Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China

by Hal Brands

A century later, Vladimir Putin’s Russia turned aggressive under similar circumstances.23 After the global financial crisis and a crash in oil prices ended a run of hydrocarbon-propelled growth, Putin needed new ways of strengthening Russia’s position, propping up its resource-dependent economy, and averting challenges to his rule. He criminalized dissent, murdered his political challengers, and steered Russia deeper into autocracy; he dialed up the nationalism and xenophobia toward foreign enemies.24 Putin sought to create a Eurasian economic bloc centered on Russia—“a new imperial community,” one cheerleader called it. He deployed state-owned enterprises, such as oil giant Rosneft, and government-backed mercenaries as tools of state power in overseas regions. Not least, Russia lopped off chunks of two neighbors (Georgia and Ukraine) that were trying to escape its orbit, while also intervening in the Syrian civil war. “We need a small victorious war,” one Russian minister argued (foolishly) in 1904. Russia’s twenty-first century tsar knows that playbook well.