The U.S.-backed putsch that deposed Ukraine's constitutional order and triggered the Russian military intervention in the Crimean Peninsula has shifted the international spotlight from Asia's festering fault lines and territorial feuds to the new threat to European peace. The crisis over Ukraine cannot obscure Asia's growing geopolitical risks for long.

In fact, the clear geopolitical winner from the U.S.-Russian face-off over Ukraine will be an increasingly muscular China, which harps on historical grievances — real or imaginary — to justify its claims to territories and fishing areas long held by other Asian states. Whether it is strategic islands in the East and South China Seas or the resource-rich Himalayan Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, China is dangling the threat of force to assert its claims.

China will gain significantly from a new U.S.-Russian cold war, just as it became a major beneficiary from America's Cold War-era "ping-pong diplomacy," which led to President Richard Nixon's historic handshake with Mao Zedong in 1972 in an "opening" designed to employ a newly assertive, nuclear-armed China to countervail Soviet power in the Asia-Pacific region. Since the 1970s, the U.S. has followed a conscious policy to aid China's rise — an approach that remains intact today, even as America seeks to hedge against the risk of Chinese power sliding into arrogance.