EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — Some thirty years ago, when I was a CIA Chief of Station in the war-torn Balkans, a US Special Operations soldier with whom I was working gave me a unique gift in honor of our time together.
He was an elite soldier from a family of elite soldiers. His stepfather served as a Green Beret in Vietnam while his father was one of the German GSG-9 commandos who freed an airliner from terrorists at Mogadishu airport in 1977. The gift - a bolt from a World War Two German MG-34 machine gun - came from the weapon his grandfather carried as a Fallschirmjaeger (‘paratrooper’) during Operation Eiche (‘Oak’), the 1943 raid that freed Benito Mussolini from his mountaintop prison.
On being released, the Italian fascist leader reportedly told the commander of the raid, the infamous SS officer Otto Skorzeny: 'I knew my friend Adolf wouldn’t desert me'.
Unwilling to abandon his closest remaining ally, Hitler ordered a daring rescue of ‘Il Duce’. However, his subsequent installation of Mussolini as the leader of the so-called ‘Italian Socialist Republic’ underscored the reality that the Italian dictator had become nothing more than ‘the Fuehrer’s’ puppet.
That wasn’t always the case.
When they first met in Venice in 1934, Mussolini was very much the senior partner in the relationship while the German leader – who had only become Chancellor the year before - had still not fully consolidated power. But the Austrian corporal had already begun to put his malevolent mark on the world. During their 1936 meeting, Mussolini spoke of Fascism and Nazism being based on shared principles and of Italy and Germany having “a common destiny”. By the time of his May 1938 visit to Rome, Hitler had clearly gained the upper hand in the relationship. That disparity in power that would become increasingly evident during their subsequent 14 meetings as Mussolini pursued a course that led to military calamity in the Balkans in 1941; the destruction of Italian forces sent to join Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa; total defeat in North Africa; and ultimately to the Allied invasion of Italy and his own ouster by 1943.
It is worth thinking about the arc of the relationship between those two twentieth century dictators when we consider Xi Jinping’s visit to Russia to meet Vladimir Putin.
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There have been no reports of Moscow renaming a street “Xi Jinping Prospekt‘ in a manner akin to the renaming of a Roman road ‘Via Adolf Hitler’ in honor of the Nazi leader’s 1938 visit to that city. But this summit found the Chinese leader in his most dominant position of the more than 20 meetings between the two leaders since Xi came to power in 2013.
The publicly announced trade and economic agreements concluded at the summit – to include construction of a new natural gas pipeline, access to Russian markets and increased Russian use of Chinese currency - appear modest. But they point to Beijing’s ability to leverage a weakened and isolated Russia to its own ends, particularly as a source for energy and precious minerals.
We do not yet have a clear indication as to what the two may have discussed in the security arena, much less the details of any secret protocols agreed upon. It is, nevertheless, safe to say that those talks centered on their deepening confrontation with Washington and the war in Ukraine.
There was much advance speculation that the summit might produce a formal Ukraine peace proposal given China’s role in reconciling Saudi Arabia and Iran and Xi’s expressed willingness to broker such a deal. Nonetheless, a comment by Putin to the effect that Chinese peace proposals could form the basis for a settlement aside, the meeting concluded with no end to the combat in Ukraine in sight.
This is not surprising for the very simple reason that Putin is not in such extremis that he needs rescuing by Xi, be it from battlefield defeat or an International Criminal Court jail cell. Having not yet fulfilled his aim of capturing all the Ukrainian territory Russia has annexed; and knowing that neither Ukraine nor its Western backers are prepared to conclude any peace agreement that acquiesces in those gains; the Russian leader is not ready to end his war.
Putin is clearly the aggressor in this conflict, and he ought not be rewarded for it. Unfortunately, the hard arithmetic of war seems to be demanding casualties that the Russians can, and the heroic Ukrainians likely cannot, long sustain.
If present trends on the ground continue, we could soon be confronted with a reality that will force hard, unappealing choices on Kyiv and its backers. The Russian army, like the Red Army before it in Finland and ‘the Great Patriotic War’, failed miserably at the outset of this conflict and has responded with what it does best: the massive use of firepower and the profligate expenditure of manpower. Putin seems prepared to grind away at the Ukrainians for as long as it takes to achieve an outcome he can portray as justifying the blood and treasure expended to ‘win’ it.
At the same time, Putin surely realizes he may well need the assistance of his “dear friend” from Beijing to bring his disastrous campaign in Ukraine to conclusion. When that time comes, he will likely seek Xi’s help in securing an indefinite ceasefire that allows Moscow to consolidate its gains, rebuild its military and claim something that approximates ‘victory’. It is, therefore, likely that the two discussed scenarios under which China will take a more active role in pushing for ceasefire in Ukraine.
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Those scenarios might include Beijing stepping up its peace campaign after Russia has achieved its goals, after ongoing Russian offensive efforts to capture more territory have reached a culminating point or should a much-discussed Ukrainian counteroffensive achieve some success.
