US Foreign Policy & Geopolitics

[DougMacG]

Is any part of this Russian threat overstated?  All but 5 of the old Soviet republicans now under his control with Ukraine looking to fall next.

"Neville Chamberlain learned more from failure at Munich than the current generation of Western leaders learned from failure in Crimea."

And there is NOTHING we can do?  It will be easier to counter them later after they have reconstituted all their old power??

Step one, make Walter Russell Mead Biden's Secretary of State (if we can't make Pompeo President right now). Mead is the only Democrat paying attention.  But that would break the Biden Rule made clear in the Kamala selection, he wants no one smarter than him anywhere near him.

[Crafty_Dog]

Russia, China and the Bid for Empire
The U.S. must hold the line against their imperial ambitions in Ukraine, Taiwan and elsewhere.
By Robert D. Kaplan
Jan. 13, 2022 6:47 pm ET


Intellectuals can’t stop denouncing the West for its legacy of imperialism. But the imperialism on the march today is in the East. Russia and China are determined to consume Ukraine and Taiwan, legacies of the Romanov and Qing dynasties respectively, into the latest versions of their historical empires. Technology has intensified this struggle for imperial geography. Great-power war has become entirely imaginable because of the reduced emphasis on thermonuclear bombs in an era of hypersonic missiles, automated weapons systems, and information warfare. Russia and China demonstrate that the struggle for empire has rarely had such nerve-racking stakes.

The notion that we can play Russia off against China—as the Nixon administration played China off against the Soviet Union—is a fantasy. President Biden’s reward for giving up opposition to Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany has been the advance of nearly 100,000 Russian troops to the Ukrainian border area. National security adviser Henry Kissinger’s secret 1971 visit to Beijing occurred in the context of dramatic military tensions on the Chinese-Soviet frontier. China was in desperate need of U.S. help. Russia today has no such need.

True, the Chinese are making large-scale economic advances in formerly Soviet Central Asia, as well as providing security assistance to the Muslim republics there. But Russian President Vladimir Putin has calculated that China, a fellow authoritarian regime, isn’t a threat to his rule in the way the West is. (Indeed, Mr. Putin easily moved antiriot police into Kazakhstan, a place that the Russian empire settled with peasants from Russia and Ukraine in the 19th and early 20th centuries.) He has little need to line up with the West to balance against China.

Rather the reverse: Mr. Putin needs China to balance against the West. Since it is the West, in his view, that has helped install a hostile regime in Ukraine, whose border is less than 300 miles from Moscow, and would like to install a similarly hostile and democratic regime in Belarus, also relatively close to the Russian capital. What we see as potential or fledgling democratic states, Mr. Putin sees as vital parts of the former Soviet Union, a great power whose sprawling territory was based on czarist imperial conquests. While Ukraine was the birthplace of Kyivan Rus, it was also forcibly absorbed inside the czarist empire in the late 18th century, only to declare independence in 1918, before the Soviet conquest.

Mr. Putin’s goal isn’t only to restore the former Soviet Union in some form or other, but to establish a zone of influence throughout Central and Eastern Europe that approximates the borders of the former Warsaw Pact. Rather than direct rule through brotherly Communist parties—which proved too expensive and helped bring down the Soviet Union—Mr. Putin’s model is a form of mass Finlandization, in which the countries from Berlin to the east and to the southeast will know exactly what red lines not to cross in terms of Moscow’s interests.


A Pharaonic network of gas pipelines, intelligence operations, organized crime, disinformation and constant self-generated crises are the tools of Russian 21st-century imperialism. The crises of the moment are Ukraine, Belarus and Bosnia. In Belarus Middle Eastern refugees have been weaponized against Poland by President Alexander Lukashenko, a Putin lackey. In the western Balkans, Serb leader Milorad Dodik threatens to break up Bosnia-Herzegovina with backing from Russia and China. Russia’s aim in all of this is to insert itself into Europe as a power broker, the ultimate revenge against a region that in previous centuries generated many military invasions of the Russian heartland.

