From the Archives | How NATO Manages the “Bear” and the “Dragon”

Elbridge A. Colby and Ian Brzezinski in Conversation with Nikolas Gvosdev

This article was originally published in Volume 65, Issue 1 in January 2020.

Nikolas Gvosdev: Which is the bigger challenge, China or Russia? Or are they equivalent?

Elbridge Colby: China is by a very considerable margin the more significant challenge to U.S. interests. The fundamental U.S. interest abroad is in denying another state the ability to dominate a key region like Asia or Europe. This could allow such a state to prejudice or deny our trade, access to markets, and so forth. China is a much greater threat on both of these scores: it is a far larger economy and thus can mount a much more plausible challenge to establish hegemony over its region than Russia can over Europe, and Asia is the world’s largest economy. So, the top priority must be to deny China hegemony over Asia. That said, Russia remains a challenge in Europe, and, in particular, is a concrete military threat in Eastern NATO; ensuring Russia does not see a plausible “theory of victory” in this area needs to be the priority focus for the Atlantic Alliance.

Ian Brzezinski: China and Russia both pose significant challenges to the United States. Both have become revisionist powers whose territorial ambitions portend to disrupt the international order that has been the basis for unprecedented peace, freedom, and prosperity since the end of World War II. Moscow and Beijing have both demonstrated a propensity to use force against other neighbors. Russia continues to occupy portions of Ukraine and Georgia. China recently attacked Indian forces in the Himalayas, and its aggressive actions continue in the South China Sea.

Both nations use their militaries to harass U.S. civilian and military ships and aircraft. Both exercise new technologies, most notably cyber and social media, to infiltrate and undermine the United States, its allies, and partners.

Both nations are led by regimes that present an ideological challenge to the West. They are dismissive of democratic forms of governance and actively advocate their respective forms of national authoritarianism as an alternative to the democratic culture and political structures that distinguish the United States and its closest allies and partners in Europe and the Indo-Pacific.

Russia and China are nuclear powers. While Russia’s nuclear arsenal is far more formidable than that of China’s, the latter’s is steadily growing in size and is modernizing. This makes their provocations and aggression particularly dangerous due to the potential escalatory consequences that conflict with them could generate.

While this makes the two nations relatively equally urgent challenges, China, due to the magnitude and global reach of its economy—its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) roughly matches that of the United States and is some ten times larger than Russia’s GDP—and the increasing sophistication and size of its military, presents in the long run a potentially more significant and complex threat to U.S. values and interests around the world.

Nikolas Gvosdev: Is there an emerging trans-Atlantic consensus on the challenge posed by China? What role has the COVID-19 pandemic played, if any, in changing attitudes?

Ian Brzezinski: While it has yet to be operationalized into a shared strategy, a transatlantic consensus on China has begun to emerge. Concern about China’s economic and military provocations, intelligence operations, and ideological challenge is well established in the United States. The Trump administration, with bipartisan support, has identified the great power challenge posed by China to be a top national security concern and even prioritizes it above that presented by Russia.

More recently, European attitudes toward China have hardened significantly. Eighteen months ago, many Europeans were content to regard China as an economic partner, notwithstanding its authoritarian political system and aggressive conduct in the Pacific. That posture has since changed as Europe has experienced Beijing’s diplomatic and economic belligerence toward those that criticize its actions and policies. Since March 2019, the European Union (EU) has formally described China as a “strategic competitor,” “an economic competitor,” and “a systemic rival promoting alternative models of governance.”

Beijing’s pugnacious conduct during the coronavirus pandemic only has reinforced this new European perspective. In her September 2020 State of the Union address, European Commission President Ursala von der Leyen characterized Beijing as one of the EU’s most challenging relationships and labelled, China, again, to be “a systemic rival.”

Elbridge Colby: Consensus is probably too strong of a word. But there does seem to be a growing degree of convergence between Europe and the United States in attitudes about China. More than anything, this already-existing trend has been accelerated by China’s own behavior: not only around the COVID-19 pandemic, but also its increasingly brazen assertiveness and “wolf warrior”-style diplomacy. Europeans have surely taken note of China’s actions against India, Beijing’s threats against a dizzying array of countries ranging from Australia to Sweden, and China’s dictatorial system at home—including in Xinjiang and Tibet.

I think this growing convergence will allow a greater degree of collective action among the United States, Europe, and like-minded countries, such as Japan, India, and Australia. But the United States also should be realistic. China remains very distant from Europe, so European threat perceptions will be more muted than those of Asian states and the United States, which was a Pacific power before it was a European one. This reality means that the degree of policy convergence between the United States and its Asian allies and partners on the one hand and Europe on the other is not a foregone conclusion.

Nikolas Gvosdev: If there is growing agreement about the need for joint trans-Atlantic action on China, how would that be operationalized? Should NATO focus on expanding its reach and partnerships into the Indian Ocean basin? Or should the non-U.S. members of NATO play more of a role in European security, freeing up U.S. attention and resources for Asia?

