets, and largely steadfast in its refusal to pay for its own defense amid what Emmanuel Macron had once labeled “the brain death of NATO.” It was easy to assume, in other words, that the West no longer had the will or capacity to fight—a hypothesis that seemed to have been recently put to the test and confirmed in Afghanistan.
The liberal international order therefore appeared to remain propped up only by, as Putin soon put it, an “empire of lies.” The reality of this only had to be demonstrated with a firm push, and the whole façade was liable to come tumbling down, exposing the rotten pillars beneath and perhaps even causing the whole edifice of the liberal international order to collapse. And, if so, then perhaps this was the moment Putin had long prepared for: a chance to break the back of this stifling Western order in one bold stroke.
And what better place to strike than Ukraine? It was, at least as far as Putin could tell, yet another of Washington’s corrupt client regimes, a fake nation with a fake American-trained military that would, like the fake Afghan National Army, immediately throw down its weapons and melt away as soon as Washington’s diplomats had fled the country—alongside their puppet comedian-president, who would speed across the border in a helicopter stuffed full of cash, just like the last guy. After which Russian forces would be welcomed, if not as liberators then at least with general resignation. With Ukraine’s major cities having quickly surrendered once the Spetznaz simply drove in and raised the Russian flag over city hall, with Kiev probably holding out about as long as did Kabul, Putin’s takeover would rapidly become a fait accompli. Their empty rhetoric about deterrence having failed, NATO would have no option but to stand by helplessly. Western unity on any symbolic sanctions would soon fracture as gas importing European states like Germany accepted the inevitable and sought to move on from an embarrassing debacle. The foreign exchange reserves Russia had carefully stockpiled would be enough to tide it over until the West finished wailing and moved on from anger to bargaining. All of the money Putin had wisely poured into guns instead of blini would pay off as Russia’s beefed-up military might was brilliantly leveraged into a strategic triumph over the rich but gutless West.
Perhaps this is what Putin informed Xi was about to happen—that a quick “special military operation” would be able capitalize on a golden opportunity to achieve their shared dream with little to no risk. This seems to be what Putin and his generals themselves expected, at least. We know this because the columns of Russian trucks that first poured into Ukraine were later found often filled not with fuel, ammunition, or food, but with anti-riot police gear. And many of the troops riding in those vehicles were not regular soldiers, but Russian National Guardsmen, trained and equipped for crowd control duties, not combat. Nor were the approximately 150,000 troops deployed for the operation actually anywhere close to sufficient for taking and holding huge tracts of land in Europe’s largest country in the first place. Nor were the logistics for a sustained campaign ever put in place; commanders of the operation seemingly were not even informed of what they would be doing. Nor were they provided with sufficient air support. Nor was critical Ukrainian military infrastructure destroyed in preemptive strikes. Instead the Russians just drove straight in like they already owned the place.
Ruin
Events did not go as planned. In fact, the whole plan collapsed within 48 hours, after a helicopter-borne assault by Russian paratroopers meant to capture the critical airports near Kiev were annihilated by ferocious Ukrainian counterattack. Everything immediately went downhill from there. Unable to simply fly into the capital, Russian forces had to try to travel overland from Belarus. In their great tactical brilliance, they had blown up a regional dam and turned half their approach into even marshier land than it was already. They quickly got literally stuck in the mud; years of corruption and disorganization had rotted out their tires, along with their supplies. Their secure communications systems turned out not to work without 4G access, which they had also blown up. They piled up into miles-long convoys that went nowhere, while their soldiers shivered and starved and occasionally deserted.
And of course, rather than surrendering on the spot like they were supposed to, the Ukrainians fought back. Somewhere along the line they’d become real nationalists, willing to fight and die to defend their not-so-fake land, people, and national independence. Their president didn’t flee (though the American diplomats of course did). They were armed with advanced Western anti-tank weapons, and stealthy Turkish drones, and fed a steady diet of NATO geospatial intelligence. And they had the support of the population behind enemy lines, who helped pinpoint the location of Russian vehicles via Google Maps and text message. The stalled or lost convoys got ambushed and wiped out; the burned out wrecks of Russian vehicles piled up on the roadways by the hundreds. Russian generals, in a desperate effort to get things moving, kept travelling to the front and getting whacked. The morale of Russia’s confused conscript army seemed to hover around rock bottom.
