Brief | January 22, 2022

Rule of Three

The rule of three in comedy exists as a reminder that three is the absolute minimum number in the universe for something interesting to happen.

In celestial mechanics, the motion of one body in space is trivial, two bodies solvable, and three bodies chaos. The introduction of a third body does not alter the universal law of gravitation, which remains constant throughout and ambivalent to either stability or chaos. In fact, there is nothing special about the third body at all. Chaos is the natural order of things, and the orderly heavens of the one or two body scenarios the exception.

As above, so below.

It is in this light that we should consider renewed concerns about Russia and China in the earthly realm. After a long interruption, we are finally returning to the historical state of international relations:

The idea of a multipolar world evokes the aesthetic of 19th century European balance-of-power politics. While that may be good for designing tabletop games, we should not confine our imaginations to such a narrow set of historical examples. There is no canonical version of a multipolar world any more than there is one of chaos. Multipolarity merely describes a particular fact about our world—the number of hegemonic political entities that countries can align themselves around—and leaves the rest open. Even in that definition, what constitutes a hegemon is somewhat diverse. A hegemon may be an alliance rather than a country. It may be much weaker than its rival hegemon in some respects, but still capable of exerting its gravitational pull in its regional sphere of influence.

Grand narratives and strategic visions don’t die in a multipolar world, despite the difficulty of coordination in such an arrangement. If anything, the moribund “liberal rules-based international order” is proof that extending the unipolar moment brought on by the collapse of the Soviet Union into decades of American hegemony was deeply corrosive to grand strategic thinking. Meanwhile, the decline of Russia has forced it to design a creative and dynamic foreign policy, much to the detriment of its neighbors. It was able to pull off a successful intervention in Syria with clear goals—maintain the intactness of Assad’s regime in defense of its principle of opposing regime changes—without being bogged in a quagmire or getting cocky elsewhere. I point to the Syrian intervention as a good demonstration of Moscow’s military assets and diplomatic skill. Russian airstrikes were instrumental in both securing military objectives and rendering enemy regions uninhabitable through systematic destruction of hospitals, farmland, and other civilian infrastructure (following a cruel campaign which the Syrian Arab Air Force began with their barrel bombs). Throughout the process, Russia maintained good relations with both Iran and Turkey despite everyone being on opposite sides.

In general, Russia has good relations with a variety of countries ranging from Germany to Israel to Saudi Arabia because it makes its interests and offers clear. Having shed all elements of Marxist idealism after the Cold War, it makes no pretenses of ideological constraints on its action. Russia maintains a network of “allies” that are seeded throughout the American-led order while maintaining a modern economy that is resilient to US sanctions and keeping its domestic oligarchs on a tight leash. Its access to oil and gas is efficiently converted into political and financial capital, which goes to fund a broad range of influence operations and tightly-run interventions. Like the Syrian intervention, the Crimean annexation and Donbas War in 2014 were costly, but stayed far from bankrupting the state or overextending its capacity. Each of these individual measures are basic, but it’s remarkable how all these commonsense things fit into a coherent policy that has sustained Russia’s odd place in the international system after a near collapse in the 1990s. Everyday Russians, no less its elite, have never forgotten the shame of that era.

American elites are prone to dismissing Russia as irrelevant or stuck in some mid-life crisis trying to reconstitute the Soviet glory days. While the Soviet nostalgia is real, it’s unclear whether the Americans or the Russians are the ones letting nostalgia cloud their judgment. In his 2005 state of the nation address, Putin mourned the collapse of the Soviet empire as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” To read it differently, I am absolutely sure that Putin does not want to repeat that catastrophe again by torching two long post-Soviet decades of progress in another ill-considered fight with the US. Putin calls to us in Ukraine: Welcome to the multipolar world, Americansky! The rest of the world have been living here for a while now.

One of the funniest jokes told about the Afghan withdrawal was that the US would lose its credibility among allies for leaving its partners in the lurch. Nothing could be further from the truth. The withdrawal from a failed intervention actually assured core allies that American would refocus its attention on other things. Like the most obvious threat to US hegemony since the Soviet Union.

No country was supposed to be able to reach technological and economic parity with the US. This was a law in both the observational sense (the empirically observed American Exceptionalism Effect!) and the legal sense, in that the US jealously guarded high-tech exports and made sure to retain foreign talent within its borders. But a counterexample did emerge, a country with a hostile, non-democratic mode of governance that was also indispensable to the global (American-led) economy.

After bumbling around in Central Asia and the Middle East chasing its own tail, the US has belatedly decided to seriously confront the threat of China. I am not so sure it understands the nature of this threat. Like the US, China has its own form of exceptionalism conveyed in the phrase “5,000 years of history,” which would seem to put the two in competition. But an exceptionalism rooted in a particular civilizational history of five millennia isn’t designed to be exportable like American Freedom™ or Soviet Communism™. The last thing that China would want to do is to remake other states in its own image because it doesn’t believe that can be done.

