Perhaps the most surprising story of the past year has been the abysmal performance of the Russian military in its invasion of Ukraine. Clumsy tactics, military trucks with dry-rotted tires, rations and medicines that expired decades ago, troops making targets of themselves by talking on cellphones, even the use of raw conscripts as human waves to detect Ukrainian positions in lieu of conducting proper reconnaissance. It has been a saturnalia of incompetence from a nation which most observers, including many military experts, had believed would roll over Ukraine in a couple of weeks. Now consider China, a country that many...