For more than a month no progress to capture Kiev was made, even as the capital kept being constantly reinforced with American and European weaponry, thousands of new volunteers, and a huge network of trenches, traps, and fortifications. Meanwhile Russian losses reached staggering levels: based on observable vehicle losses, NATO estimated some 7,000 to 15,000 Russian soldiers had been killed, and far more wounded, with up to 40,000 total casualties by early April—a number that would represent the loss of nearly a third of Russia’s initial force (while Russia only officially admitted 1,351 deaths in the same period, Russian Ministry of Defense numbers leaked to and momentarily published by Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda in mid-March specified 9,861 killed and 16,153 wounded).
And so, by the end of March, perhaps belatedly realizing that Kiev has six times the population as did Stalingrad in 1942, the Russians finally accepted that they were completely incapable of taking the city, turned around, and retreated—“redeployed” for what Moscow described as a new strategic focus on the eastern part of Ukraine.
In short, the war has been a train wreck for Russia from the start. But it’s hard to understate how much of a surprise this has been for just about everyone. Western intelligence agencies also thought Kiev, and then soon all of Ukraine, would fall within days. The White House was so confident in this that they said so openly and repeatedly. Everything had been counted up in tables, and mapped out on paper, and wargamed, and the end was deemed a foregone conclusion. Many European nations, like Germany, were so resigned to this inevitability that they initially refused to send arms or otherwise complicate their relations with a Russia that they assumed would soon extend its influence much closer to the core of the continent.
The irony then is that Putin probably really was on the verge of getting exactly what he wanted out of the war, just as he’d predicted. It was only the totally unexpected failure of his own once much-feared war machine, and its humiliation at the hands of the Ukrainians, that intervened. And this shock reversed the whole strategic picture, turning Putin’s gambit into a mounting disaster for Russia.
For weeks now I have noticed a strange reluctance among some in the West (at least among my fellow let’s just say “deeply disillusioned with the establishment” observers) to accept the reality of this. As if Western leaders’ demonstrably depthless reserves of stupidity guaranteed Putin immunity from making terrible blunders too. Or as if understandable wariness of our media’s endless ejaculation of pro-Ukraine, pro-escalation, pro-the-current-thing propaganda meant that the opposite narrative must in fact be automatically true: that a Russian victory was probably just around the corner. (The fact is that good regime propaganda is often true—that’s what makes it so effective in its ability to shape narrative with lies.)
The retreat from Kiev should rightly put an end to this. Contra assertions by Putin that all is going “according to plan,” the facts on the ground don’t lie: nothing is really going according to plan for him. The undisguised glee in Washington at being on the comfortable side of a proxy war should also help demonstrate as much (more on that later). True, as a nuclear armed power, Russia cannot ever outright lose this war (contrary to the seeming expectations of some, Zelensky will never ride into Moscow on a tank to accept Putin’s unconditional surrender and drag him to The Hague to be tried for war crimes). But Putin now also cannot win what he had envisioned, either. His original war goals—of disarming and “de-Nazifying” Ukraine (i.e. replacing the regime in Kiev with a subservient, pro-Russian government)—have now had to be abandoned. Instead, (assuming we are not all annihilated in a nuclear exchange) the two sides appear to be headed toward either a frozen conflict or an eventual negotiated settlement, with Putin now in the process of defining success down in order to try to find a politically acceptable off-ramp out of this quagmire.
Russia’s new offensive to try to secure the eastern half of Ukraine may or may not be very successful in taking additional territory. There are some reasons to think Russia will perform better now that it is operating closer to its border and has had additional time to plan and organize more methodically. But there are also reasons to suspect that the Russian military’s problems run far deeper than what can be patched over in a few weeks, or that it has even had time to truly recover from the terrible losses it has already sustained. Nearly a third of Russia’s battalion tactical groups are estimated to now probably be “combat ineffective” after sustaining heavy losses and constant fatigue from weeks of fighting near Kiev, and rushing them a new front without any chance to rest or reconstitute may add little to Russian operational power. Meanwhile Ukraine is being constantly resupplied with more and more weapons and cash from the West.