China’s global rise is self-limiting in other ways. Take the example of the much-lauded Belt and Road Initiative. I am not as dismissive as Tanner Greer, who thinks of the whole thing as clever marketing to cover for a state-owned-enterprise shopping spree. However, he’s not wrong. There’s a reason why we don’t consider the network of American-led multinational corporations as a US-led Belt and Road Initiative. It’s actually not easy to take all these constituent self-interested parts and use them as foreign policy poker chips except in very select circumstances. The US government has used the reach of American media and telecoms companies to spy on foreigners, but it cannot compel these companies to stick some coherent, long-term plan to further the interests of the American state over their own. The dispersed nature of Chinese economic assets (a port here in Sri Lanka, a shipping facility in Kazakhstan, a manufacturing facility in the UK, etc.) do give China a leg up in espionage and make it more resilient to sanctions, but they cannot be mobilized en masse in an economic war. When push comes to shove, local governments can always seize their own assets back, especially against a maligned power like China. Anti-Chinese riots and protests happen frequently across the world and China’s absolutely terrible reputation given its actions in Xinjiang and Hong Kong does it no favors. China does not station troops to protect their assets because its strategy has been informed by watching colonial powers exhaust themselves doing the same thing in overseas empire-building. The more exploitative end of China’s overseas acquisitions, pejoratively termed “debt-trap diplomacy,” which frustrate local governments who are denied a key geographic asset or facility, seem more likely to be accidents than gambits. Central planning is awfully difficult, and the Chinese government has their hands full regulating home-grown tech, real estate, and finance monopolies. Taken together, the Belt and Road Initiative acts as a form of diversified opportunity and insurance to China, than any actual threat to the US.

China’s terrible reputation also means it has no genuine allies, only highly transactional economic partners. The arm’s length relation between the Sinosphere and the rest of the world (the consequence of a mixture of government policies and language barriers) guarantees that the whole idea of a Chinese sphere of influence, like Chinese exceptionalism, is self-limiting. Yes, China will become a regional hegemon in Asia despite American efforts to the contrary. But it will be a distrusted one, which gives ample opportunities for the US to act as an offshore balancing power.

As China builds up its conventional and nonconventional military assets and becomes more belligerent in asserting its claims in the Pacific and potentially Indian Oceans, there are far more opportunities for mistakes that escalate into conflict. However, the localized nature of these clashes will not lead to the Thucydides Trap that some scholars seem to think is always imminent, because both sides have read enough WW1 and WW2 history to know that re-enacting global conflict between nuclear powers is pretty dumb. I’m not even sure if proxy wars are on the table here. Sabre-rattling will rise occasionally to fever–pitch but the majority of the violence, like in Hong Kong, will be directed domestically to disastrous effect.

The rationality of Chinese foreign policy is well demonstrated in their relations with Myanmar, which has been volatile for a while now, as it alternated between military rule and democracy while sustaining a multitude of ethnic militias on its border regions, where they have become a fixture of the landscape now. Chinese money poured into the country’s infrastructure, which necessitated delicate diplomatic negotiations. Keenly aware of not stoking anti-Chinese sentiment, China cultivated its relation with Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) as one of its top international partners when Myanmar turned democratic. Much to their chagrin, a coup on February 1, 2021 set those diplomatic efforts to waste as the military government returned and new agreements with the military junta had to be drafted. China is not a benign power by any stretch of the imagination, but it has behaved abroad in ways far better than peers in its position: Western colonial powers and militarist Japan. It has done so, not out of morality but out of a practical sense to avoid needless entanglements while making money.

In a multipolar world your allies are as likely to bring you down as your adversaries. The true threat that Russia and China pose is that they exist as pariahs that are both condemned by but also well-integrated in the global system. In the modern world, it is extremely difficult for large powers to command their allies, because they cannot credibly threaten to nuke them. The EU has extensive economic ties to both Russia and China. Lest we forget, the EU is a rickety thing held by duct tape and everyone’s desire not to do a Hitler again. Both EU and the UK, having suffered through Brexit, cannot afford to be choosy about whom they deal with. As more and more countries play this balancing act, US control becomes more and more unstable. The unilateral US exit from the Iran nuclear deal did not suddenly endear the Iranian regime to Europe, but it certainly gave an excuse for the Europeans to seek more trade abroad while pushing the envelope on US sanctions.

As pariahs, China and Russia are under no pretensions that other nations want to imitate them or be their friends. Like all regional powers, they both have accrued many blood-debts that they will never pay off. But their mere existence proves the possibility for alternatives to the existing order. And a consensus is slowly forming, from the pariahs to the non-pariahs, that US hegemony is not only no longer a benevolent thing (the pariahs argue that it never was) but that it is also now objectively untenable. Once this consensus forms, the only method of compliance is for the US to use explicit military and economic force to coerce allies into doing every little single thing. And that will be a massive pain to the US.

