Ukraine's survival is vital to Japan, South Korea and Taiwan

As the war in Ukraine runs longer, calls for the US to pull back from that conflict and refocus on Asia are getting louder. Interestingly, however, one hears less of that critique in Asia itself. America's frontline allies in the region understand that what happens in Ukraine won't stay there – it will either strengthen or weaken a larger global order on which they depend.

This became clear last month, when I traveled to Seoul for the Asian Leadership Conference. At an event nominally focused on Asia, Ukraine was front and centre.

South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol opened the conference by declaring that the world must "never allow the illegal invasion of Ukraine … to become a successful precedent." The other headliner was Ukraine's first lady, Olena Zelenska, a choice that speaks volumes about the war's prominence in Asian security debates.

When I visited Tokyo several months ago, Foreign Ministry and National Security Council officials made clear that the Japanese government was intensely preoccupied with Russian President Vladimir Putin's war. Japan even discarded what was once a guiding principle of its foreign policy – don't tangle with China and Russia simultaneously – to join the coalition that put sanctions on Putin's regime.

Even in Taiwan, which faces an existential threat from China, few officials are calling for Washington to cut Ukraine loose. "Ukraine's survival is Taiwan's survival," Taiwan's top diplomatic official in Washington, Hsiao Bi-khim, argues. "Ukraine's success is Taiwan's success."

Cynics might think this is a case of US allies telling their superpower protector what it wants rather than needs to hear. But East Asia's democracies aren't geopolitical simpletons. The reason Putin's invasion has so galvanized them is because it has reminded them of some elemental strategic truths.

First, the war in Ukraine is a test of whether nuclear weapons can be used to enable conventional aggression. Russia has been using nuclear threats to keep the West from intervening directly while it ravages Ukraine and tries to steal its territory. If it succeeds, the precedent will be terrifying for South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, all of which face nuclear-armed adversaries with revisionist intent.

Second, history shows that there is a certain indivisibility of global security. Peace is unlikely to be sustained in one key region of Eurasia if it collapses in others.

During the 1930s, Hitler's exploits in Europe accelerated Japanese aggression in Asia: A "broken windows world" encouraged predators of all types. In 1950, the US intervened in South Korea in part to discourage the Soviet Union from testing a fragile free-world community in Western Europe. 

Today, a Russian triumph in Ukraine would have global implications. It would signal that the autocratic entente led by Beijing and Moscow is rising while a Western coalition led by Washington is faltering. It would create a climate of insecurity in Europe, consuming US attention and resources for many years, perhaps decades, to come. Neither of these developments would improve the prospects for peace and stability in Asia, and the region's leaders know it. "Ukraine today could be East Asia tomorrow," Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida said last year.

Third, deterrence is about more than the balance of military power. Yes, whether China uses force in the Western Pacific will hinge, in significant part, on estimations of its enemies' capabilities. Here, critics of US policy are right that neither Washington nor its allies are preparing fast enough – although the war in Ukraine may actually help them, by focusing attention on supply-chain deficiencies, inadequate munitions stocks and other military shortcomings.

But deterrence also hinges on how an attacker gauges the intentions of its rivals, and whether it thinks the international community has the will to punish the most grievous forms of aggression. Countries have few better ways of making these judgments than by extrapolating from recent experience. So Japan, Taiwan and South Korea are paying close attention to who outlasts whom in Ukraine, because they understand that China and North Korea are watching, too.

These issues relate to a final matter: The war in Ukraine is a register of the resilience of the world in which East Asian democracies have thrived. So-called realists in the West may scoff at the very idea of international order. Yet officials in Taiwan, South Korea and Japan understand how much their nations depend on a world where territorial conquest is discouraged, brute force isn't the only thing that counts, and vulnerable democracies aren't abandoned to the tyrants next door.  They understand that a world in which those rules are weakened is a world in which their own security – perhaps their own survival – will be at greater risk.

Maybe the democratic world could shrug off the damage from a Ukrainian defeat. But America's friends in East Asia, who have everything at stake in the matter, aren't counting on it.

Disclaimer: This article first appeared on Bloomberg, and is published by special syndication arrangement.