But in the end Russia’s performance in the east may not actually be that relevant. The myth of Russian military invincibility is already smashed. And even if the offensive does succeed enough to allow Putin to walk away claiming a partial victory—such a hold on parts of southern Ukraine, recognition by Kiev of the “independence” of the breakaway pro-Russia regions in Crimea and the Donbas, and a Ukrainian commitment not to join NATO—this “win” would in reality represent a major strategic loss for Russia. Left with only about the same territory it already effectively controlled before the war; the Russian economy now isolated by sanctions and technology import restrictions, and its ability to replenish its military strength curtailed; Ukraine now absolutely confident in its independent national identity, united forever by a heroic battlefield origin myth; Zelensky’s government still in power in Kiev, and more pro-Western than ever; NATO not only brought back from the dead but completely reenergized, with Sweden and Finland (the latter mere kilometers from St. Petersburg) on the verge of joining the hated alliance; the Europeans offering Ukraine a fast-track into the EU, and Washington eager to play Marshall Plan; Poland, Germany, and multiple once complacent nations in Europe now rapidly rearming; and the “liberal international order” stronger than ever… Russia will come out of this catastrophe in a position vastly weaker than before blundering into it, with no significant improvement in its strategic outlook to speak of and its future prospects greatly eroded.
Putin may grit his teeth and bear this turn of events by adopting the pose of that classic long-suffering Russian stoicism that he’s forced on his populace. But for China this is already a totally unasked for, absolute face-palm-inducing fuckup.
Contempt
From Beijing’s perspective, this situation is not, at all, what the de facto alliance with Russia was supposed to produce for China.
China tends to take an approach to foreign relations that its defenders would call pragmatic and its critics ruthlessly transactional. Close relationships are not maintained out of an abundance of friendly loyalty, but because doing so is beneficial to national interests. In this case an exceptionally close relationship with Putin’s Russia was assumed to bring China certain significant benefits, extending beyond mere political and ideological alignment.
Keeping the peace along China’s northern border was of course strategically important, but that only required a certain minimum of non-aggression. And while for many years China relied on Russian technical expertise, especially in areas like aerospace engineering, at this point China has pulled well ahead of its neighbor. Meanwhile, with a gross domestic product of only around $1.6 trillion in 2021 (barely above Australia), Russia is not exactly a booming market for Chinese goods. There is of course Russia’s important energy and other resources. But then, with Russia being totally dependent on exports, and China being the world’s largest market, China will always have the option to just buy those. No, what China really saw in Russia was something else entirely.
China is an old empire; it endured much hardship in those times when it was weak. It is also run by a Leninist political party that firmly believes power ultimately grows out of the barrel of a gun. China, that is to say, fundamentally respects strength and is contemptuous of weakness. Russia was therefore long worthy of sincere respect because, while it’s Soviet glory days were behind it and its economy backwards and puny, it retained a military uniformly judged to be among the foremost in the world. In truth, from China’s perspective it was this, and almost this alone, that made Russia a great power worthy of standing as an equal in the councils of the world—a notion Putin himself went out of his way to encourage by staking his reputation on having remade Russia into a formidably martial state.
This martial Russia stood to be a very useful friend/asset for China, in multiple ways, merely by sitting around and looking menacing. In the event of a war over Taiwan, or any kind of regional crisis or U.S.-China conflict, Russia could act as an immensely dangerous spoiler for the United States and its allies. Geographically, a looming Russia would pressure Japan and South Korea from Northeast Asia, expanding the scope of a potential conflict beyond China’s coast, which is hemmed in by a ring of hostile islands. But, most importantly, its presence would threaten the possibility that any conflict with China would expand into a two-front war in both Asia and Europe. The USA would be forced to keep significant forces positioned in Europe to protect NATO from any sudden Russian attack. That China did not have a formal alliance with Russia was no obstacle: it would be sufficient just to keep Washington uncertain and afraid enough to limit its stated desire to “pivot to Asia” and focus on containing China alone. And this threat seemed eminently credible, because as recently as 2019 the experts conducting America’s wargames were predicting, repeatedly, that a Russian invasion of Europe would be so overwhelming that it could capture all of the Baltic States “within a few days,” and that NATO would likely be forced to use tactical nuclear weapons to stop the Russian advance anywhere north of Warsaw.
This mutual fantasy has now been shattered. Far from being poised to overrun Europe, Russia’s Potemkin army proved incapable of even making it through the rag-tag volunteers of Kiev, with their consumer drones and yoga matts. Even if it “wins” and ends up with a few more bites out of Ukraine, it no longer credibly poses any serious conventional threat to NATO. And while the United States will have to stay in Europe for a while yet to soothe local anxieties (and make its defense companies a tidy profit selling huge amounts of arms), it will soon be free to turn eastward with far less anxiety.
