Constantine Menges (1939-2004)
While China last week floated a relative non-starter of a peace plan to end Russia's unprovoked war in Ukraine, Beijing at the same time is reported to be preparing the sale of artillery shells and other munitions to Moscow. We take a look at the current dynamic through the lens of the late Constantine Menges, a former senior national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan.
Sometime in the next couple of months, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is expected to land in Moscow to meet with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. That meeting could push world events toward a negotiated settlement in the war in Ukraine; or, more likely, it could lead to a prolongation of that year-long conflagration through the supply of Chinese-made offensive weaponry to the struggling Russian military.
Whatever the outcome, the Xi-Putin meeting exemplifies a further solidification of the post-Soviet Russian-China alliance, something which my late neighbor and U.S. presidential adviser, Constantine Menges, predicted would take hold with a vengeance and would threaten U.S. national security interests on an unprecedented scale.
Those predictions date back some 20 years, and they seem to be very much worth addressing amid the current geopolitical landscape. We ignore Menges at our peril.
In Washington-area policy circles, Menges (who worked in senior roles at the White House and the CIA) was known for being both persistent and prescient. “Constant Menace” was his light-hearted handle among those who respected his analytic skills and his passion for putting views forward on how to best protect U.S. national security and economic interests in an emergent tri-lateral world.
Menges, who died of cancer in 2004, made it his dying wish to his wife, Nancy, that his deeply researched work, China: The Gathering Threat, be published posthumously. Today, it’s extremely hard to find the book (published by Nelson Current in 2005,) and its ranking on Amazon is, sadly, way back in the dusty-shelf space.
Yet Menges’s unquestionably powerful and illuminating tome stands as the potential successor to statesman George F. Kennan’s remarkable article published under the pseudonym “X” in Foreign Affairs in July 1947. Kennan’s article, urging containment of the Soviet Union, set a course for U.S. foreign policy – rigorous Cold War policy -- in the immediate wake of World War II and throughout the closing decades of the last century. Menges’s overlooked work, which goes to the “big picture” kind of thinking that is often absent from today’s debates, should set descriptive swim-lanes for U.S. foreign, economic and military policy in the years running up to 2050. Kennan’s seminal article, entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” clearly has its 21st Century match in Menges’s work, a richly footnoted book that focuses in excruciating detail on the sources of post-Soviet Russian conduct and associated Chinese conduct on the world stage.
In these times of heightened geopolitical uncertainty amid the ongoing tragedy in Ukraine, I’m reminded of the over-the-fence talks in Georgetown I had in the early 2000s with Dr. Menges: about the new Russian leader, Putin, and about the emergent economic powerhouse, China.
Menges, in his quiet professorial way, would assert that while Middle East turmoil and state-sponsored terrorism would provide major challenges to American and Western interests, the “long-game” had to be focused on what he described as the coming dualistic challenge from both the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation, working in concert with each other.
Menges’s prescriptive book, written in 2004, lays out these key points, foreshadowing the current state of play.
*America’s most strategic challenge: the “China-Russia strategic axis is explicitly intended to counter the United States around the world and provide the basis for a still undefined ‘new political and economic order’ that China has declared to be a major global objective and which Putin endorsed at his first summit,” with the then Chinese leadership some 20 years ago.
*The “China-Russia strategic axis makes the world more dangerous. For the first time in forty years, the U.S. faces these nuclear-armed major powers coordinating their international actions or secretly providing each other with military guarantees in the event of conflict with the U.S. or other countries.”
*China’s ultimate goal is “regional dominance,” including the South China Sea zone of influence, leading to potential hemispheric dominance stretching to Europe through both economic muscle (direct investment) and military presence. Taiwan – the forever hot-button target -- sits in the cross-hairs of China’s growing shore-based phalanx of ballistic-missile systems, and the U.S. strategic response to an invasion by Beijing remains less than certain.
*Putin, “since assuming the presidency of Russia ….in 2000, is an intelligent, disciplined and systematic leader. He has said Russia should become a ‘strong state’ under a ‘dictatorship of law’ and that it must again play a major role in world affairs.”
*Russia “now stands precariously at the crossroads of a democratic or autocratic future. Which road Russia chooses will have historic and long-term consequences for the United States. The path favored by China and hardline elements in Russia could well plunge the U.S. back into a replay of the darkest days of the Cold War.”
We should read Menges, dive into his probing analysis of the inner-thinking of the hard-boiled Tier 1 autocrats in Beijing and Moscow over the past half-century. And, most important, we should listen to his call to action: “It’s time to get serious about strategy toward China and Russia and about geopolitics. The United States ‘must manage the peace,’ in confronting an expansionist Russia and “the rising, globally active, nuclear-armed and increasingly wealthy Communist regime in China.”
This upcoming summit in Moscow, a tete-a-tete of the world’s top two “autocrats for life,” is of critical significance for peace in Europe and beyond.
If the summit’s true agenda is to prolong the war in Ukraine through advanced-weapon supplies from Beijing to Russian troops, it would severely deepen the suffering of the Ukrainian people and heighten the risks of an even broader war beyond current battlelines.
Putin, playing his China card like never before, would gain immensely from Chinese arms deliveries through a renewed ability to prosecute an invasion that keeps him in power as long as he is seen as having the upper hand on the battleground (currently very much in question by all observers.) Xi, in turn, would gain by keeping the global media’s focus on the hot war on Europe’s edge while quietly and steadily increasing the People’s Liberation Army presence in and around Taiwan and the South China Sea disputed territories.
How the Biden administration, and future U.S. administrations, deal with the “long-game” China-Russia challenge is first among priorities for America and the West. We would do well to consider the prescient wisdom of Dr. Menges, one of the key architects of the Reagan Doctrine and a most-thoughtful “framework” practitioner of big-picture foreign, economic and military policy.
Warren Getler, based in Washington, D.C., writes on foreign and military affairs. He has worked as a journalist at Foreign Affairs Magazine, the International Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News.
