A book by Stanford research fellow Oriana Skylar Mastro, Upstart: How China Became a Great Power (Oxford University Press, 2024), provides a framework for analyzing the strategies by which China became the main challenger to the US.
Mastro’s framework identifies three strategies:
1. Emulation of many, but not all, US policies;
2. Exploitation of gaps in Western policy that create opportunities for an upstart; and
3. Entrepreneurship — pursuing original initiatives without Westen precedent.
But does this framework also explain Russia? Does it even explain China? Can it help the West understand and cope with the totalitarian axis?
In most cases Beijing tries to develop these three Es in ways that do not trigger an alarmed, forceful riposte from Washington. When Beijing feels confident, however, this caution recedes.
Mastro’s analysis leaves unanswered whether China seeks only to become a great power or aims to match, topple, or even replace the US as the reigning superpower. She says little about Beijing’s blunt use of hard power, including military might, to maintain and expand its domain.
To be sure, she describes China’s military threats to Taiwan, but she does not discuss China’s illegal claims to nearly all of the South China Sea or its bullying of Vietnamese and Philippine vessels in their own territorial waters.
Nor does she discuss Chinese repression of Tibetan, Turkic and other ethnicities within a reconstituted Chinese empire where smaller peoples are virtually obliterated by influxes of Han immigrants. In short, her focus on the three Es ignores Beijing’s use of unbridled force to maintain and enlarge its power.
This is an important omission, as the evidence suggests Xi Jinping intends to proceed as far as China’s means and external restraints permit.
Does Moscow also utilize the three Es of emulation, exploitation and entrepreneurship? We certainly see examples of all three strategies, including in Russia’s relationships with African regimes that feel neglected or abused by the West and want better trained and equipped security forces to crush domestic and foreign opponents. They get them from the Kremlin without any tiresome nagging about democracy.
Since the Cold War, the Kremlin has sought to emulate the US triad of land, sea and air based nuclear forces, and if one element seemed weak, such as long-range bombers, Moscow expanded the others by stockpiling ICBMs and submarines. While Nikita Khrushchev deemed US-style aircraft carriers out of reach, he did seek a missile base in Cuba — a bold entrepreneurial gambit that nearly led to catastrophe.
Entrepreneurship is too flimsy a word to characterize Vladimir Putin’s brutal actions. At home, he smothers or even liquidates all forms of internal opposition. Independent media such as Nezavisimaya Gazeta and the human rights group Memorial are dubbed foreign agents and shut down or ousted.
None of Mastro’s three Es fit Putin’s agents dynamiting Russian apartment buildings and blaming Chechens. Nor do her three strategies include wars to extinguish Chechen demands for independence; annexation of two Georgian provinces; or imperial land grabs in Ukraine.
Entrepreneurship is also too pretty a word to describe Kremlin interference in elections, from the US to Moldova. Beyond its exploitation of gaps in Western defenses, Russia has been using cyber-attacks and information warfare for years to disrupt and intimidate enemies.
The level of covert physical attacks on the soil of European NATO members outstrips anything seen in recent history, prompting mounting calls for a stepped-up response. Russian sabotage has included break-ins and arson at factories and critical national infrastructure, such as water treatment plants in Finland and Sweden. There was even a reported assassination plot against the CEO of Germany’s largest arms company.
These actions are probably intended to undermine European trust in governments and impede further Western support for Ukraine. They also seek to undermine Western cohesion in advance of any future wider conflict.
Mastro’s three Es are too weak to encapsulate the brutal agendas of Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin — not to mention North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. They are too narrow to enfold Xi’s occupation of nearly the entire South China Sea, or his extreme repression of minorities.
Putin’s wars against Chechens, Georgians, and Ukrainians — as well as Russian supporters of human rights — go far beyond any strategies of emulation, exploitation, or entrepreneurship.
The downside to this analysis is that it does not prime other nations to cope with the scope and intensity of challenges they face from the totalitarian axis. A strategy of complacency and “let somebody else do it” will not meet the needs of our times.
Walter Clemens is Associate, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University and Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science, Boston University. He wrote Blood Debts: What Putin and Xi Owe Their Victims (2023).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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