Whatever the capacity of Russia and China to seed authoritarian regimes by exporting surveillance tech and military aid, that threat of rising authoritarian regimes is far surpassed by the threat of a changing consensus. And let’s not forget that the EU funds concentration camps in Libya to deal with its migrant crisis, the US supported the UAE and Saudi Arabia in their war in Yemen, and that Israel (specifically the Israeli company NSO Group) proliferated spyware to all sorts of unsavory regimes.

We see these dynamics play out in the current Ukrainian war scare. As we speak, both Russian and Ukrainian forces are mobilizing for an invasion to play out. I am convinced by Michael Kofman’s analysis that war is actually likely and not just simple sabre-rattling for a better negotiating position.

Let’s consider how strange this is.

In a multipolar world, we would expect that the US would coordinate with Russia to balance out China. Or at the very least, the US and Russia should not actively antagonize each other. Yet we may (or in my and Kofman’s opinion, probably will) see American and European weaponry used by the Ukrainian military against a Russian invading force.

And this is happening for entirely rational reasons.

Even without repeating Russia’s talking points about “NATO eastward expansion,” a reasonable observer can agree that two opposing nuclear powers sharing a border is a bad situation. However, Latvia and Estonia both are NATO members who have a direct border with Russia. Moreover,the Russian-Latvian border is a mere 8 hour drive to Moscow. That Latvia has a nuclear deterrent against Russian invasion and an obligation to defend other NATO members, through NATO’s Article 5 on collective defense, is an absolutely insane security arrangement that no one should want.

But Latvia is a sovereign state, and if sovereignty and self-determination mean anything other than words, then it should be able to vote to cooperate with NATO if they want. I would rather hope, though, that NATO would have been smart enough to reject such a proposal. Luckily enough, Russia was weak and disorganized when the Baltic states were admitted into NATO in 2004. Given the irreversibility of this decision, Russia has made its peace with the outcome. Russia has its own cards, including conventional military assets and the substantial number of ethnic Russians in the Baltic States in its calculations to keep them in check.

Fast forward to today’s Ukraine, Russia would much rather de facto partition the country and render its eastern half ungovernable than accept another border with a NATO country. This is the same cruel logic that forces China to support North Korea, despite it being a major pain in the neck given its possession of nuclear weapons, constant need for Chinese aid, and the ticking time bomb of a collapsed regime triggering a massive refugee crisis at any moment in time.

The Ukrainian government could have certainly tried to strike a delicate balance between Europe and Russia like the massively corrupt Yanukovych tried and failed to do, but Ukraine is a democracy and is subject to the will of the people, who are deeply divided along cultural and political lines on this issue. Thus, I don’t blame the Ukrainian government one bit for desperately throwing their lot with NATO after being literally invaded by Russia, also given how horribly Russia treats its neighbors and the promise of economic integration with Europe. But their informal military partnership with NATO, with its flow of military aid and training, is certainly guaranteed to trigger the strategic logic that motivates Russia to intervene.

Given its role as the global police, the US cannot back down from and simply let Ukraine be invaded. It must do something, even if it means repeating its failed Syrian intervention, where it sent enough materiel and intelligence to the rebel side to postpone but not prevent their demise as the rebels were rolled by much better-trained conventional forces. It is physically and mathematically impossible for the Ukrainian military, which was essentially built from scratch after the countries military assets were lost in the Crimean annexation, to resist an invasion. So Ukrainian military doctrine has shifted to mount an initially stiff resistance before melting away into partisan-like warfare. I wonder if all the American and European intelligence leaks about Russian attempts to stage a false flag operation and plant a puppet government and recent shipments of military aid are but an initially stiff public response to Russian aggression before America and its allies melt away and throw their hands up to accept the inevitable.

Once this war occurs, there is no going back. I don’t think Russia is “being pushed into the arms of” China, but US-Russian coordination will certainly be far more difficult to achieve while more Russian-Chinese coordination is in the cards as Russia must deal with an increased sanctions regime. We see fractures within NATO, as Germany is showing up the US by blocking military aid to Ukraine. Whether or not this is a pacifist inclination or love of cheap Russian gas is up to you, but it opens the door to more instances of disobedience.

That’s the thing about chaos. You compute these outcomes step-by-step and second-by-second, and the trajectory you trace out diverges from your expectations in due time.

Author’s note:

I am wary of writing on this because the last thing I want to do is to accidentally aid anyone’s (dis)information campaign and stoke tensions when other people’s lives are at stake. My heart will always be for peace and against invaders. I understand the Russian strategic logic, but I don’t think it changes the fact they are going to rain egregious harm on Ukrainian civilians and military personnel without a direct threat of attack on the Russian homeland.