Putin suspends nuclear arms treaty with the US, casting Ukraine as a battle for Russia’s survival; Beijing would like a word

(Originally published Feb. 22 in “What in the World“) If there was any doubt about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s willingness to keep Russia bogged down and bleeding to death in Ukraine, his state-of-the-nation speech Tuesday in Moscow dispelled it.

Speaking a day after U.S. President Joe Biden’s surprise house call on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and a year after his forces invaded, Putin cast the war as a battle against the West for Russia’s very survival. To underscore his determination, Putin announced that Russia was suspending participation in the 2010 New START treaty, the last remaining nuclear arms control pact between Russia and the United States. That suggests Russia may not only stop submitting to inspections of its nuclear arsenal, but also begin deploying more nuclear weapons than the treaty’s maximum.

The speeches change nothing, but suggest the war will drag on. Russian forces continue to slow walk their latest offensive, with northern forces shelling Ukrainian troops to keep them from joining compatriots trying to break the land bridge to Crimea in the south. Russia, meanwhile, has called a meeting of the UN Security Council to address allegations that the Biden Administration orchestrated the sabotage last September of the Nord Stream pipelines carrying natural gas from Russia under the Baltic Sea to Germany.

Stuck in the middle of this ceaseless cage match is China. Since reopening after its long pandemic lockdown, Beijing has been tentatively trying to pursue rapprochement with Europe and the U.S.—and the war in Ukraine isn’t helping. Foreign Minister Qin Gang on Tuesday said Beijing was worried the war in Ukraine would “spiral out of control” and called on “the countries concerned” to stop feeding the fire, and most importantly to stop casting China as party to the conflict and equating Taiwan with Ukraine.

A longstanding ally of Moscow’s faced with an increasingly bitter rivalry with the United States, China has tried to sit on the fence over Ukraine. It has expressed sympathy with Russia’s concerns about NATO’s eastward expansion but stopped short of supplying it in Ukraine, instead calling for negotiations to end the war—all while happily buying Russian oil at a discount in defiance of Western sanctions. For America’s “my way or the highway” form of diplomacy, this is tantamount to full-throated support for Moscow in Ukraine. For Washington, nothing short of public condemnation by China of its ally will do.

That’s especially true given Washington’s growing animosity towards China. In short, America trucks no rivals to its global power and China refuses to bow to its former colonial masters and is determined instead to take a place at the head of global affairs commensurate with its size. The result is a standoff marked by increasingly bellicose chest-thumping that will likely lead to war someday. In the meantime, it makes it impossible for Washington to accept China as an honest broker in Ukraine, even if doing so might give Beijing the credibility it needs to dial back tensions in the Pacific.

Instead, the U.S. portrays China’s efforts to negotiate as evidence of its determination to join Russia in opposing the U.S.-led global order, therefore putting it on the wrong side of a two-sided contest. That position mirrors U.S. diplomacy during the early Cold War—until former-President Richard Nixon proved in 1972 there could be a third side by striking detente with Communist China.

Now, Washington is already interpreting a trip to Moscow this week by China’s top diplomat Wang Yi—and the potential summit between Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping that Wang is reportedly there to arrange—as a huddle rather than an intervention.

It’s interesting to contrast Washington’s shrill condemnation of China’s position on Ukraine with its relative silence over India’s. New Delhi hasn’t condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, either, and is also still buying Russian oil, and arms, and wheat. Alas, no one fears India’s navy or worries about its territorial ambitions against U.S. allies in central Asia. On the contrary, Washington has been avidly courting India as a diplomatic and military counterweight to China.

But India’s silence on Ukraine is deafening: it’s a reminder that in the new Cold War that Washington is launching, the “Global South” isn’t necessarily on the right side either. Many in the West’s former colonies in Africa, the Middle East and Asia are also not entirely happy with the “heads I win, tails you lose” global order Washington has fashioned. They may not be rooting for Putin, but they aren’t rooting for the U.S. either.