Ukraine is Xi’s proxy war against the West, says former top US security official

Chinese President Xi Jinping views Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine as a proxy war against Europe and the West, according to a former top US security official. 

Matt Pottinger, a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and a former US deputy national security advisor, told a Policy Exchange event in Central London that Ukraine is not just Putin’s war, but Xi’s as well. 

Pottinger said: “In March of 2023, about a year after the all-out invasion had begun, Xi visited Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin and we now know that it was a turning point in this war. I believe a very strong case can be made that Xi Jinping came to regard [Ukraine] as a full-blown Chinese proxy war against Europe and the United States.”

“This is a period of new global instability and warfare and, I would say, proxy wars,” he added. 

Speaking alongside security minister Tom Tugendhat and national security advisor Lord Sedwill, Pottinger also speculated that Russia and China’s “no limits” partnership runs deep and that Xi is acquiring greater leverage over Putin. 

Tugendhat asked about China’s greater influence in eastern Russia, mentioning that Chinese names for places such as Vladivostok had returned to some maps. Could no limits actually mean, eventually, no borders?

Pottinger replied: “The degree to which Putin is sacrificing the long-term interests of Russia is profound…Russia is surrendering agency to a greater power, Beijing.”

These comments come as Putin begins his two-day visit to China. The red carpet has been rolled out for the Russian leader and he has been inspecting troops and enjoying a concert in Tiananmen Square with Xi. 

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken in a recent visit to China publicly condemned Beijing for sending “critical components” to support Russia’s military-industrial base. Blinken said that Xi’s support for Putin’s war was “helping to fuel the biggest threat to [Europe’s] insecurity since the end of the Cold War”

The Ukraine war has certainly resulted in closer ties between Russia and China. Between 2021, before the war, and 2023, bilateral trade between the two grew 64 per cent to $240bn (£189bn). 

Pottinger argued that the last few years have been a story of the collapse of Western deterrence and that it must be restored and explicitly projected to the world. An example of where that deterrence is needed is Taiwan and a new volume edited by Pottinger aims to show how that is possible. In The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan, military and political leaders map out a workable strategy for the West to deter China from pursuing acts of aggression against Taiwan.

As Putin’s visit to Beijing reveals Sino-Russian relations at their closest in years, restoring deterrence will be a priority in the minds of many Western policymakers and Pottinger’s warning will be ringing in their ears.

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