Imperialism throughout history has often originated from a deep well of insecurity. That is the case with Russia and China today. Just as Ukraine was for centuries part of the czarist and Soviet imperial heartland, Taiwan was a Chinese dynastic conquest until the 1894-95 Sino-Japanese War forced China to cede Taiwan to Japan. In Beijing’s view, restoring control of Taiwan to mainland China would right not only a Western depredation against a historic Chinese empire, the Qing Dynasty, but a Japanese depredation as well. Unlike Western countries, which are busy apologizing for their former conquests, the Chinese as well as the Russians take pride in their imperial legacies. Adm. Zheng He, an early Ming Dynasty explorer who sailed a vast armed fleet as far as the Middle East and East Africa, is a Chinese national hero.

If China and Russia didn’t take pride in empire, they wouldn’t be attempting to rule Taiwan and Ukraine today. For China, the return of Macau, the brutal suppression of Hong Kong and economic dominance over Outer Mongolia make Taiwan the only missing piece of its Middle Kingdom’s imperial geography. As for Tibet and Xinjiang (home to the Muslim Uyghur Turks), they represent colonial legacies of former Qing rule.

The problem now isn’t imperialism per se but the melding of imperialism with Leninist methods of control, which continue to define Russian and Chinese rule. Thus, the U.S. has no choice but to be a status quo power—that is, it need not defeat or even seriously undermine these two revisionist empires, but it must firmly hold the line against their advance. Ukraine needs not join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or the European Union, as long as it remains independent and democratic. Taiwan needs not declare independence, as long as it isn’t incorporated into China. These are unsatisfying positions, but they are moral in the sense that they represent both U.S. values and Americans’ wariness of armed overseas involvements.


Containment is a word nobody likes to say out loud. But it works. Remember especially that it was Richard Nixon’s Vietnam-era policy of détente and tactical maneuvering—rather than an attempt to seek all-out victory in the Cold War—that preceded Ronald Reagan’s successful Wilsonianism. The Soviet Union eventually collapsed of its own accord. We should keep that in mind, given that domestic tensions inside Russia and China, though more opaque than our own, aren’t to be underestimated and in fact help fuel their aggression.

Meanwhile, the American left should focus on where empire as an ideal truly endures, which isn’t in the West.

Mr. Kaplan holds a chair in geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and is author, most recently, of “The Good American: The Epic Life of Bob Gersony, the U.S. Government’s Greatest Humanitarian

[Crafty_Dog]

   https://www.ft.com/content/d307ab6e-57b3-4007-9188-ec9717c60023?63bac0e6-3d28-36b1-7417-423982f60790&fbclid=IwAR3o8hOHSVx3AX543UfNFaCmapB4WlLU8KhvE3758L-3ncteNSNaui0YLzw

   Russia and China’s plans for a new world order
For Moscow and Beijing, the Ukraine crisis is part of a struggle to reduce American power and make the world safe for autocrats
© Evgeniy Paulin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool/AP

The western alliance has threatened the Kremlin with “massive” and “unprecedented” sanctions if Russia attacks Ukraine. But, as the Ukraine crisis reaches boiling point, western efforts to isolate and punish Russia are likely to be undermined by the support of China — Russia’s giant neighbour.

When Vladimir Putin travels to Beijing for the beginning of the Winter Olympics on February 4, the Russian president will meet the leader who has become his most important ally — Xi Jinping of China. In a phone call between Putin and Xi in December, the Chinese leader supported Russia’s demand that Ukraine must never join Nato.

A decade ago, such a relationship seemed unlikely: China and Russia were as much rivals as partners. But after a period when both countries have sparred persistently with the US, Xi’s support for Putin reflects a growing identity between the interests and world views of Moscow and Beijing. According to the Chinese media, Xi told Putin that “certain international forces are arbitrarily interfering in the internal affairs of China and Russia, under the guise of democracy and human rights”.

As Xi’s remarks to Putin made clear, the Russian and Chinese leaders are united by a belief that the US is plotting to undermine and overthrow their governments. In the heyday of communism, Russia and China supported revolutionary forces around the world. But today Moscow and Beijing have embraced the rhetoric of counter-revolution. When unrest broke out in Kazakhstan recently, Putin accused the US of attempting to sponsor a “colour revolution” — a term given to protest movements that seek to change the government — in a country that borders both Russia and China. Senior Chinese ministers echoed those remarks.