For Beijing, this necessarily changes its whole strategic map. For the more than 100 years since the October Revolution of 1917, China and the CCP has been deeply connected to and shaped by Russia. But Russia’s shameful display on the battlefield will prove the original sin that transforms China’s view of it from one of respect into one of thinly veiled contempt. Beijing can certainly appreciate the perks of possessing dependent client states. But in Russia’s case China never wanted a needy dependent clinging to its leg; it wanted the valuable partnership of a great power. Yet it took less than two weeks for Russia to begin begging China for arms and assistance. China has not sent them. If it is no longer a serious military power then Russia has been reduced to just another third-world oil exporter—like a big Eurasian Nigeria, but with terrible demographics. In the end, China will begin to treat it as such.
So while in public China may continue to vigorously support Russia rhetorically, its material support will be limited. Beijing has other priorities to worry about now, because Putin’s big screw-up has placed it in a truly no-win scenario.
Act II: Alone
For whoever has, to him more will be given, and he will have abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away…—Matthew 13:12
Divided
It’s true that Beijing cannot afford to completely throw Russia under the bus. Russia is still, uncomfortably, the most significant ally China’s got. And if China wants to attract any others in the future then it can’t look too weak and unreliable. Plus Xi has too consistently touted his personal relationship with Putin, on more than one occasion calling him his “best friend” and the man most like himself in the world. Backing off too fast would not be a strong look. Most importantly, a scenario in which Putin’s regime actually did fall, and Russia was transformed into a pro-Western state sitting literally on China’s doorstep, would be a nightmare beyond all comprehension for Beijing. So a minimum level of help will have to be provided to prevent the worst and keep the China-Russia partnership alive.
But, at least in the short-term, China’s priority must be to avoid getting dragged down into the mud by Russia. And unfortunately for Beijing this is a real threat, because Putin’s blunder has put many of its most important interests directly in jeopardy.
Even in China’s own neighborhood the invasion of Ukraine has provoked a passion for rearmament, cuddling up to the United States, and collective defense that must be deeply disconcerting to Beijing. Officially pacifist Japan, for example, not only joined U.S. and European sanctions, and shipped military aid to Ukraine, but is now debating doubling defense spending to 2% of GDP (just as Germany has committed to in Europe) as part of what its prime minister described as an effort to “enhance defense with a sense of speed.” Former Japanese Prime Minister and current ruling party head Shinzo Abe has even proposed that Japan agree to host American nuclear weapons on its soil, while also arguing that the United States and Japan should abandon any ambiguity about their intention to together defend Taiwan—both once profoundly radical steps for a senior Japanese politician to give voice to. South Korea, too, with a newly elected conservative government, is also moving toward a harder defense posture and a closer relationship with the American alliance network. Beijing’s support for Moscow therefore appears to be contributing to rapidly worsening suspicions of China and its intentions in a region traditionally hesitant to trade profitable economic exchange with China for American promises of security.
The worst damage, however, is undoubtedly occurring in Europe, where anger over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is most intense, and where frustration with China’s closeness with Russia is growing quickly. When Xi and European leaders held a summit on April 1, he implored Europe not to blindly follow Washington’s lead on policy, and to “form its own understanding of China, and adhere to its own autonomous policies toward China.”  But the Europeans were having none of it, with EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell reporting they had warned Xi not to send aid to Russia, but that overall “the dialogue was everything but a dialogue”—adding that the two sides “did not agree on anything else,” either.
The chance that this anger may translate into movement by Europe towards economically decoupling from China, or even openly sanctioning China over its support for Russia, is a huge risk. Collectively, the European Union is China’s top global economic partner, with a bilateral trade volume of $828 billion in 2021. In comparison, China’s two-way trade with Russia was $147 billion (most of that imports of Russian energy). To put it mildly, Europe is a far more important market for China than is Russia, which is too small an economy to absorb much in the way of Chinese goods and services. Especially at a time when China’s economy is already facing serious headwinds, and the threat of the United States moving to decouple parts of its own economy from China is already growing more serious, losing access to Europe would be extremely costly. This reason alone will be enough for China to carefully avoid openly flouting Western sanctions or to be caught sending Russia military aid.
