Page 42 - ACTL Journal Win24

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JOURNAL
“Xi Jinping . . . started a handshake with the people of China . . . : ‘If you allow me to govern uncontested, I promise I will give you a better quality of life year, after year, after year.’ And that was pretty easy to do for about the first thirty years because there was a lot of economic low hanging fruit that could be harvested to live up to that handshake between the
leadership of the Communist Party of China and the peo- ple. Well, around 2010 . . . that started to look a little tenu- ous. And so President Xi came in and said, ‘I can’t live up to that handshake. I need to make some changes in how we’re running the country because I can’t promise that economic growth because it’s getting harder and harder.’ And so what President Xi started doing, recognizing that this peoples’ agreement was shaky, is he started to put internal repressions in place because what did the leaders fear in authoritarian governments more than anything, more than America, more than Japan, more than war? They fear a revolt of their people.”
China is an authoritarian state, controlling every aspect of the lives of its people with a complex system of sanctions and rewards. This is designed to preserve the primacy of the Party – but there are cracks in the façade as China’s people become aware of their repression.
So Admiral Martoglio’s second major point: CHINA IS STILL GROWING, BUT THE PEOPLE’S TRUST IN THE CCP IS ERODING.
He then turned to consideration of the Russian Federation.
“China and Russia work on nationalism. Nationalism is where you whip up the people against something to keep their minds off of other things; perhaps the econ- omy, perhaps their life, perhaps their quality of life. The danger of nationalism is it only lasts a short period of time. You’ve got to keep feeding that nationalism beast.”
“2012 to 2020, the Russian people were actually pretty happy; things were going well. Their quality of life was improving, the oil and gas industry was doing well, they were proud of what their military was doing in places like Crimea and the Donbas and Syria, Georgia. There’s a Rus- sian pride, which for those of you who know Russia, is a deep, cultural enticement for Russians.
“But about 2020, remember I said you’ve got to keep feeding this nationalism beast, about 2020 you started to see a little bit of a disturbance in the force inside of Russia where peo- ple were saying, you know, ‘Gosh, we’re still proud about being Russians but, you know, we look to countries that used to be part of the Soviet Union and we know they have a better life than us. We know their quality of life is better.
We want more.’
“But their economy didn’t support more, so patience wore thin, they grew tired with the systemic corruption, and Pu-
tin had to feed the nationalism beast. So he said, ‘Hey, I grabbed Crimea in 2014. Now I’m going to do something even more and it’s going to be easy and it’s going to be quick and it’s going to feed the beast and the people are going to love me and things are going to be just fine.’”
Putin had several objectives before entering Ukraine. He wanted to annex the Donbos, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia regions; he hoped to fracture the European Union and NATO; and he wanted to flaunt Russian power. To date, he has fallen short in these aspirations. The general attitude of the Russian people at this point is that it is a bad war that probably shouldn’t have started but they don’t want to lose because they fear what follows. Admiral Martoglio sees the War in Ukraine as a contest between Putin’s crusad- ing and Ukraine’s national will.
“When people ask me what’s Putin doing, I say, ‘Putin’s cru- sading.’ Think back to your history, however far back that goes - high school, college, graduate work - what does a cru- sader do? A crusader goes until they can’t go anymore. It’s not logical; it’s ideological. And that’s what Putin is going to do. Until he is stopped, he will keep going into Ukraine, into the Baltic, into the Balkans, to recreate - like he said in his Na- tional Security Strategy - that near periphery subordinate to Russia. Putin’s crusading versus Ukraine’s national will and the coalition’s willingness to support and stick together. You take any one of those three away and the war stops.”
The outcome is still unclear.
Vice Admiral Martoglio then turned to the issues surround- ing the Russia-China Strategic Alliance. Considering re- cent events and, especially, the rise in Chinese power, he concludes that there is no sign of the China/Russia bonds weakening in the face of the current challenges, but there is friction in the junior-senior partnership and little trust between them.
“China is very wary of Russia going too far in Ukraine. . . Nothing’s going to change tomorrow in this relationship but there is friction over this senior/junior relationship, which isn’t developing; it’s developed. China is the senior partner - remember, that was one of Putin’s major points in his strat- egy; I will be subordinate to no nation, especially China. There’s little trust between China and Russia, despite what Putin and Xi say to each other publicly. And there are clearly limits to China’s no limits relation with Russia.”
Admiral Martoglio then turned to assessing the relative strength of the partnership of China and Russia and their al-