The U.S. increasingly views China, not Russia, as this century’s defining challenge

Brahma Chellaney, Nikkei Asia

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has mounted a renewed push to end the war in Ukraine — this time with greater preparation, clearer resolve and a heightened sense of urgency. By exploiting the winter lull in major ground offensives, it aims to force negotiated compromises and lock in a deal before the conflict enters its fifth year in February.

Part of the push reflects Trump’s vanity project as a self-styled global peacemaker. Addressing the United Nations in September, he boasted, “Everyone says that I should get a Nobel Peace Prize.”

But the deeper driver is strategic: a calculation that America’s long-term interests are better served by closing out a proxy war with Russia that no longer sits at the center of U.S. priorities. Trump’s Alaska summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin was the first sign of an emerging strategic recalibration in U.S. policy.

With U.S. policymakers increasingly focused on countering an ascendant China, the administration sees Russia as a declining economic power whose war in Ukraine has become a costly distraction for Washington, siphoning American attention and resources away from the far more consequential contest with Beijing. Ending the war on terms that stabilize Europe and strengthen America’s economic position is therefore a central objective.

This objective has led to dual-track pressure — compelling Kyiv to negotiate while forcing Moscow to bankroll both U.S.-led reconstruction of Ukraine and broader joint ventures. The result is a peace framework designed not only to stop a grinding war, but to make the postwar landscape financially rewarding for Washington.

Presently, America’s preoccupation with Ukraine hands China a strategic dividend: it dilutes U.S. deterrence in Asia, complicates alliance coordination and stretches a finite U.S. military-industrial capacity. Washington is already struggling to refill its own weapons stockpiles even as it arms both Ukraine and Israel.

Meanwhile, the brutal arithmetic of the battlefield is becoming impossible to gloss over. Ukraine’s manpower crunch in the military is deepening, its air defenses are fraying, it is still losing ground, and Western production lines cannot match Russia’s surging output. As a senior U.S. official has warned, Russia is now producing missiles faster than it can fire them — creating a rapidly expanding arsenal of long-range weapons that could, at some point, deliver a knockout blow to Ukraine.

For the U.S., whose defense resources are already overstretched, continuing to underwrite Ukraine’s war effort risks compromising its ability to counter China — a far larger, more capable and more ideologically driven challenger than Russia. A protracted war in Ukraine will erode America’s capacity to surge forces and sustain a high-intensity fight in the western Pacific, or even credibly signal to Beijing that it is fully prepared to defend Taiwan.

The implication is clear: a settlement needs to be reached soon, before the war’s trajectory tilts decisively against an already-bleeding Ukraine.

Critics of Trump’s peace push should heed the warning from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s former spokesperson, Iuliia Mendel: “Every subsequent deal for Ukraine will only be worse — because we are losing.” It bears recalling that Ukraine and Russia nearly reached a settlement in Istanbul in April 2022 — a deal far more favorable to Kyiv than anything remotely attainable today. Yet, as U.S. Vice President JD Vance has noted, “There is a fantasy that if we just give more money, more weapons, or more sanctions, victory is at hand.”

America has seen this movie before. It spent 20 years waging war against the Taliban — and lost — because it refused to make difficult compromises when it still had leverage. The eventual withdrawal from Afghanistan was not only belated but humiliating.

Those now deriding efforts to end the Ukraine war should answer a simple question: What realistic alternative do they propose that Moscow could conceivably accept? If they cannot articulate one, then their objections amount to little more than wishful thinking dressed up as resolve.

The Trump administration’s peace plan is a hard-nosed attempt to realign Western strategy with long-term geopolitical realities — above all, the need to shift focus to the Indo-Pacific region, the world’s strategic center of gravity. The proposed course may be unsettling, but it reflects a basic truth: The era of limitless American bandwidth is over. And Washington’s underlying calculation is unmistakable — China, not Russia, is the defining challenge of the 21st century.

Whether the plan succeeds, however, depends on factors far beyond Kyiv’s control. Its viability hinges on Moscow’s willingness to accept a settlement at a moment when it holds the battlefield advantage. Putin may well decide that time favors Russia: that pressing the military offensive and intensifying the pressure on Ukraine could extract even larger concessions down the road.

Whatever its eventual fate, the peace plan sends a clear signal to allies and adversaries alike: American strategy is entering a new phase. For Europe, this may feel like an unwelcome jolt of reality. For China, it is a warning that Washington intends to reclaim the initiative in the Indo-Pacific. And for Ukraine, it is a sobering reminder that even the most committed patron ultimately reshapes its commitments to serve its own core interests.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the independent New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research and fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground,” which won the Bernard Schwartz Book Award.