Our activities in Ukraine followed a decade and a half of steady enlargement of the NATO alliance (whose purpose was to contain a Cold War Soviet threat) by appending all the western neighbors of a prostrate Russia. Vladimir Putin accordingly persuaded his subjects they were being surrounded by the West, stirred up latent anti-Western sentiments conveniently designed to split his democratic opposition, and began to modernize his decrepit and demoralized military. Russia has been called “a gas station with a flag,” and it is true that Russia has become an oil monoculture with a second-rate army. But that is hardly a reason for pushing Russia into the waiting arms of a rising, ambitious, superpower with a first-rate army and nearly five times Russia's gross domestic product.

A significant consequence of Western sanctions on Russia for its interference in Ukraine was Moscow’s last-minute capitulation to Chinese pricing demands in their May 2014 gas deal. Putin called the deal “a large-scale strategic project on the global level,” one that “will significantly strengthen economic cooperation . . . with our key partner China”. Rather than pivoting to Asia, we've managed to create another distraction to accompany our fixation on the Middle East.

There we intervened to overthrow a totalitarian dictator allegedly possessing weapons of mass destruction, ready to lend to religious terrorists he despised and who reviled him. Though we fought in the name of democracy, freedom and counterterrorism, in reality, we sunk our blood and treasure into a confessional conflict, "a clash of civilizations," and what the Quran terms a fitna. This Quranic "discord" is promoted not by would-be global tyrants, but by Holy Warriors funded and armed by local states, dynasties and great powers, like the United States and Russia. This mosaic of proxy, national, dynastic and sectarian wars closely resembles Europe’s Thirty Years’ War, which was the culmination of a Christian fitna that lasted not thirty, but one hundred and thirty years.

The Shia-Sunni clash structures that theater of action, not democratic resistance to tyranny. Instead, we should pursue a policy of "offshore balancing" to prevent both the proxies of the Saudi/Gulf kingdoms and the surrogates of Iran from triumphing—by sanctioning banks laundering terrorist funds, firing an occasional cruise missile, dropping an occasional bomb when we see terrorist camps being erected. But the incoming Secretary of Defense should reorient our spending to revitalize our navy and reestablish an effective naval presence in the Pacific to deter Chinese adventurism and back up our allies. This would have the added benefit of reining in any resurgent Japanese militarism. We need a strategy of offshore balance in the Middle East, but must also start alerting the public to the possible hegemonic threat gathering in Asia. We need to look in the other direction.

Robert S. Leiken is the author of Europe’s Angry Muslims (Oxford University Press 2012). He was the director of the National Security and Immigration Program at the Nixon Center and the Center for the National Interest 2002-2012.

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