Augusto Manzanal Ciancaglini
Political scientist
Recent times have seen some threatening military moves by Russia and China. Moscow built up troops along the border with Ukraine. Simultaneously, China began amphibious assault exercises and air raids in the so-called Taiwan air defense identification zone.
Russia is bolstering China’s air and submarine defense capabilities with the sale of its armaments; Beijing thus intends to counterbalance its presence in the Indo-Pacific. Russia and China have been conducting joint military exercises precisely there.
Faced with a potential increase in Sino-Russian coordination, which is embellished by plans to manufacture Russian vaccine in China, Washington is draining its alliances in a splashy containment. To that end, it will need to strengthen its support for the Three Seas Initiative (TSEI), which is a collaborative platform between twelve Central and Eastern European countries that straddle three seas: the Baltic, Black and Adriatic. This Alliance, inexorably led by Poland, aims to keep Russian influence flowing through gas away from the region.
The United States is trying to stifle Russia with Eastern Europe and must take advantage of the favorable western breeze to blow Beijing; the European Union is offering a suspension of the ratification of the trade agreement with China and hopes to start talks with India, at the same time that France and the United Kingdom are sending a nuclear submarine and an aircraft carrier, respectively, to the South China Sea. Germany stands on another plane in this story.
The American key becomes threefold on each terrain: with the NATO mantle, the containment of Russia is played out across the three seas mentioned above and with three blocs; the rancorous neighbors, the renewed Ottoman Empire and the Western European powers.
With the differences of tension inherent to a diverse context in the type and degree of expansionism, in the Indo-Pacific a triune envelope also seems to be configured: a less reactive ASEAN, but aware of how far it must depend, is superimposed by the QUAD and then the EU. This scenario is structured in the East China Sea, in the South China Sea and perhaps also in the Arabian Sea, where the wreckage of the Chinese Long March 5B rocket landed and Beijing’s ambition is dumped via Pakistan.
Another way of looking at it is that the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean strangle the South China Sea, the core of China’s ambitions. Moscow, on the other hand, runs up against another, closer curtain. The Arctic and the land encounter in the heart of Asia are the logical escape valves.
Russia and China have to calibrate their flow by shrewdly alternating diving and dabbling, even with each other.
The United States, for its part, will have to take advantage of the double Trimarium to chop up and paper over its rivals, but leave them several vents: from the three seas it sails towards the shipwreck of an eventual world of three superpowers.
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