Elbridge Colby: The primary mission for European NATO should be to ensure the effective defense of the NATO area. From the U.S. perspective, Europe remains a vital interest, and NATO is a critical alliance. But the top

U.S. priority is ensuring the effective defense of its allies and partners in the Asia-Pacific, including Taiwan, from Chinese attack—not only because of the strategic reasons mentioned above, but also due to the breathtakingly rapid and impressive growth of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Thus, dealing with the PLA will continue to be priority #1 for the U.S. military, as the 2018 National Defense Strategy and U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper made clear. This means that the U.S. military contributions to Europe will necessarily have a ceiling, especially as budget pressures are likely in the 2020s.

Given the shared interests of European NATO and the United States in a NATO protected from Russian attack, the best use of European NATO resources will be to ensure an effective defense of NATO Allies against a Russian theory of victory.  Most concretely, this means an improved conventional defense of the Baltic states and Poland. Russia’s most daunting theory of victory involves a conventional fait accompli against one of these states coupled with threats (explicit or implicit) to escalate to the nuclear level if its gains are too aggressively challenged. The primary way to undermine this theory of victory is to ensure that Russia cannot secure such a fait accompli in the first place. This does not mean a Maginot Line, rather it means the ability to prevent Russian conventional forces from seizing and holding Allied territory.

With the resurgence of Russian conventional forces in the last two decades, this approach is difficult, but definitely feasible—especially considering NATO’s lopsided advantages in resources. Germany needs to rejuvenate its conventional forces to play a more significant role, alongside the United States, Poland, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, and the Scandinavian and Benelux countries, in blunting any such Russian assault.

This scenario is the best use of European NATO military effort not only because it is in se important, but also because Europe’s ability to project meaningful military power to the Asia-Pacific is likely to be very limited. Better to have Europe play to its strengths in the Euro-Atlantic area rather than to vainly try to project meaningful military power to the Asia-Pacific.

In addition to providing adequate security for NATO’s Eastern Flank, European states, such as France and the United Kingdom, can also help in conducting various missions in North Africa and the Near East, as well as backfill U.S. forces in the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf area in the event of conflict in the Pacific.

Ian Brzezinski: A key priority of the next U.S. administration should be to forge this emergent transatlantic consensus on China into a comprehensive political, economic, and military strategy designed to both deter aggression from China and to foster a more cooperative relationship.

NATO should play an appropriate role in this strategy. The Alliance’s decision-making bodies provide a useful forum to generate a shared awareness of China’s military capabilities and activities. The Alliance’s long-standing relationships with Australia, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea, Japan, and Mongolia should be expanded to include more intensive military exercises and operations. The Alliance could institutionalize a moderate presence in the Indo-Pacific region by establishing a small headquarters or Center of Excellence in one of these partner countries or at the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. Such an Alliance presence may not decisively shift the military balance in the region, but it would communicate clearly to Beijing the West’s unity and determination to defend its interests in the region and the rules-based international order.

With that said, a NATO strategy for China alone will not be a sufficient solution to the West’s increasingly tense relationship with Beijing. A coherent and effective transatlantic strategy for China must be comprehensive, one that leverages the full complement of diplomatic, economic, technological, social, and military capabilities that define geopolitical power. For this strategy to have maximum success, it will need to combine the capacities of both Europe and North America and be reinforced through collaboration with the community’s democratic partners in the Indo-Pacific.

Nikolas Gvosdev: How do you see the Russia-China strategic partnership?

Ian Brzezinski: This partnership is at best a transactional relationship and an imbalanced one. China’s economy dwarfs that of Russia. China is a rising global power, while Russia is struggling to operate on that stage. Neither nation historically has demonstrated much affinity for the other. Their partnership masks long-standing Russian unease with China’s rising influence and camouflages China’s dismissive regard for its economically less significant neighbor.

The partnership between Beijing and Moscow is driven by a shared sense of resentment of the West—and the United States in particular—and the current international order. However, it is a partnership shadowed by rivalry intrinsic to two authoritarian states that envision for themselves, respectively, globally dominant positions.

Elbridge Colby: Clearly, the relationship has deepened considerably over the last few years. Whatever frictions exist between them, both evidently see their partnership as solidly rooted above all in a shared opposition to the United States. So this is the reality.

But we should not simply accept this situation as a fixed given. First, such a close partnership is a major problem for the rest of us. Together, these are two exceptionally formidable powers covering the length of Eurasia; acting together, they can cause the rest of us serious problems. Just to give an example: a Russia acting in concert with China can do things in Europe to distract U.S. attention away from blunting China’s pursuit of hegemony in Asia. Consequently, we have an interest in some degree of distance between Beijing and Moscow. This interest does not mean that there needs to be a diplomatic revolution—Moscow and Washington do not need to become allies, for instance. Rather, it is a matter of ensuring that Beijing and Moscow are not so closely aligned in their actions and strategies.