Washington’s hidden hand
As Russia and China see it, the uprising in Kazakhstan fitted a pattern. The Kremlin has long argued that the US was the hidden hand behind Ukraine’s Maidan uprising of 2013-14, in which a pro-Russian leader was overthrown. China also insists that foreign forces — for which, read the US — were behind the huge Hong Kong protests of 2019, which were eventually ended by a crackdown ordered from Beijing.


An estimated 100,000 Russian troops have amassed along Ukraine’s border © AP
Both Putin and Xi have also made it clear they believe that America’s ultimate goal is to overthrow the Russian and Chinese governments and that local pro-democracy forces are America’s Trojan horse.

In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson of the US talked of “making the world safe for democracy”. In 2022, Putin and Xi are determined to make the world safe for autocracy.

The ambitions of Russia and China, however, are far from being wholly defensive. Both Putin and Xi believe that their vulnerability to “colour revolutions” stems from fundamental flaws in the current world order — the combination of institutions, ideas and power structures that determines how global politics plays out. As a result, they share a determination to create a new world order that will better accommodate the interests of Russia and China — as defined by their current leaders.

Two features of the current world order that the Russians and the Chinese frequently object to are “unipolarity” and “universality”. Put more simply, they believe that the current arrangements give America too much power — and they are determined to change that.

“Unipolarity” means that, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world was left with only one superpower — the US. Fyodor Lukyanov, a Russian foreign-policy thinker who is close to President Putin, believes that unipolarity “gave the United States the ability and possibility to do whatever it saw fit on the world stage”. He argues that the new age of American hegemony was ushered in by the Gulf war of 1991 — in which the US assembled a global coalition to drive Saddam Hussein’s Iraq out of Kuwait.

The Gulf war was followed by a succession of US-led military interventions around the world — including in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s. Nato’s bombing of Belgrade, Serbia’s capital, in 1999, has long formed part of Russia’s argument that Nato is not a purely defensive alliance. The fact that Nato bombs also struck the Chinese embassy in Belgrade has not been forgotten in Beijing.


China insists that foreign forces — ie the US — were behind the Hong Kong protests of 2019 eventually suppressed by Beijing © Isacc Lawrence/AFP via Getty Images

When unrest broke out in Kazakhstan recently, Putin accused the US of attempting to sponsor a revolution © STR/EPA/Shutterstock
After the 9/11 terror attacks on New York and Washington, Nato invoked Article 5 — its mutual-defence clause — and invaded Afghanistan. Once again, according to Lukyanov, America had demonstrated its willingness and ability to “forcefully transform the world”.

But America’s defeat in Afghanistan, symbolised by the chaotic withdrawal from Kabul in the summer of 2021, has given the Russians hope that the US-led world order is crumbling. Lukyanov argues that the fall of Kabul to the Taliban was “no less historical and symbolic than the fall of the Berlin Wall”.

Influential Chinese academics are thinking along similar lines. Yan Xuetong, dean of the school of international relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing (Xi’s alma mater), writes that “China believes that its rise to great-power status entitles it to a new role in world affairs — one that cannot be reconciled with unquestioned US dominance.”

Like Lukyanov, Yan believes that “the US-led world order is fading away . . . In its place will come a multipolar order”. President Xi himself has put it even more succinctly with his often repeated claim that “the east is rising and the west is declining”.

For Russia and China, the making of a new world order is not simply a matter of raw power. It is also a battle of ideas. While the western liberal tradition promotes the idea of universal human rights, Russian and Chinese thinkers make the argument that different cultural traditions and “civilisations” should be allowed to develop in different ways.

Vladislav Surkov, once an influential adviser to Putin, has decried Russia’s “repeated fruitless efforts to become a part of western civilisation”. Instead, according to Surkov, Russia should embrace the idea that it has “absorbed both east and west” and has a “hybrid mentality”. In a similar vein, pro-government thinkers in Beijing argue that a fusion of Confucianism and communism means that China will always be a country that stresses collective rather than individual rights. They claim that China’s success in containing Covid-19 reflects the superiority of the Chinese emphasis on collective action and group rights.


