Central Asia Could Be the Key to Driving a Wedge Between Russia and China

“War is the realm of chance,” said Carl von Clausewitz, who knew more about the matter than most of us. “No other human activity is so continuously or universally bound up with it.” Even with Russia’s offensive in Ukraine bogging down to the point that a Pentagon official can call it “anemic” and Vladimir Putin’s Victory Day speech on May 9 passing off with no new threats of escalation, trying to look ahead beyond the war’s end seems like a fool’s errand—except that it is what strategists have to do. They must squint toward distant horizons while options are still open, rather than waiting till alternatives have been foreclosed and then scrambling to deal with whatever is left. The reality is that, almost regardless of what happens in Ukraine over the next few weeks, the United States can do something about the biggest strategic question of the war—which is whether the fighting will push Russia and China together into a great-power bloc dominating Eurasia, or whether it will pull them apart, reducing either’s ability to undermine the American global order.

Geography has made Russia and China revisionists. The map looks very different from Moscow than from Beijing, but strategists in both places see one big thing about it: that it needs to be redrawn.

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