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When Russia Fights the Wrong Enemy

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was an unprovoked error that has allowed the real threat facing the country – China – to gather strength. Putin’s oligarch cronies should ask themselves whose interests the war is serving.

NEWPORT, RHODE ISLAND – Like Czar Nicholas II, Russian President Vladmir Putin has misidentified his primary foe. Fighting a war of choice, he allows the real menace to his country to gather strength. China, not Ukraine, constitutes Russia’s existential threat. In the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), Nicholas fought Japan over Manchuria for concessions that Russia could not monetize, instead of investing in the railways and munitions needed to fight the country’s actual enemy, Germany, a decade later.

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