Russia and China in the Gray Zone

Ariane Tabatabai

Source Link

A number of European nations, including Poland, Estonia, Denmark, and Norway, have experienced Russian manned and unmanned aircraft incursions into their airspaces. NATO allies responded with immediate defensive measures such as shooting down the Russian unmanned assets and have also reportedly started to revisit and refine their own approach and rules of engagement in the face of such incursions. They are doing so to telegraph their resolve and showcase their combined capabilities to Russia in the face of what Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has characterized as “the closest we have been to open conflict since World War Two.”

Though Russia has a long history of gradually pushing the envelope to achieve its aims, its recent activities are similar to the recent Chinese playbook on incrementally increasing pressure on Taiwan. To be sure, these two campaigns have significant differences (for example, while Moscow’s most recent activities have thus far been limited to air incursions, Beijing’s have also spanned the maritime domain). Russia’s recent activities have also been more ad hoc, and limited in their breadth and depth, while China’s have been sustained for several years, and gradually grown in scope, intensity, occurrence, and complexity. More fundamentally, China’s campaign should be understood in the context of its wish to reunify with Taiwan, which is not the case with Russia’s activities against NATO. But they share a number of similarities and are occurring against the backdrop of increased cooperation between the two countries in their “gray-zone campaigns,” a term used by the intelligence community to describe the “deliberate use of coercive or subversive instruments of power by, or on behalf of, a state to achieve its political or security goals at the expense of others, in ways that exceed or exploit gaps in international norms but are intended to remain below the perceived threshold for direct armed conflict.” Such cooperation has implications for NATO in Europe as well as U.S. allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific region. This is especially true as Beijing seeks to attain readiness to militarily seize Taiwan by 2027 even as its preference likely remains to do so without the use of force.