International crises and the gray zone: tracing crises through history

Chapter 1 offers an introductory overview of the key international crises that have impacted U.S., Chinese, and Russian interests between 1990 and 2020. The analysis starts with the 1990s and the paradigmatic shift brought about by the end of the Cold War. While Russia has emerged from the splintered USSR, and soon got involved in two conventional wars with Chechnya, China has been entangled in an increasingly aggressive confrontation with Taiwan, and started its expansionist policy in the South China Seas. The turmoil has propelled the U.S. to global power status, with military and peacekeeping involvement in the Middle East and the Balkans. The following decade of the 2000s had the three powers dealing with challenges posed by violent non-state actors (VSNA). The 9/11 attacks mobilized the U.S. and its allies, while Russia and China tended to use this near-universally-accepted threat of terrorism to persecute opponents of their respective regimes. This was also the decade when Russia’s increasingly bold influence campaigns had started in Europe, targeting Estonia with a cyberattack in 2007 and Georgia with more conventional military forces in 2008. Finally, the 2010s saw an increasing blurring of the line distinguishing war from peace, forming the backdrop to the concept of gray zone warfare. The chapter reviews the Arab Spring that set the Middle East ablaze and caused a wave of refugees through Europe, the peaking of ISIL, China’s emboldened moves vis-a-vis the Senkaku Islands, and Ukraine’s transition from Euromaidan protests to an increasingly conventional confrontation with Russia.