"Putin’s Ukraine Invasion: Turbocharging Sino-Russian Collaboration In Energy, Maritime Security, And Beyond?" - By CWP Alum Andrew Erickson

Putin’s war of choice in Ukraine goes far beyond Javelins, the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (i.e., HIMARS), and Russia’s campaign of destruction against the second-most-industrialized post-Soviet state. Shock waves from the war now wash across the shores of maritime Asia, with years of unfolding impacts ahead. Accordingly, this article takes readers through a journey featuring ecosystems inhabited by oil barrels, gas pipelines, submarine technologies, jet engines, and basing access. It also will explore China and Russia’s centuries-old relationship cycle of fear, temporary bonds of common cause, and division anew. In coming months and years, China will tap the Russian raw material storehouse more deeply. But a Moscow under duress and isolation could yield far more than cheaper oil and gas; Russian military pinnacle technologies—particularly in the undersea-warfare realm—could be coupled with China’s financial resources and industry to tip the Indo-Pacific security balance in favor of a Sino-Russian axis of autocracy at the expense of the United States and its allies and partners. People’s Liberation Army (PLA) access to air and naval bases in the Russian Far East and High North, plus acoustic intelligence sharing, could make conditions in the Indo-Pacific even worse for the United States and its allies and partners.

https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=8311&context=nwc-review

Andrew S. Erickson, PhD, is a professor of strategy and the research director in the Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute (CMSI). He is also a visiting professor in Harvard University’s Department of Government and an associate in research at Harvard’s Fairbank Center.

Photo Credit: https://pixabay.com/users/geralt-9301/