In February 2022, China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin declared a partnership with no limits. Soon after, Russia invaded Ukraine, complicating the relationship of the two nations.

In conversation  WBUR's "On Point" with Meghna Chakrabarti, Center Fellow Oriana Skylar Mastro discussed the dynamics of the China-Russia relationship, and the implications of the war in Ukraine. 

Sign up for APARC newsletters to receive our experts' commentary and analysis.

According to Mastro, what China wants from the Russia-Ukraine War is a quick resolution through a negotiated settlement that provides Russia security assurances from the West and China legitimacy if they need to use force over Taiwan. "The China-Russia alignment is extremely deep," said Mastro "but the scope [of their security partnership] is very narrow." At present, Russia helps China challenge U.S. hegemony in Asia, but "we shouldn't expect China to be forthcoming about support for Russia in Ukraine."

Mastro also spoke to Fox 2 KTVU following a two-hour phone call between President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping, in which Biden Warned Xi of ‘Consequences’ if China aids Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Mastro remarked that China has "not come out in condemnation of this blatant use of force and China can't stand on the sidelines and expect for its reputation not to be tarnished if they continue to support Russia, even implicitly."

Image

Mastro suggested that this moment has serious implications for the U.S.-China great power competition and that success in the U.S.-China relationship "isn’t about [the two powers] but about [their] relationships with the rest of the world...the United States is trying to compete with China economically, politically, and militarily around the world and [the United States has] commitments everywhere...China is very focused on the region, at least militarily, and that makes it difficult for the United States to compete."

China and the United States are the two biggest carbon-emitting countries in the world. Decarbonization in these two countries will have material impacts on a global scale and is timelier than ever, according to a recent report from Stanford University’s Precourt Institute for Energy, Stanford Center at Peking University, APARC's China Program, and Peking University’s Institute of Energy.

The report is the product of a roundtable series, held in October 2021 that brought together leading American and Chinese current and former officials, and experts in the public and private sectors working on energy, climate, the environment, industry, transportation, and finance. The roundtables promoted discussion around how China and the United States can accelerate decarbonization and cooperate with one another to meet their carbon neutrality goals by mid-century.

The thematic areas of the roundtables included U.S.- China collaboration on climate change, global sustainable finance, corporate climate pledges, and the opportunities and challenges for the acceleration of decarbonization in both countries in general, as well as specifically for the power, transportation, and industry sectors.

The resultant report reviews the key themes and takeaways that emerged from the closed-door discussions. It builds on the “U.S.-China Joint Statement Addressing the Climate Crisis” released by the U.S. Department of State on April 17, 2021 and shares some common themes with the “U.S.-China Joint Glasgow Declaration on Enhancing Climate Action in the 2020s” released on November 10, 2021. Shiran Victoria Shen of the Hoover Institution authored the report, with contributions by Yi Cui of the Precourt Institute for Energy, Zhijun Jin of the Institute of Energy and Jean Oi, Director of APARC's China Program. 

The report suggests that tensions in U.S.-China relations have hindered the acceleration of decarbonization and that open science in fundamental research areas must be encouraged. Universities can educate future leaders, advance knowledge, and foster U.S.-China collaboration on open-science R&D, regardless of the political environment. The report argues that the most promising strategy to decarbonize energy is to electrify consumption now served by fossil fuels as much as possible while decarbonizing electricity generation. 

The roundtables identified six areas where the U.S. and China could collaborate: global green finance, carbon capture and storage, low-carbon agriculture and food processing, methane leak reduction, grid integration and greater use of intermittent renewables, and governance, including at the subnational level. The report further identifies more concrete and additional promising areas for accelerated decarbonization and bilateral collaboration, as well as the obstacles to be tackled, including institutional, political, and financial constraints. 

This article first appeared in the online magazine American Purpose.  

On March 9, South Koreans head to the voting booths to elect their new president. Although conventional wisdom posits that foreign affairs have little effect on voting preferences, South Koreans have defied this prediction in the past—and now, they may once again. Indeed, the atmosphere in this year’s election recalls that of 2002, when anti-American sentiments swept the South Korean presidential election. This time, it may be anti-Chinese sentiments that make an impact.

Sign up for APARC newsletters to receive our experts' commentary and analysis.

According to our survey of over one thousand South Koreans, conducted this past January, a large majority of respondents—78 percent—indicated that Republic of Korea (ROK)-China relations will be an important consideration when deciding which presidential candidate to vote for. Given that younger South Koreans are expected to be the deciding factor in this election, it is particularly significant that the figure rises to 82 percent for respondents in their twenties. Twenty years ago, anti-American sentiments tipped the vote in favor of Roh Moo-hyun, the liberal candidate, who pledged not to kowtow to the United States. This time, how will anti-Chinese sentiment play out in Seoul? Will it work in favor of the conservatives, who tend to be tougher on China and emphasize the U.S.-ROK alliance? And what does this mean for Washington?

