By Joey Sarte Salceda
Chair, Institute for Risk and Strategic Studies, Inc.
The most dangerous position in geopolitics is not weakness. It is overcommitment.
Three years into its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has delivered a masterclass in how a major power can transform a calculated gamble into a cascading, irreversible decline.
The war has cost Russia over one million casualties, an estimated $2.4 trillion in direct and indirect economic damage, and a strategic position that deteriorates by the quarter. The lessons extend far beyond Europe. For the Philippines, navigating great power competition while defending its sovereignty in the West Philippine Sea, Russia’s trajectory offers a stark warning and, more importantly, a roadmap for what not to do.
The Anatomy of Strategic Overcommitment
Russia’s February 2022 invasion was supposed to deliver a quick victory: a neutral or puppet Ukraine, a divided NATO, continued European energy dependence, and a consolidated sphere of influence across the former Soviet space. Moscow got the opposite on every front.
NATO is larger and more unified than at any point since the Cold War’s end. Finland and Sweden, neutral for generations, are now members. The alliance has deployed substantial forces to its eastern flank, and European defense spending has surged.
Germany alone has committed to a €100 billion defense modernization fund. Europe’s dependence on Russian gas, once Moscow’s trump card, has collapsed: Russian pipeline gas deliveries to the EU fell from over 150 billion cubic meters in 2021 to a fraction of that today. The International Energy Agency reported in September 2025 that Russia’s revenues from oil product exports had declined to five-year lows.
The economic picture is equally damaging. After two years of war-driven growth averaging 4% annually, fueled by military spending that now consumes over 8% of GDP and 40% of federal expenditure, Russia’s economy is entering stagnation.
The Moscow Times reported in early January 2026 that GDP growth for 2025 slowed to around 1%, with similar headwinds expected for 2026. The Central Bank’s key interest rate hit a record 21% in late 2024, strangling civilian businesses. Corporate bankruptcies increased 26% in the first three quarters of 2024. The ruble has depreciated significantly against the dollar since the invasion began. The sugar rush of wartime spending is over; what remains is a structural distortion that will take years to unwind.
Most telling is what the war has cost Russia beyond its borders. The Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), Moscow’s answer to NATO, has been exposed as hollow. When Azerbaijan launched its offensive to retake Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2023, Russian peacekeepers stood by as Armenian positions fell within 24 hours. The result: over 100,000 ethnic Armenians fled their homes, and Armenia, Russia’s most loyal post-Soviet ally, began its irreversible pivot towards other partners.
By December 2024, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan declared Armenia had “crossed the point of no return” with the CSTO. A March 2024 poll showed only 31% of Armenians viewed relations with Russia positively, down from 93% in 2019. Armenia has since ratified the Rome Statute, frozen CSTO participation, and begun EU accession talks.
Syria completed the picture of strategic collapse. In December 2024, Bashar al-Assad, whom Russia had rescued through direct military intervention in 2015, fell to rebel forces in just twelve days. Moscow, overextended in Ukraine, could not or would not save its client. The Assad regime’s collapse, as Harvard’s Belfer Center noted, “signals more than a localized defeat. It represents a critical inflection point in global power dynamics.” Russia’s naval facility at Tartus and the Hmeimim air base remain under negotiation with Syria’s new government, but the strategic position that made Russia a power broker in the Middle East has evaporated.
Central Asia tells a similar story. Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan are all pursuing “multi-vector” diplomacy that pointedly diversifies away from Moscow. The Middle Corridor — a rail and sea route linking China to Europe via the Caspian and South Caucasus that bypasses Russia entirely — saw cargo volumes increase 20% in 2024.
Turkish trade with Central Asia has expanded rapidly, with bilateral trade with Uzbekistan reaching $2.23 billion in 2024. At the April 2025 EU-Central Asia summit in Samarkand, Brussels upgraded relations to a “strategic partnership,” pledging €12 billion in infrastructure investment. In October 2025, when Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov complained that a new World War II memorial in Uzbekistan bore inscriptions only in Uzbek and English, a prominent Uzbek academic responded that Uzbekistan “is not a colony.”
The China Trap
Perhaps the cruelest irony of Russia’s strategic gamble is the relationship it has produced with China. What Moscow frames as a “comprehensive partnership of strategic interaction” increasingly resembles a tributary arrangement.
The asymmetry is stark. China’s GDP is approximately ten times that of Russia. While China is Russia’s largest trading partner, accounting for roughly a third of Russian foreign trade, Russia represents only about 3% of China’s total trade. In 2024, Russia’s share of Chinese imports in key product categories soared: Chinese goods now constitute 57% of Russian imports, up from 23% in 2021. The reverse dependency barely registers. As the European Council on Foreign Relations noted, “China derives considerable benefits from a weakened but stable Russia — one increasingly dependent on Beijing for economic markets, technological alternatives, and diplomatic cover.”
