Colin Cleary
It is a long-cherished shibboleth in Washington that China is America’s gravest strategic threat. This line of thought is shared across both political parties, and it guides strategic thinking at the Department of State, the Pentagon, and in the White House. The House of Representatives has established a committee to study the malign activities of the Chinese Communist Party. President Donald Trump regularly criticizes Chinese trade practices and vows tariffs in retaliation. One of the most notable issues of the 2024 United States presidential election was the suspicious Chinese purchase of American farmland near sensitive military facilities, and the ways in which this could be stopped.
China is no paragon of virtue in global affairs, and it must be held to account. But to bring the preponderance of America’s resources to bear on Beijing is to miss the activities of a different member of the United Nations Security Council, whose leaders and state propagandists channels routinely threaten nuclear war against the United States and its European allies; whose dictator has invaded and fraudulently annexed the territory of another internationally recognized state at will; and whose military launches calculated missile and drone strikes on civilian targets every day.
To be clear, China is the only peer competitor of the United States across all domains: military, economic, cultural, and technological. But China’s poor behavior on the international stage cannot hold a candle to Russia’s, whose leaders have openly embraced nuclear blackmail. In one telling exchange, former President and current Vice Chair of Russia’s National Security Council Dmitri Medvedev on July 28 called President Trump’s setting of a 10- to-12-day deadline for Russia to end the conflict in Ukraine a “threat and a step toward war,” and threatened nuclear retaliation in response.
Russia, rather than China, thus represents the most pressing danger to the security of the United States. Deterring and containing Putin’s regime must be President Donald Trump’s top priority. US national security strategy, under Biden as well as Trump, has gotten it wrong by placing China first. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 came as a shock to the West, but it probably should not have. The Russian leader has long held—as his 2021 article “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” makes clear—that Ukraine in its entirety rightfully belongs to Russia, and its independence was a historic mistake that he is intent on correcting.
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