Moreover, for Chinese companies the risk of triggering American secondary sanctions is no joke. Like everyone else on the planet, those companies conduct most of their global business in dollars, and often still rely on American technological components to produce their products. Which means that America effectively controls who they can sell to. Most of them will never willingly accept losing access to the majority of their global customers just to support Beijing’s impoverished comrades in Russia. Unless the Chinese state forces them to, of course—but so far Beijing has pointedly not done so.
Which is why to date Chinese firms have not rushed to Russia’s aid, but instead quietly complied with sanctions, and in some cases even begun to pull out of the country. State oil giant Sinopec has halted multiple projects in Russia, including construction of a half-billion dollar gas plant, while it assesses sanctions risks. And Chinese state refiners have so far shunned signing new contracts for Russian oil, despite being offered steep discounts. Telecom giant Huawei has temporarily suspended new orders for sales in Russia, and furloughed its Russian staff. Shipments of Chinese smartphones to Russia have fallen by as much as half overall. Computer maker Lenovo has also suspended shipments to Russia. Drone maker DJI has just suspended its business in Russia. The head of the Russian Academy of Sciences says China has even frozen joint scientific research projects without any explanation. Overall, for China “it makes [sense] to stand by and watch what happens next,” as one Chinese executive told the Financial Times—which is not exactly the swift rescue Russia may have hoped for from its best friend.
Still, despite all the risks, China would probably do more to help Russia defy the West if it could. It chafes at the long arm of America’s dictates just as much as Russia does, after all. But the reality is that it can do very little. Because it turns out the “liberal international order” still has China by the balls.
The Sixty Percent
In China’s lengthy strategic literature the difficult to translate concept of shi (勢) plays an especially prominent role. Sometimes translated as “momentum” or “potential,” it might best be described as the potential energy inherent in and available to be released by the configuration of any given situation. On the battlefield, or in a war campaign, a masterful Chinese general’s most important task is, in theory, to subtly and patiently shape the circumstances—using terrain, weather, morale, maneuver, concentration of forces, etc.—to maximize his shi relative to the enemy’s. And then, crucially, to grasp the exact timing of when the ebb and flow of shi has produced the most advantageous possible moment to attack. Or as Sun Tzu instructed:
“When torrential water tosses boulders, it is because of its momentum (shi); when the strike of a hawk breaks the body of its prey, it is because of timing. Strike the enemy as swiftly as a falcon strikes its target. It surely breaks the back of its prey for the reason that it awaits the right moment to strike…Thus the momentum (shi) of one skilled in war is overwhelming, and his attack precisely regulated. His potential (shi) is that of a fully drawn crossbow; his timing the release of the trigger.”
Putin didn’t realize that he had really bad shi and even worse timing. He detected that the West was declining and that the Russia-China bloc had some accelerating momentum on the world stage, but mistook this for having already accumulated enough advantage to be ready to deliver a knockout blow. And only when his strike failed to topple his foes did he find that he no longer had the waves at his back. Simply put, an impatient Putin moved too soon. In particular, China was simply not yet in a position to significantly help Russia prevail in an open contest with the West.
Much has been made, for instance, of China’s ability and eagerness to buy Russia’s oil and gas if those fiscally crucial exports are shunned by the West. Putin himself declared that Russia will now “redirect” its energy exports to other “rapidly growing markets” instead of Europe. But while it is true that China has a strong appetite for Russian energy, this obscures the reality that Russia cannot simply “redirect” the 75% of its exports currently going to Europe over to China at the flip of a switch—even if the demand is there, currently the infrastructure to do so simply doesn’t exist. And while Xi and Putin signed off in February on the construction of a new gas pipeline from Siberia to China as part of $117.5 billion in new bilateral oil and gas deals, such pipelines will take years to construct. Moreover, China will likely not prove to be a sustainable growth market for Russia in the future, given that the country is moving aggressively, in the name of energy security, to limit its import needs, including by investing $440 billion to build a staggering 150 advanced nuclear reactors over the next 15 years. Combined with losing all of its pricing power if it makes China its only buyer, this seems like a recipe for a serious long-term decline in Russia’s energy export industry (i.e. its only real industry).
Also among Russia’s significant missteps was an underestimation of the robustness of continued Western dominance over the global financial system, and an overestimation of the China-Russia bloc’s ability to challenge that dominance at the present time. Russia was clearly caught off guard by the extent and unity of Western sanctions, with the Central Bank of Russia admitting that the probability of Russia’s foreign reserves being frozen by the U.S. and Europe had been assessed to be “very low,” given that the move was “unprecedented.” Which is why about half of Russia’s $643 billion in foreign exchange reserves amassed before the war were still outside the country when it began, leaving them now in the hands of the West.