Russia has become a discount energy supplier to China, selling oil at prices below market rates to maintain cash flow. The yuan’s share of Russian trade settlements has exploded from under 2% before the war to nearly 40% by early 2024. When the Moscow Stock Exchange was sanctioned in mid-2024, yuan-denominated transactions reached 99.8% of volume. Russia even experienced a yuan liquidity crisis in September 2024, a humiliating dependency for a country that fancied itself a great power.
Chinese investment in Russia, meanwhile, has dried up. Major projects above $500 million involving technology transfer have essentially ceased since 2019. The Power of Siberia 2 pipeline, a proposed 50 billion cubic meter gas route that Russia desperately needs to replace lost European markets, has been repeatedly delayed by Beijing, which uses the project as leverage for better pricing. China takes Russian resources on favorable terms but gives nothing in return that might strengthen Russia’s independent capacity.
The historical backdrop makes this particularly grim for Moscow. China’s strategic memory is long. The “Century of Humiliation” that shapes Beijing’s worldview includes the unequal treaties of 1858-1860, when Tsarist Russia seized territories, including Vladivostok, that remain under Moscow’s control. During the Sino-Soviet split, Soviet leaders explicitly threatened China with nuclear annihilation. The Nixon administration exploited this rift to engineer the US-China rapprochement. Now Russia has handed Beijing all the leverage it needs to settle old scores — slowly, economically, without firing a shot.
The Emerging Equilibrium
The post-Ukraine world is coming into focus. Contrary to Moscow’s rhetoric about multipolarity, the emerging order looks less like a concert of powers and more like a modified American primacy, with China as a formidable but contained second, and everyone else positioning within that framework.
This is not necessarily bad news for middle powers, but it creates risks for those who miscalculate their position. Russia’s error was not picking a side; it was allowing a single objective to consume all strategic flexibility, converting a revisionist gamble into an existential commitment from which there is no exit. The result is a great power reduced to the biggest loser in an equilibrium it helped create.
The Philippine Imperative: Strategic Diversification
The Philippines is not Russia. We are not launching invasions or challenging the global order, but the underlying lesson applies. In a hardening bipolar-plus environment, the most dangerous position is over-commitment to a single relationship, a single patron, or a single adversary.
The Philippines has a favorable position. Our alliance with the United States provides a credible security umbrella. Our location at the heart of the Indo-Pacific gives us strategic relevance. Our diaspora and cultural reach create connections that few countries can match. The challenge is converting these advantages into durable security without becoming so identified with one bloc that we lose flexibility — or become dispensable in a grand bargain.
The West Philippine Sea dispute illustrates both opportunities and dangers. The Philippines has been right to stand firm on sovereignty, to invoke the 2016 arbitral ruling, and to document Chinese aggression. But the dispute cannot be allowed to define the entire bilateral relationship with China, nor should it push the Philippines into a posture where our value to Washington depends solely on our willingness to serve as a frontline state.
Strategic diversification means several things simultaneously. It means deepening security ties with Japan, Australia, South Korea, and India — partners who share our concerns about Chinese assertiveness but bring different capabilities and relationships. The Visiting Forces Agreements with Tokyo and Canberra, and the enhanced defense cooperation with Seoul, are good starts. It means economic pragmatism: China remains a top trading partner, and decoupling is neither feasible nor desirable. It means diplomatic agility: maintaining ASEAN centrality and refusing to become so aligned with one power that we lose our regional standing.
President Marcos’s recent foray into the Middle East is commendable in this regard. The Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement with the UAE, signed on January 13, 2026, marks the Philippines’ first free trade pact with a Middle Eastern nation. It grants preferential tariff treatment to 95% of Philippine exports and opens a gateway to the broader Gulf Cooperation Council market. The agreement covers not just goods but services, investments, digital trade, and economic cooperation. This is precisely the kind of relationship-building that diversifies our economic exposure beyond the US-China axis.
Diversification, however, is not merely about hedging between great powers. It is also about building our own sphere of goodwill—a network of relationships where the Philippines is not a supplicant but a sponsor.
The Magellan Forum: A Philippine Initiative
There is a region where the Philippines possesses natural advantages we have barely begun to leverage — the Pacific Islands and Timor-Leste.
Consider the affinities. Timor-Leste, which in October 2025 became ASEAN’s eleventh member after a fourteen-year accession process, shares our Catholic heritage, our experience of colonialism, and our struggle for independence. Prime Minister Xanana Gusmão, whose tears of joy at the signing ceremony in Kuala Lumpur reflected decades of effort, leads a nation that looks to Southeast Asia for its future but retains deep ties to the Lusophone world. The Philippines supported Timor-Leste’s independence and championed its ASEAN membership throughout the long accession process.
