China-Russia ties expose a Republican foreign policy blind spot

The Republican Party has been tough on China but appears to be finding it harder to reconcile that with Beijing’s closeness to Moscow amid the Ukraine war
Over time, Republicans seem poised to abandon traditional foreign policy positions aligned with a liberal world order

Robert Delaney

Published: 8:30pm, 27 May 2024

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The hug that Chinese President Xi Jinping gave his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin earlier this month, along with the many other expressions of mutual support, made clear which side Beijing is taking on Russia’s war against Ukraine, and underscored the foreign policy problem that the US Republican Party has.

How does one proceed in portraying China as the most pressing threat facing the US, which has been a political imperative for both American political parties in recent years, when Russia continues to integrate its economy with China’s while trying to bombard its neighbour into submission?

As Putin makes dark references to Russia’s nuclear capabilities, it’s becoming impossible to avoid mentioning Moscow as equally dangerous, and if we look closely enough we can see a growing effort by the Republican Party to lay the blame for the Sino-Russian partnership entirely at US President Joe Biden’s feet and use it as an election issue.

To get into this, let’s be clear about the Republican Party’s new ideological foundation: the liberal international order that the party’s earlier incarnation forged over decades – where free markets and civil society initiatives have broadened political power bases throughout the West – is now seen by the party of today as more dangerous than anything that Moscow and Beijing might have done to undermine it.

In other words, better to strangle independent media and a judiciary that might question efforts to subvert elections as well as regularly employ Nazi rhetoric than to allow transgender people to use bathrooms that align with their gender identity.

In the Republican Party, the respect for autocrats used to be mostly limited to Trump himself and the most fervent among his base. Just last week, for example, he proclaimed that Putin, Xi and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, are “at the top of their game” while denigrating the US.

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What if Trump wins?

Trump has managed to get away with these comments because they’re often just one small part of his usual meandering vortex of rhetorical extremes that echo white supremacist and Christian nationalist backwash.

But now others in Trump’s orbit, many with better foreign policy bona fides, are joining in to seed the ground for the new positioning that the entire party will need to adopt as part of the effort to unwind what it did globally in the second half of the 20th century.

Cue Michael Pillsbury, a well-respected China analyst, now with the Heritage Foundation, who has long been out in front when it comes to the argument for the hardest line possible against Beijing.

He doesn’t deny that Beijing and Moscow are much closer now. However, Pillsbury is asserting that not only is Biden responsible for the hell that Putin has unleashed on Ukraine, but that he’s also culpable for not supporting negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv.

Putin has no intention of giving up an inch of Ukrainian land that his forces occupy, and will use any means at his disposal to keep it. So what good are negotiations unless the parties involved are prepared to accept this condition?

Aside from the allegation that Biden is the real villain, Pillsbury came out with a line straight from Moscow’s propaganda machine: “We need some kind of negotiations over the Ukraine.”

Anyone at his level knows that using the article “the” before Ukraine was the way that the Soviet Union referred to the area. The article was dropped when Ukraine gained its independence.

This is not an insignificant verbal slip. It is part of a reframing of the situation that prepares the ground for the ultimate shift that Republicans need to make to achieve their new geopolitical aims.

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Furious mainland China slams Taiwanese leader’s ‘blatant’ call for independence

Over time, the new Republican Party will not side with a democratic Taiwan against the Beijing-Moscow partnership which has become a military industrial behemoth pushing nationalist-populist agendas. When it comes to international power projection, it will be much easier for the Republican Party to deal with like-minded players like Putin and Xi than it will be to cater to the agendas of the world’s democracies.

Pillsbury isn’t the only traditional Republican who’s embracing the Trumpist extremes. Nikki Haley, Trump’s most formidable opponent in the Republican Party primary, who put up some valiant fights against the Russians when she was the former president’s UN ambassador, now says she’s prepared to vote for him.

The question isn’t whether the Republican Party will side with the world’s autocrats. It already is. It’s whether their twisting of the truth will persuade enough American voters to go along with them.

Robert Delaney is the Post’s North America bureau chief