Combined with Russia’s ejection from the SWIFT international payment network, this was reportedly a “shock” for China’s leaders. They had not expected so many countries—including even Switzerland, a country that had maintained its strict neutrality for centuries—to so quickly join in on sanctions and endorse the weaponization of a key financial institutions like central banks and SWIFT. While Beijing has long been concerned by the knowledge that the dollar’s dominance gave the United States and its allies such leverage, the brazenness of wielding it against a power as significant as Russia has set off intense alarm, with China suspecting that, even as the world’s second largest economy, it could soon become the next target.
Some commentators have given significant credence to the possibility that this development will only lead Russia to switch to conducting its transactions in yuan, and thereby even help substantially accelerate a transition away from use of the dollar system by many countries around the world. The Chinese alternative to SWIFT, the People’s Bank of China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) has been pointed to as a means by which Russia will be able to make this switch. But this significantly overstates the Chinese system’s current ability to be of any help to Russia on this front.
Anyone can create a new payment system or currency—the hard part is getting anyone else to use it. Around half of global transactions last year were paid in dollars, and more than 30% in Euros, while just 2% used yuan. Which is why in the last quarter of 2021 CIPS processed some 13,000 transactions, while SWIFT handled 40 million. So while Russia could continue to trade with China by using the yuan, it then still couldn’t trade with anyone else. Which is a problem, because it can’t fulfill anywhere close to all of its needs just by trading with China. And if Chinese companies are hit with secondary sanctions for buying Russian goods to try to resell in dollars, or for importing components in dollars to sell to Russia for yuan, who else would be willing to trade with them using only yuan?
The real challenge is that most people around the world still have significant reason to hold dollars, given that the dollar retains its status as the global reserve currency, while few people have a good reason to hold yuan (and no one wants to hold rubles). And network effects matter. Russia and China both know this, which is why over the last several years they have diversified many of their transactions out of the dollar—just not into yuan but into what seemed like the next best alternative: the Euro. But, again, this decision was based on the assumption that Euros would be a safe option, which, to their surprise, turned out not to be the case.
The only way out of this trap is for the yuan to become globally desirable, easily convertible, and widely considered legally safe to hold. The latter two cannot happen until China opens its capital account and floats the yuan without state manipulation—which Chinese authorities are extremely reluctant to do because of the real risk that more capital would flee China than enter it. As for the first, tens of billions of dollars’ worth of foreign capital has already fled China since the start of the war as offshore investors reconsider the safety of remaining in the Chinese market given the direction the geopolitical environment is currently trending. Even if people no longer want to risk holding dollars, they don’t yet have a reason to hold yuan instead. And if China were to double down and seriously help Russia evade sanctions, then all three of these requirements would be further undermined, significantly setting back, rather than accelerating, the internationalization of the yuan.
Again Putin moved too early, before any robust alternative to the dollar system had gotten off the ground. It is too soon to say precisely how sanctions will impact the Russian economy over the longer term. They may be manageable for Putin, and won’t slow his immediate goals in Ukraine. But they also certainly won’t help either Russia or China economically compete with the West. The idea that somehow—now that the Russia-China bloc is under heavy pressure and disempowered—this is the moment that will lead to a quick triumph of the yuan over the dollar is a delusion.
That shift may eventually happen over the long term, but as Ray Dalio explained relatively well in his book on cycles of change in the world order (see my review here), historically an upset in the global reserve currency is consistently the last epochal change to flow from the replacement of one reigning superpower by another, following only well after this succession has been cemented economically, militarily, and diplomatically. Ultimately, China cannot overthrow the power of the United States by deliberately undermining and replacing its reserve currency—it can only replace its currency by first dethroning the United States from power.
Yet what this crisis has revealed is that China is still not close to being able to do that. This is not, however, because China is itself a weak country; indeed it may be well on its way to overtaking the United States on a one-to-one basis. But the war in Ukraine has produced a snapshot that is quite definitive: powerful as it may be, China stands almost alone. And that leaves it nearly helpless in the face of the immense power of the U.S.-led bloc being arrayed against it.