Palau’s connections run even deeper. From 1574 to 1899, Palau was part of the Spanish East Indies, administered from Manila alongside the Philippines, the Marianas, and the Carolines. When the Malolos Congress convened in 1898 to establish Asia’s first republic, a delegate was appointed for “the islands of Palaos.” As President Surangel Whipps Jr. noted during his February 2025 state visit to Manila, “Our countries share a rich tapestry of history that dates back to the colonial era when Spain held sway over much of the Pacific.”
Today, Filipinos constitute 60% of Palau’s foreign workforce and 20% of its total population. Philippine hospitals treat Palauan patients through a medical referral program dating decades back. Palau’s local dialect has been influenced by Philippine English.
The Federated States of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands share similar histories of Spanish, German, Japanese, and American administration. Papua New Guinea, though outside this colonial heritage, hosts substantial Filipino business communities and maintains growing ties with the Philippines.
These are places where China is aggressively expanding influence. Since Solomon Islands and Kiribati switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to Beijing in 2019, China has pursued security agreements, infrastructure projects, and elite cultivation across the Pacific. The 2022 China-Solomon Islands security pact alarmed Washington, Canberra, and Wellington alike. In February 2025, the Cook Islands signed a comprehensive strategic partnership with Beijing, prompting concern from New Zealand.
PLA Navy ships have visited Vanuatu and Tonga; a Chinese naval task force circumnavigated Australia in early 2025, conducting live-fire exercises in the Tasman Sea. UN General Assembly voting patterns tell the story: in 2000, Pacific Island votes alligned with China’s positions 54% of the time on resolutions where Beijing and Washington disagreed; by 2024, that alignment had risen to 86%.
The United States and its allies are responding through the Compacts of Free Association with Palau, the Marshall Islands, and the Federated States of Micronesia; through Australia’s security agreements with Tuvalu, Nauru, and PNG; through Japan’s expanded Pacific engagement. But these are great power moves. What is missing is a peer voice, a country that speaks to the Pacific Islands not as a donor or security guarantor but as a neighbor with shared history.
The Philippines can be that voice. Something like a forum among our nations, call it the Magellan Forum, would formalize this potential.
I propose that name because Magellan’s voyage linked the Philippines, Guam, the Marianas, Palau, and the broader Pacific before borders and nation-states existed. The Philippines, at the crossroads of that voyage, is the natural convenor of a dialogue reconnecting communities that history once joined.
Initial membership would include the Philippines as convenor; Timor-Leste, now a full ASEAN member; Palau; the Federated States of Micronesia; and potentially Papua New Guinea as an observer.
Guam and the Marianas, US territories with deep Filipino communities, could participate as observers, respecting their constitutional status while acknowledging cultural ties. Over time, membership could expand to other Pacific Island states, and eventually to Latin American Pacific nations linked by the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade, with Spain and Portugal as “heritage partners.”
Forum activities would be substantive rather than ceremonial: fisheries cooperation agreements that are genuinely reciprocal rather than extractive; educational exchanges and scholarship programs at Philippine universities; disaster response coordination leveraging our shared experience with typhoons and cyclones; maritime security dialogue focused on capacity-building for smaller coast guards; and cultural festivals celebrating shared heritage.
The gains are obvious and straightforward. Small states vote in the United Nations; they remember who showed up. Pacific Island nations hold over 60 security and cooperation agreements with various partners—relationships built in times of relative peace that will pay dividends in ways no strategic planner can fully anticipate. The Philippines cannot outspend China in the Pacific, but we can out-relate them. Cultural affinity (the shared Catholicism with Timor-Leste and Palau, the Austronesian heritage across Micronesia, the Filipino diaspora communities that serve as bridges) is a strategic resource that no amount of infrastructure investment can replicate.
Conclusion: The Virtue of Flexibility
Russia’s tragedy is that it confused commitment with strength. It bets everything on a single objective, subjugating Ukraine, and lost everywhere else: in Europe, in the Middle East, in Central Asia, in its relationship with China. The longer the war continues, the more Russia becomes precisely what it feared: a diminished power, a junior partner, a cautionary tale. Its military is degraded, with over a million casualties and equipment losses that will take decades to replace. Its economy is distorted, dependent on war spending that crowds out civilian investment. Its alliances are exposed as hollow. Its position relative to China, the one major power that has not abandoned it, grows weaker by the year.
The Philippines need not repeat this error. Our position is far more favorable: allied with the preponderant power, located at the heart of the world’s most dynamic region, possessed of a diaspora and cultural reach that create connections across the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and beyond.
Favorable position, however, is not guaranteed success. We must be firm on what matters (sovereignty, territorial integrity, the rule of law in the West Philippine Sea) and flexible on everything else. We must hedge our bets, diversify our relationships, and build networks where we are not supplicants but convenors. The Magellan Forum is one concrete step — an initiative that costs little, risks nothing, and positions the Philippines as a regional leader rather than merely a regional stakeholder.
In the emerging equilibrium, the Philippines must not be the biggest loser. xxx