Senate witness says miscalculation could lead to conflict with China

Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Fiona Hill says in prepared remarks to the Senate Armed Services Committee at a hearing about national security priorities that the current challenge in Europe was how to craft a more durable regional security arrangement that rolls back Russia's land grabbing Ukraine was embraced by all Europeans, and sets a precedent for reinvigorating the largest set of international agreements, that the European security environment was irrevocably altered or ruptured in 2014 when Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimean peninsula and spark barked off a brutal conflict and proxy war on the Donbass region, that none of the United States and Europe's mechanisms and practices for keeping the peace after World War Two and during the Cold War had much if any effect on deterring Russia from seizing Crimea in 2014 or attempting to take care of the rest of Ukraine in 2022, that Western deterrence failed in part because American and European policymakers never meaningfully emphasize the Western red lines, that instead European leaders led by Germany and France rushed to push Russia's annexation of Crimea to one side and brokered a quick peace settlement in Donbass with the Minsk Accords which would have limited Ukraine's sovereignty fully implemented.