If one takes a map and colors in the countries that have actively joined Washington in sanctions on Russia (as above), what you will see is essentially a map of “the West,” with the United States and European Union joined by a few far-flung Asian protectorates like Japan, South Korea, and Australia. Russia and China would accurately point out, of course, that this leaves out not only the majority of countries in the world but also a majority of the world’s population. And yet, the hard truth is that these facts are of very little consequence to the present reality of power mapped here—together these countries by themselves represent around 60% of global GDP, and therefore a large majority of the combined material power in the world, including military power. This is why together they can effectively treat Russia like a Canadian trucker and get away with it, and why for now the dollar will retain its supremacy, and why China’s shi is now shit.
For China, the newfound unity of this bloc, and its persistent economic and military dominance, is the greatest of all possible problems. It could be a decade or more (if ever) before China and the shabby band of developing countries that could be called its own bloc of pseudo-allies (currently representing at most maybe around 25% of global GDP) can close the economic gap. That really only leaves China with one option in the near term: to somehow split the developed countries of The Sixty Percent, convincing a sizeable part to either join Team China or at least abandon Washington and commit to neutrality. And that means that—to the certain exasperation of all those young Asianists and others who thought we must surely by now be past such anachronisms—the future of the geopolitical balance now once again fundamentally hinges on Europe.
Trans-Atlantis
For a few centuries now, various geopolitical thinkers have described the world as having essentially two different possible configurations of geopolitical power, both pivoting around the Europe’s direction of alignment. Since the time of Hobbes, one has traditionally been symbolically associated with the great mythical sea monster, Leviathan. The other with the great land beast, Behemoth.
In one of these configurations, Europe shrinks back from the alien steppes of Asia—a sense of menace perhaps emanating from the depths of its historical memory—and looks westward across the seas, aligning itself with the more familial power of North America. The balance of world power becomes Trans-Atlantic, and therefore fundamentally maritime in character. The huge interior landmass of Asia is marginalized and outmaneuvered along its periphery by Leviathan. This is the configuration of global power that has long reigned over the earth, first in the age of colonialism typified by the British Empire, and then under Britain’s post-war American successor.
In the other possible configuration, however, the power of Europe is fused to the emergent power of Asia, connecting Orient with Occident across the vast steppe. In this Eurasian configuration, global power would re-center on the safe interior of what Sir Halford Mackinder called the great “World Island” of the trans-Eurasian landmass, with the bulk of Behemoth marginalizing the maritime rimlands of the periphery. Naturally, this is a vision that has long obsessed Russia, the world’s only geographically trans-Eurasian power. (Hence perhaps why Dmitry Medvedev said the deeper purpose of invading Ukraine was to begin to “finally build an open Eurasia from Vladivostok to Lisbon.”) But, more recently, the Eurasian dream has also been taken up by a new champion that is already the natural heartland of the Asian pole: China.
As described above, these visions are not merely fanciful (despite their fantastic beasts), or even simply geographic, but quite material. If one imagines the world’s power as divided into equal quarters by China, the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world, this is actually not too far from an accurate picture of each of their respective shares of global economic output today. If any two were to unite, they would easily outweigh either of the other two alone—and since “rest of world” is of course not a uniform bloc, that mostly leaves the other three jostling for how to balance between themselves.
While the return of China to particular prominence within Asia is new in this century, the basics of this idea have shaped global politics for at least the last 100 years. It was after all the core dynamic that drove the Cold War: the Soviet Union hoped to complete its partial control of Europe and East Asia and fulfill the Eurasian dream; the United States aimed to prevent it from doing so and to break its hold on Eastern Europe, firmly establishing Trans-Atlantic dominance. This was in fact the whole basis of America’s strategy of containment first proposed in 1946 by George Kennan, who warned that the Soviets could never be allowed to consolidate the balance of the world’s industrial centers located in these regions into their hands alone. This became America’s defining strategic principle for the next several decades—as reflected quite explicitly, for example, in the 1988 National Security Strategy of the United States, where President Reagan put it this way:
The first historical dimension of our strategy…is the conviction that the United States’ most basic national security interests would be endangered if a hostile state or group of states were to dominate the Eurasian landmass—that part of the globe often referred to as the world’s heartland…since 1945, we have sought to prevent the Soviet Union from capitalizing on its geostrategic advantage to dominate its neighbors in Western Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, and thereby fundamentally alter the global balance of power to our disadvantage.
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