Second, there are things we can act upon and do to unsettle this partnership. In particular, Russia has to have a natural fear of being pushed around by China, whether it admits such fears or not. China will be so much more powerful than Russia that their partnership is inherently unequal, especially as Russia spends down its legacy advantages in military technology and related areas. Moreover, these countries directly border each other. While the Russian Far East is not Russia’s heartland, it seems reasonable to expect that a growing China will exert more and more influence there, as well as in historical areas of Russian predominance such as Central Asia. So, there are natural points of friction; indeed, these tensions were enough to cause in part the Sino-Soviet split despite the shared Marxist ideology of the time. Furthermore, contemporary China does not seem shy in pushing its interests and demands. Just ask India.

The key question for the United States and Europe, then, is how to promote such divergences, and particularly the distancing of Russia—as the weaker power—from China. This question is not an easy one and certainly not a matter of some grand bargain. Such a bargain risks not only sacrificing important interests in Europe, but also not working against a Moscow that is assertive and surely understands the U.S. interest in splitting it from Beijing. I have yet to see a compelling case for how Washington and its allies should approach this problem, but what I can say is that we should figure one out. To me, it is likely to involve a mixture of firmness and deterrence with conciliation; exactly what that mixture is I don’t know. However, I think we probably want both to show Russia that it has a viable “Look West” option and that attempts to undermine NATO and European stability will be too costly and unavailing. So, Moscow is most likely to choose a different course not by our just being nice and understanding, but rather by combining elements of outreach with firmness and deterrence.

Nikolas Gvosdev: How do you see China’s influence in Europe evolving?

Elbridge Colby: China’s economy will almost certainly continue to develop at a significant rate. Even if we partially decouple, China is likely to be able to tap its enormous domestic economy, as well as at least some foreign markets to continue growing. This means that China will be an immensely important economic factor. We will have to adapt our strategies, conscious that this will not be the case. China will have a lot of economic influence in Europe. So, we will have our collective work cut out for us to show Europeans why colluding too much with the PRC is a Faustian Bargain.

China also likely will become more active militarily in the Euro-Atlantic area. While China’s main goal is to become the regional hegemon in Asia first—and from that position of strength establish its global preeminence—Beijing will possess the ability and the motive to project some degree of military power into the Euro-Atlantic area. China will, for instance, have nuclear-powered submarines, aircraft carriers, long-range bombers and other aircraft, an expanding space architecture, and so forth. In addition, it is likely to build relationships in Africa, the Near East, Latin America, and Europe itself. Part of NATO’s focus should be to ensure that PLA forces cannot undermine NATO’s security too much even as the United States focuses on the Western Pacific.

Ian Brzezinski: The coronavirus pandemic of 2020 will likely prove to be the turning point for Beijing’s influence in Europe. China’s denial that it was the source of the virus and its threats to those who criticized its role in the pandemic catalyzed already growing European concerns about China’s cyber-espionage, horrible human rights situation, and military provocations in the South China Sea. Evidence of this turn in European attitudes toward China includes the growing number of European countries restricting the use of Huaweii telecommunications equipment and the nearly confrontational September 2020 summit between the EU and China. During that meeting, EU leaders bluntly challenged Chinese trade practices, demanded more transparency from China regarding the coronavirus, and criticized China’s human rights violations in Hong Kong and Xinjiang.

Nikolas Gvosdev: What, if anything, needs to change in transatlantic relations in light of what you’ve said?

Ian Brzezinski: To effectively marshal their unmatched political, economic, and military power in a coherent transatlantic China strategy, the United States and Europe should more effectively address the divisive dynamics that currently undermine their own unity and cohesion. Greater effort will be needed to ensure more equitable burden sharing among allies, a more equitable trading relationship, and a recommitment to defend the values that distinguish this community of democracies. And, both sides of the Atlantic have to contribute to the political, economic, and military dimensions of a joint China strategy. The means for an effective transatlantic strategy for addressing China’s emergence as a global power clearly exist. Marshaling them is a matter of political will.

Elbridge Colby: There should be a fundamental rebalancing of the bargain. Europe needs to take a much more significant role in ensuring the defense of NATO Europe, as well as in handling security threats from proximate areas like North Africa. In return, Washington should defer more to European political preferences on these issues.

Further, I think the United States needs to re-root the transatlantic relationship in more durable ground: shared interests. Particularly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, rhetoric on both sides of the Atlantic tended to emphasize that we are bound together by shared values. This sentiment is partially true, although I note there are plenty of differences both across the Atlantic and within the various NATO states. But the best alliances proceed from shared fears; that is the best motivator to stick together and fight. The United States and its NATO Allies share an interest in a Europe that is not dominated by any state, and a world that is not dominated by China. This understanding is a firmer basis for our alliance going forward, and we should emphasize that more.