That said, it is unlikely that Xi – who has been complicit in this war at least since his 04 February 2022 Beijing meeting with Putin – would be bothered if the fighting and dying continued for a while longer.
Absent the overthrow of the man in the Kremlin – which appears extremely unlikely and is something Beijing would do everything in its power to prevent - China will emerge as the major beneficiary from the Ukraine conflict - however and whenever - it ends.
The Ukraine war will have served to distract the US and allies from shifting military resources to the Pacific region; to deplete western arms stockpiles and government finances; to sufficiently weaken and isolate Russia to the point where it will clearly emerge from it as the junior partner in its alliance with Beijing; to grant China insight into – and better prepare for - the likely western policy and military responses to its coming campaign to settle the Taiwan question; and to allow China to portray itself - to those not a party to the war - as a force for peace.
While there was no public discussion at the summit of Chinese military assistance to Russia, Beijing will likely step-up covert deliveries of critical arms and components needed by Moscow, to include artillery shells, drones and micro-chips in particular, through proxies such as North Korea and Iran. Beijing is likely to eschew large-scale overt shipments of Chinese-origin arms (that is weapons that can be identified as such when used or lost in Ukraine) unless and until it decides that Russia might face defeat or could be considering the use of weapons of mass destruction absent such support.
In that vein, any hope that Xi’s visit might have dissuaded Moscow from threatening to use nuclear weapons were dashed by Dmitry Medvedev’s warning that Russia would be willing to use nuclear armed missiles against any country that might arrest Putin on war crimes charges. Such threats are not new. But Moscow’s frequent use of such language together with the recent downing of a US drone over the Black Sea, and assertions such as that made by the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Rybakov following Xi’s visit that Russia is “in a de facto state of open conflict with the United States” underscore the growing potential for intentional or unintentional escalation of the conflict.
If this is, as has often – and rightly – been asserted, an existential war for the Russian leader, we must consider the possibility that he is willing to use all means at his disposal in waging it. Rhetorically, the two leaders - both in summit statements and in reciprocal editorials published in advance of their meetings – employed the dialectic language of the era in which they came of age. Xi’s avowal that “we are always on the side of peace and dialogue…(and) stand firmly on the right side of history” and Putin’s complimenting of China’s “colossal leap forward” could easily have been voiced during any fraternal get-together of Cold War communist leaders.
The two repeatedly and pointedly underscored the fact that their relationship is based upon rejection of the US-led world order and their commitment to mutual action aimed at bringing ‘unipolar’ global dominance to an end. In the Rossiyskaya Gazeta, Xi extolled Moscow-Beijing ties as ‘setting a new model of great power relations’ while complaining about ‘hegemonic and bullying practices’ of an unnamed power - read the US. For his part, Putin wrote in the People’s Daily that ‘the crisis in Ukraine was provoked and fueled by the West, a manifestation of its desire to retain its international dominance and preserve the unipolar world order’.
Proclamation of a ‘partnership without limits’ lacks the martial tone of a ‘Pact of Steel’. We are, however, paying a steep price for our failure to achieve what should have been one of our principal strategic objectives: to prevent a partnership between Beijing and Moscow. Driven by their individual actuarial calendars, Putin and Xi’s vitriolic antipathy for the US coupled with their combined capacity for destruction make them the most dangerous duo we have confronted since Hitler and Mussolini. Both leaders are committed to ensuring their countries take what they see as their rightful places in an emerging multi-polar global order.
But as was the case with their Fascist and Nazi forbearers, the threats each country poses to us are not equal. Russia - a revanchist power with bounded aspirations that is looking to reassert its influence on the world stage and particularly in former Soviet space - has shown itself in Ukraine to be less capable militarily than we had believed. China - an expansionist state with a rapidly growing military possessed of seemingly unbounded ambition and unconcealed aspirations to supplant the US from its leading role in the world – is no longer a peer competitor. It is our principal adversary. We ought to focus our attention and national security resources accordingly before it is too late.
Read China’s Chess Game in Ukraine: Is the West Ready?
By 1944, Mussolini knew his end was coming. “I was”, he said, “an interesting person…Now I am little more than a corpse.” In April 1945, that is exactly what he was, his body strung up from the roof of an Esso station along with that of his mistress. Vladimir Putin may yet wind up hanging off a Lukoil station. But before he meets whatever finish fate has in store for him, he and his Chinese counterpart are intent on ending the illusion of the so-called ‘rules-based international order’.
As Xi told him on departing the Kremlin: “Change is coming that hasn’t happened in 100 years. And we are driving this change together”. Putin’s chilling response was “I agree”. Like the dictators who plunged the world into global conflict, they speak of base grievance and grandiose phraseology of destiny. They are telling us war is coming. I hope we are listening.
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