China Is Watching Ukraine With a Lot of Interest
Updated at 10:05 a.m. ET on January 14, 2021.
As Joe Biden confronts Vladimir Putin about Russia’s military buildup along its border with Ukraine, another world leader is probably watching with keen interest. China’s Xi Jinping, too, has a geopolitical grievance in his neighborhood—in his case over Taiwan, the microchip-rich island that Beijing insists is and always should be part of China. Like Putin, who is eager to bring Ukraine back under Moscow’s control, Xi worries that a former chunk of his country’s empire is growing closer with the United States and its allies. How Xi interprets (or worse, misinterprets) the outcome of the Ukraine standoff could influence whether and how China tries to reunify with Taiwan, and thus has implications for the security and stability of East Asia.
That makes the Ukraine crisis a crucial test of American global power. Four years of Donald Trump’s “America First” chaos abroad, combined with political and social polarization and a failed response to the—one too divided, overstretched, and just plain weary to sustain its far-flung commitments. This narrative, which Biden’s botched only reinforced, seems to have taken hold within the Chinese leadership and has become a regular theme of official propaganda. As Xi, Putin, and other autocrats intensify their efforts to roll back American power, the U.S. is facing the stiffest challenge to its global primacy since the fall of the Soviet Union.