This commentary was originally published by The Wall Street Journal.

A Russian invasion of Ukraine would be the most consequential use of military force in Europe since World War II and could put Moscow in a position to threaten U.S. allies in Europe. Many in the American foreign-policy establishment argue that the appropriate U.S. response to any such invasion is a major American troop deployment to the Continent. This would be a grave mistake.

The U.S. can no longer afford to spread its military across the world. The reason is simple: an increasingly aggressive China, the most powerful state to rise in the international system since the U.S. itself. By some measures, China’s economy is now the world’s largest. And it has built a military to match its economic heft. Twenty-five years ago, the Chinese military was backward and obsolete. But extraordinary increases in Beijing’s defense budget over more than two decades, and top political leaders’ razor-sharp focus, have transformed the People’s Liberation Army into one of the strongest militaries the world has ever seen.

Sign up for APARC newsletters to receive our experts' commentary and analysis.

China’s new military is capable not only of territorial defense but of projecting power. Besides boasting the largest navy in the world by ship count, China enjoys some capabilities, like certain types of hypersonic weapons, that even the U.S. hasn’t developed.

Most urgently, China poses an increasingly imminent threat to Taiwan. Xi Jinping has made clear that his platform of “national rejuvenation” can’t be successful until Taiwan unifies with the mainland—whether it wants to or not. The PLA is growing more confident in its ability to conquer Taiwan even if the U.S. intervenes. Given China’s military and economic strength, China’s leaders reasonably doubt that the U.S. or anyone else would mount a meaningful response to an invasion of Taiwan. To give a sense of his resolve, Mr. Xi warned that any “foreign forces” standing in China’s way would have “their heads . . . bashed bloody against a Great Wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people.”

The U.S. must defend Taiwan to retain its credibility as the leader of a coalition for a free and open Indo-Pacific. From a military perspective, Taiwan is a vital link in the first island chain of the Western Pacific. If Taiwan falls into Chinese hands, the U.S. will find it harder to defend critical allies like Japan and the Philippines, while China will be able to project its naval, air and other forces close to the U.S. and its territories. Taiwan is also an economic dynamo, the ninth-largest U.S. trading partner of goods with a near-monopoly on the most advanced semiconductor technology—to which the U.S. would most certainly lose access after a war.

The Biden administration this month ordered more than 6,000 additional U.S. troops deployed to Eastern Europe, with many more potentially on the way. These deployments would involve major additional uncounted commitments of air, space, naval and logistics forces needed to enable and protect them. These are precisely the kinds of forces needed to defend Taiwan. The critical assets—munitions, top-end aviation, submarines, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities—that are needed to fight Russia or China are in short supply. For example, stealthy heavy bombers are the crown jewel of U.S. military power, but there are only 20 in the entire Air Force.

The U.S. has no hope of competing with China and ensuring Taiwan’s defense if it is distracted elsewhere. It is a delusion that the U.S. can, as Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said recently, “walk and chew gum at the same time” with respect to Russia and China. Sending more resources to Europe is the definition of getting distracted. Rather than increasing forces in Europe, the U.S. should be moving toward reductions.

There is a viable alternative for Europe’s defense: The Europeans themselves can step up and do more for themselves, especially with regard to conventional arms. This is well within Europe’s capacity, as the combined economic power of the NATO states dwarfs that of Russia. NATO allies spend far more on their militaries than Russia. To aid its European allies, the U.S. can provide various forms of support, including lethal weapons, while continuing to remain committed to NATO’s defense, albeit in a more constrained fashion, by providing high-end and fungible military capabilities. The U.S. can also continue to extend its nuclear deterrent to NATO.

The U.S. should remain committed to NATO’s defense but husband its critical resources for the primary fight in Asia, and Taiwan in particular. Denying China the ability to dominate Asia is more important than anything that happens in Europe. To be blunt: Taiwan is more important than Ukraine. America’s European allies are in a better position to take on Russia than America’s Asian allies are to deal with China. The Chinese can’t be allowed to think that America’s distraction in Ukraine provides them with a window of opportunity to invade Taiwan. The U.S. needs to act accordingly, crisis or not.

Ms. Mastro is a center fellow at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, part of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Colby is a principal at the Marathon Initiative and author of “The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict.”