As Biden lets slip that regime change in Russia is his ultimate goal, Washington’s adversaries on the other side of the world fortify themselves

(Originally published March 28 in “What in the World“) North Korea last week did exactly what the Pentagon said it was preparing to do—test-launch an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of striking the continental United States. The ICBM, the first Pyongyang has launched since 2017, landed in waters off Japan. Having first used the pandemic as a distraction, North Korean Kim Jong-un has figured out there’s little risk of retaliation while the U.S., China and Russia are occupied with the crisis in Ukraine.

China is also making hay while the sun (doesn’t) shine in Ukraine. It’s close to signing a security agreement with the Solomon Islands. China would provide the tiny atoll nation with security from such imminent threats as typhoons and civil unrest in return for a Chinese naval presence. China has a pretext for such agreements: violent protests in Honiara last year largely targeted stores owned by recent Chinese immigrants. Anyone who has managed to travel in Southeast Asia or Europe in recent years, however, will notice the proliferation of Chinese-owned convenience stores and groceries. While the overall percentage of China’s 1.4 billion population emigrating abroad is very small, Chinese represent the second-largest group of migrants moving abroad after India, according to the International Organization for Migration, and the fourth-largest group of residents abroad after India, Mexico and Russia. Most go to the U.S., where more than two million live, but you don’t read about Beijing negotiating a security agreement with Washington to defend them. Maybe it should.

China is also making diplomatic overtures to India, with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi traveling to New Delhi last week amid the Ukraine crisis to bury the hatchet after a conflict on their Himalayan border in 2020 soured relations. Beijing is no doubt eager to exploit India’s shared refusal to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to peel it away from Washington’s “Indo-Pacific NATO” for containing China.

In the Arctic, meanwhile…. the U.S. military is gearing up to counter an increased Russian military presence as climate change opens more of the Arctic Ocean to navigation and exploration.

Back in Europe, meanwhile, U.S. President Joe Biden’s big trip to Poland ended with his foot in his mouth when, during what was meant to be a rousing speech on how the war in Ukraine is a battle between democracy and autocracy, Joe got over-excited and said about Russian President Vladimir Putin that “for God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

The White House scrambled to clarify that Joe didn’t mean that the U.S. was angling for regime change in Russia, but the gaffe earned head-slaps from America’s allies. After Biden declared him a war criminal, Putin will have few reservations left about just what Washington’s long-term strategy is going forward. He’s unlikely now to believe any Western assurances about Russian security in talks to end the war in Ukraine. Biden’s slip may also discourage China from intervening as a moderator if it thinks it might be made Washington’s patsy in a long game to overthrow Putin.

For his part, Ukrainian President Volodomir Zelensky has resorted to trying to shame members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into sending him tanks and warplanes, while simultaneously suggesting to Moscow that Ukraine might be willing to be a non-nuclear, neutral buffer state between Russia and the West. In a video address Sunday, he accused NATO of having less than 1% of the courage of Mariupol’s beleaguered defenders and in an interview with The Economist accused NATO of being afraid of Russia.

It is. And rightly so. While Russia has downgraded its war aims, saying it aims not to subdue Kyiv but rather to liberate the ethnic-Russian enclaves in Donbas, experts still worry that Putin’s increasing desperation could prompt him to resort to tactical nuclear weapons to decimate Ukraine’s ability to resist and to deter the West from escalating aid to Kyiv.