18 April 2023

A New American Grand Strategy to Counter Russia and China

John Bolton

The post-Cold War era is over. This brief interregnum following the Soviet empire’s defeat proved an illusory holiday from reality and is now rapidly disappearing before expanding or newly emerging threats. History often fails to arrange itself conveniently for our understanding, especially for those alive when its tectonic plates shift. By any standard, however, history is now moving rapidly.

Xi Jinping certainly thinks so. He told Vladimir Putin after their recent Moscow summit: “Right now there are changes—the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years—and we are the ones driving these changes together.” For China’s communists, that century started with the 1927 onset of civil war against Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang, culminating victoriously in 1949 when Mao Zedong established the People’s Republic of China and famously declared that “the Chinese people have stood up!”

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