(DCWatchdog.com) – According to a Fox News Digital Report, foreign policy experts have warned that China is “watching” the U.S. and Western allies’ response to Russia’s Ukraine aggression to determine if there are any signs of “weakness.”
In the Thursday report, Heino Klinck, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia during Trump’s administration, said that China was calculating “what this would ‘cost them’ if they were to move against Taiwan,” saying China was “getting more data points” by examining what the West is doing regarding Russia.
Klinck continued his statements, saying China’s examination of the U.S.’s response to Russia will “inform and potentially shape Chinese decision-making.” Hinck also cautioned that “Any sign of weakness” would be considered.
The aggression displayed by Moscow toward Ukraine actuated the U.S. and Western allies’ sanctions against Russia in addition to deploying forces to NATO-member nations surrounding Russia and Ukraine.
But to many critics, these actions aren’t enough, with former President Donald Trump saying that the West’s ineffectiveness in deterring the Russian invasion would “embolden” China to take more aggressive action toward Taiwan.
Despite this, Isaac Stone, the CEO of Strategy Risks, a political analytic, data, and risk assessment company that quantifies the links between corporations and the Chinese Communist Party, disagreed with Trump’s and Klincks’ viewpoints about China calculating U.S. weakness.
Instead, he shared his views that he believed in “some ways” China would be doing the opposite.
Stone believes that China would “calculate that the U.S. is unlikely to go to war with Russia over Ukraine and China over Taiwan at the same,” making U.S. military involvement in the Russia-Ukraine conflict an incentive for “China to act now.”
The aggressions pursued by both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping could be rooted in desires to rebuild their respective nations’ empires, although China has emphasized “Taiwan for sure is not Ukraine,” and adding that “Taiwan has always been an inalienable part of China. This is an indisputable legal and historical fact.”
But the conflict between China and Taiwan could be very different to navigate for a far different reason: Western nations would have trouble imposing significant sanctions on China.
Klinck pointed to this difficulty in his statements about sanctions failing to deter Russia and the U.S. struggling to convince Germany to block certifying the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
Klinck said, “What we see now in Europe demonstrates a failure of deterrence,” before adding that “the stakes, with respect to economic sanctions in a Ukraine-Russia scenario, are a lot less than they would be with China.”
