By Nadège Rolland
The impact of the crisis will continue to be felt across Asia this year.
In 2015, the impact of the Russian invasion of Crimea will still be felt across Asia. The crisis came as a wake-up call for post-modern Europe, a reminder that existential threats still exist and that conflicts can hardly be avoided because of purely economic calculations of cost and benefit. Asian powers, for their part, are well aware that geopolitics is not a thing of the past.
A situation where an emerging power wants its great-power status back, considers its sovereignty over land and maritime borders as crucial to its security, and sees its near abroad as its own restricted sphere of influence certainly sounds very familiar to any Asian power today. Even if the analogy stops here, one can still ask what lessons Beijing in particular may learn about the international community’s willingness to sanction Russia’s use of force in Ukraine.
From an Asian perspective, the Ukraine crisis poses the question of the future of U.S. engagement in Asia, a question crucial both to U.S. allies and to other regional countries. Will the emergence of this crisis in Europe distract the U.S. from Asia? Will it impact President Barack Obama’s “rebalance” policy? China no doubt hopes that the rise of Russia will deflect U.S. strategic pressure away from Asia, but U.S. allies are similarly wary of this possibility.
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