By Will Marshall

Since Xi Jinping rose to power in 2013, China has pursued an increasingly self-isolating diplomacy of jut-jawed belligerence. Nothing better illustrates the damage done to Beijing’s global standing than Xi’s declaration of a “no limits” partnership with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

For starters, it was spectacularly mistimed. Xi announced the new Sino-Russian alliance during the Beijing Olympics in February 2022, just 20 days before Russia invaded Ukraine.

There’s no indication that Putin gave Xi a heads up about the attack, though President Biden had repeatedly warned the world it was coming. The invasion put the Chinese leader on the spot because it brazenly violated two principles Beijing supposedly holds sacred — territorial integrity and non-interference in the affairs of sovereign states.

Keep reading in The Hill.

Almost exactly a century ago, Benito Mussolini seized power in Italy and Joseph Stalin took control of the Soviet Union. These events marked the origins of fascist and communist totalitarianism, which soon gave rise to Adolf Hitler in Germany and lit the fuse for both World War II and the Cold War.

That era seemed to come to an end in 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union started to implode. Popular uprisings toppled tyrants, and liberalizing winds swept the globe.

But the totalitarian idea is making a comeback today thanks to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping. Like their predecessors, these dictators are dangerous because they have designs on others’ territory, few domestic checks on their power and contempt for the resilience and resolve of free societies.

Read more in The Hill.

By Tamar Jacoby, Director of the New Ukraine Project

When President Joe Biden touched down in Kyiv on February 20, it was more than another secret presidential trip like the visits Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama made to Afghanistan and Iraq. There was no stealthy meeting with American troops, no photo op on a base in an American theatre of operations. Biden’s goal was to demonstrate American support for a democratic ally fighting the most devastating war in Europe since 1945. Not even Franklin Roosevelt did this. He never visited London during the Blitz, choosing to meet Winston Churchill on safer ground in Washington, Casablanca, Tehran, and Yalta. That Biden’s visit came on the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made it all the more significant as a show of determination to halt Vladimir Putin’s push to crush a democratic neighbor. “I thought it was critical that there not be any doubt, none whatsoever, about U.S. support for Ukraine,” Mr. Biden said.

Andrey Dubenko is the co-owner of a small shopping mall on the river between Bucha and Irpin, two of the Kyiv suburbs that saw the worst fighting in the weeks after Russia’s invasion last February. The boundary between the two towns—one was occupied through the next month, the other remained in Ukrainian hands—became the front line. Air strikes, artillery fire, and hand-to-hand combat in the parking lot gutted Dubenko’s mall. Now the 54-year-old investor and developer, a man old enough to have served in the Soviet army in the 1980s, is rebuilding and optimistic. But he is also unflinchingly clear-eyed about who will determine what happens in Ukraine. “When will the war end?” he asks rhetorically. “That will be decided by Americans. The war will end when the U.S. wants it to end – when they stop sending weapons and ammunition.”

Read more in Washington Monthly.

By Will Marshall, President of PPI

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s vicious mauling of Ukraine is shattering quite a few grand illusions about the post-post-Cold War world.

For starters, Russia’s failure to defeat its much smaller and poorer neighbor has demolished its image as a military juggernaut. Instead of confirming its status as a great power and pillar of a new, multipolar world order, Putin’s war has exposed Russia as a declining power — at best a junior partner in the new league of autocracies directed from Beijing.

Plagued by old equipment, bad logistics and poor leadership, Russian troops have been outfought by determined Ukrainian defenders. In just under a year, the war has cost Russia “significantly” more than 100,000 casualties, says General Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. That’s more in one year than Russia suffered in a decade of war in Afghanistan.

Read more in The Hill.

By Will Marshall, President and Founder of PPI.

Maybe Europeans are not from Venus after all. In a rare display of unity and resolve, they are pouring advanced weapons into Ukraine, expanding NATO, kicking their addiction to Russian gas and tightening the economic squeeze on Moscow.

With the reprehensible exception of Viktor Orban’s Hungary, our European allies seem determined to thwart Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutish attempt to dismember Ukraine if not erase it from the map altogether. To the surprise of many Americans, the creaky old transatlantic alliance is beginning to look like a strategic asset again.

Sweden and Finland, strictly neutral during the Cold War, are joining NATO. That’s confronted Putin with a new, 800-mile northern border with the defensive alliance he loathes and falsely claims poses an offensive threat to Russia.

But the most consequential shift in Europe’s dovish zeitgeist has occurred in Germany. Stung to action by Putin’s second invasion of Ukraine in February, Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced a “Zeitenwende” – turning point – in the quasi-pacifist drift of Germany’s post-Cold War diplomacy. Instead of the usual humanitarian aid, he promised to send Kiev weapons for self-defense and to boost Germany’s military spending by $100 billion a year.

Read the full piece in The Hill. 

By Will Marshall, President of PPI

Since his election as president in 2000, Vladimir Putin has methodically consolidated power in his hands with the expressed aim of making Russia great again. Instead, he’s diminished his country’s power and global standing in every respect but one — Moscow’s ability to threaten its neighbors with nuclear weapons.

Russian observers have characterized Putin’s increasingly autocratic reign as a tacit pact with Russian society: The Kremlin won’t interfere in the everyday lives of citizens if they stay out of politics. It’s a bad bargain for the Russian people.

For one thing, it’s cost them a rare shot at governing themselves after centuries of czarist and totalitarian despotism. Over the past two decades, Putin has steadily snuffed out post-Soviet Russia’s incipient democracy — rigging elections, jailing dissidents and journalists, suppressing independent civic associations and colluding in the assassination of regime critics at home and around the world.

Read the full piece in The Hill. 

By Will Marshall, President of PPI

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) – the most successful and enduring mutual security pact in history – is about to start its second act. In Act 1, the United States played the leading role in deterring Russian aggression and keeping the peace in Europe. In Act 2, Europeans will take center stage.

With longtime neutrals Sweden and Finland knocking on its door, NATO likely will grow to 32 members. For the transatlantic allies, however, the wise course isn’t merely to expand NATO, but to reinvent it.

How to seize that opportunity – which goes well beyond hackneyed calls for greater “burden-sharing” – should be the focal point of NATO’s Madrid summit later this month.

NATO should be fundamentally reconfigured to reflect three geopolitical realities. First, since its creation in 1949, the alliance has expanded dramatically as many of Europe’s ancient feuds and rivalries have been subsumed within pan-European values and institutions.

Second, NATO’s 27 European members (excluding Turkey) vastly exceed Russia in economic clout, population and military spending. Third, America inexorably is turning its strategic gaze to China and the balance of power in Asia.

Read the full piece in The Hill.