As Russia’s illegal war to exterminate the nation of Ukraine slogs into its third devastating month, it has yielded many lessons China can apply to its future war against the nation of Taiwan — and that Taiwanese can exploit for their defense and survival.
For China, the most important lesson of Russia’s stark military failures is that like Russia, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) quest for hegemony rests on a brittle and fatal hubris.
Vladimir Putin envisioned his war to conquer Ukraine as a stepping stone to political-military hegemony in at least Eastern Europe and the Baltic states. But several key failures have turned his war into an existential risk to his own regime. These include: underestimating Ukrainian resolve and that of the democracies now assisting Ukraine while imposing political and economic isolation on Russia; and, the expectation of dividing NATO rather than to driving Sweden and Finland to join it.
