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People prepare food around a fire outside buildings heavily hit by Russian shelling in Mariupol, Ukraine, on May 5. (TASS/Yonhap News)

With the war in Ukraine having now raged on for more than 100 days, the world has entered a critical period that will determine whether the two authoritarian powers of China and Russia are isolated in their opposition to the US or whether they will form a single bloc. A sharp conflict is underway between the inertia of maintaining the US-led unipolar system and the centripetal force driving China and Russia together in their quest to bring about a multipolar system.

Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine at a time while the US was focusing its foreign policy resources on the Indo-Pacific region to counter the rise of China. While the current conflict is taking place in Europe and not in the Taiwan Strait — the main stage of confrontation between the US and China — the war is already testing the US’ capacity and resolve to defend the liberal international order, which has relied on American hegemony.

Those circumstances were in evidence in US President Joe Biden’s tour of South Korea and Japan in late May. During that tour, the US moved urgently to advance its Indo-Pacific Strategy both on a general and concrete level. On a general level, the US officially launched the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework and held a summit of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, the collaborative framework between the US, Japan, Australia and India aimed at containing China. And on a concrete level, the US strengthened military cooperation with Korea and Japan.

Jake Sullivan, the White House national security advisor, said during a press conference on May 18 that Biden “intends to seize this moment — this pivotal moment — to assert bold and confident American leadership” during his visit to the Indo-Pacific region.

The crux of the US’ Indo-Pacific Strategy is to marshal allies together to suppress “revisionist forces” such as China and Russia in acknowledgment that American hegemony is being threatened. The details of this strategy were disclosed in the National Security Strategy and the National Defense Strategy that the Trump administration released in December 2017 and January 2018, respectively.

In those documents, the US defined China and Russia as revisionist forces that seek to challenge the US. According to the US, it is gradually becoming clearer that those two countries are seeking to build a world that conforms to their authoritarian model and to acquire veto power over other countries’ economic, diplomatic and national security decisions. As a solution, the US made clear its intention to maintain a balance of power in friendly regions in the Indo-Pacific, Europe, Middle East, and the Western Hemisphere while launching a struggle between power blocs.

Following his inauguration in January 2021, Biden has taken steps to strengthen the Indo-Pacific Strategy while rebuilding alliances in both the East and West that had atrophied during the Trump administration.

While attending the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 19, 2021, one month after his inauguration, Biden said that humanity had reached an “inflection point” between democracy and autocracy and that “the United States will work closely with our European Union partners and the capitals across the continent — from Rome to Riga.”

Then in March, Biden turned his attention to the Indo-Pacific region by holding the Quad’s first virtual conference. In September, he launched AUKUS, a trilateral security pact between the US, the UK and Australia.

In economic terms, Biden began accelerating efforts to reorganize supply chains to the exclusion of China in the area of cutting-edge technology in February, immediately after his inauguration. That includes reviewing supply chains in the four critical areas of semiconductors, large-capacity batteries, key minerals, and medical products.

Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, Sweden and Finland — two Northern European states that have long cultivated neutrality — have applied for membership in NATO, while even Germany, which has maintained a pacifistic course for the past seven decades, decided to hike arms spending. Russia’s miscalculation has further reinforced the Atlantic alliance between the US and Europe.

Similar changes have taken place in the Indo-Pacific region. At a summit on May 23, the US and Japan paved the way for substantially raising Japan’s defense spending to more than 2% of gross domestic product — compared with the 1%–2% range now — and for Japan to acquire enemy base strike capabilities that would allow it to attack other countries’ territory directly.

This means that Japan, which has been pursuing rearmament, would be able to launch a strike on a missile base in China or elsewhere. The US is also attempting to rein in a nuclear-armed North Korea and rising China through trilateral military cooperation with South Korea and Japan.

On the economic front, the US is working to completely isolate Russia, one of the three central axes in the global geopolitical order, by mobilizing its allies to join in on unprecedented sanctions. But the limits of and cracks in US hegemony have become apparent.

When the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution calling for the withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukraine on March 2, shortly after hostilities were launched, the measure was supported by 141 out of 193 member countries. Another five opposed it, while 35 abstained. Included among the abstentions were several key countries, such as China, India and South Africa.

The easing of anti-Russian sentiment was also evident in the April 7 vote on whether to suspend Russia from the UN Human Rights Council, with 93 countries approving the measure, 24 opposing it, and 58 abstaining. Numerous so-called “middle powers” such as Brazil, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Mexico chose to abstain rather than back the US.

The reason they opted not to cooperate with the US has to do with their increased economic interdependence with China and Russia as a result of the rapid progression of globalization in the wake of the Cold War system breaking down. Russia, in particular, is a giant in the energy area. This has led to holes forming in the sanctions on Russia as countries like China, India, Turkey, Brazil, and South Africa have continued importing Russian oil and fertilizer even after the war was launched.

Even Brazil, which is considered a pro-US country in South America, has continued to trade with Russia, recognizing Russian fertilizer as essential for its export crops. With Russian petroleum going for essentially clearance prices, India has reaped major economic rewards by increasing its Russian imports from 430,000 tons in March all the way to 3.36 million tons in May. The EU has moved to impose an embargo on coal and petroleum imports, but it has been unable to touch natural gas, which accounts for 40% of all imports.

The international community now collectively faces two possible outcomes. In one of them, the West’s efforts to isolate China and Russia succeed, resulting in a weaker Russia and the slowing of China’s growth. In this case, the liberal global order centering on the US may be sustained for the foreseeable future.

In the second scenario, China and Russia manage to overcome the siege by the US and others to survive as a bloc.

Meeting on March 30 with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Tunxi, a district in China’s Anhui Province, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov declared, “We are living through a crucial phase in the history of international relations.”

“I believe that the international solution will emerge more clearly according to the outcome. We will proceed toward a more just and democratic multipolar order with China, and with other like-minded people,” he said at the time.

If this happens, a Eurasian front consisting of Turkey, Iran and India may coalesce to back up Sino-Russian solidarity.

The solidarity between continental countries such as China and Russia with countries located around the Eurasian continent, such as Iran, has been argued since the time of Halford Mackinder (1861-1947), often called the founder of geopolitics, to Zbigniew Brzezinski (1928-2017), former White House national security advisor.

This is the scenario that strategists in the West have been most wary of.

Although the war in Ukraine has grown protracted and economic blocs have been intensified, there are also scenarios pointing to great ambiguity regarding who the real winner will be.

“If the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted a need to shorten supply chains, the war in Ukraine underscores the importance to have reliable trading partners,” said Peter Martin, director of research at Wood Mackenzie, in a recent report. Martin said that this was “not the end” of globalization, but rather a sign that global trade may be reshuffled around two or more “distinct blocs.”

Christian Roeloffs, CEO of Container xChange, says, “What we are expecting to see in the coming times is clearly a lower reliance on the Big East-West trade routes between China and Europe, as well as China and the US.”

According to these two experts, such changes in trade practices and trade routes could be an opportunity for Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam as well as Latin America and Africa. This is because the drop in trade between the West and China will prompt the two sides to seek to secure trade and markets with other countries within their respective regions.

This is why countries around Eurasia, such as Turkey and India, or middle power countries in Latin America and Africa, are pursuing strategies to become more economically independent from the US since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine.

As the war coincides with the COVID-19 pandemic, the supply chains are being reorganized and the global economy continues to fragment. No matter how the war ends, it is clear that Russia’s raw materials and China’s production power and markets will be much less integrated with the Western economy.

This will result in a world that is more uncertain and dangerous than before, where security and economic crises between different camps rear their heads again and again.

By Jung E-gil, senior staff writer

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