Fyodor Lukyanov, right, a foreign-policy thinker close to Putin, believes the collapse of the USSR gave the US permission to do what it liked on the world stage © Mikhail Klimentyev/TASS
Beijing and Moscow argue that the current world order is characterised by an American attempt to impose western ideas about democracy and human rights on other countries, if necessary through military intervention. The new world order that Russia and China are demanding would instead be based on distinct spheres of influence. The US would accept Russian and Chinese domination of their neighbourhoods and would abandon its support for democracy or the colour revolutions that might threaten the Putin or Xi regimes.

The crisis over Ukraine is a struggle over the future world order because it turns on precisely these issues. For Putin, Ukraine is culturally and politically part of Russia’s sphere of influence. Russia’s security needs should give it the right to veto any Ukrainian desire to join Nato, the western alliance. Moscow also demands to act as the protector of Russian speakers. For the US, these demands violate some basic principles of the current world order — in particular, the right of an independent country to define its own foreign policy and strategic choices.

The Ukraine crisis is also about “world order” because it has clear global implications. The US knows that if Russia attacks Ukraine and establishes its own “sphere of influence”, a precedent will be set for China. During the Xi era, China has built military bases all over contested areas of the South China Sea. Beijing’s threats to invade Taiwan — a self-governing democratic island that China regards as a rebel province — have also become more overt and frequent. If Putin succeeds in invading Ukraine, the temptation for Xi to attack Taiwan will rise, as will the domestic pressure on the Chinese leader from excitable nationalists, sensing the end of the American era.

Russia and China clearly have similar complaints about the current world order. There are also some important differences between the approaches of Moscow and Beijing. Russia is currently more willing to take military risks than China. But its ultimate goals may be more limited. For the Russians, the use of military force in Syria, Ukraine and elsewhere is a way of repudiating the claim made by former US president Barack Obama that Russia is now no more than a regional power. Dmitri Trenin of the Carnegie Center in Moscow argues that, “For the country’s leaders, Russia is nothing if it is not a great power.”

But while Russia aspires to be one of the world’s great powers, China seems to be contemplating displacing the US as the world’s pre-eminent power. Elizabeth Economy, author of a new book called The World According to China, argues that Beijing is aiming for a “radically transformed international order” in which the US is in essence pushed out of the Pacific and becomes merely an Atlantic power. Since the Indo-Pacific is now the core of the global economy, that would essentially leave China as “number one”. Rush Doshi, a China scholar working in the White House, makes a similar argument in his book, The Long Game. Citing various Chinese sources, Doshi makes the case that China is now clearly aiming for American-style global hegemony.


The 9/11 terror attacks led to Nato invoking Article 5 and invading Afghanistan, showing US willingness to ‘forcefully transform the world’ © Jose Jimenez/Primera Hora/Getty Images

US forces battle the Taliban in 2001. America’s final defeat in Afghanistan last year has given Moscow hope the US-led world order is crumbling © Oleg Nikishin/Getty Images
A bid for global supremacy
The difference in the scale of the ambitions of China and Russia reflects the difference in their economic potential. Russia’s economy is now roughly the size of Italy’s. Moscow simply does not have the wealth to sustain a bid for global supremacy. By contrast, China is now, by some measures, the world’s largest economy. It is also the world’s largest manufacturer and exporter. Its population of 1.4bn people is roughly ten times that of Russia. As a result, it is realistic for China to aspire to be the most powerful country in the world.

But while the differences in the economic potential of Russia and China makes Xi ultimately more ambitious than Putin, in the short term it also makes him more cautious. There is something of a gambler’s desperation in Putin’s willingness to use military force to try to change the balance of power in Europe. Trenin argues that, having seen Nato expand into much of what was once the Soviet bloc, Putin sees Ukraine as his “last stand”.

In Beijing, by contrast, there is a strong feeling that time and history are on China’s side. The Chinese also have many economic instruments for expanding their influence that are simply not available to the Russians. A signature project of the Xi years is the Belt and Road Initiative, a vast international programme of Chinese-funded infrastructure that stretches into Central Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas.

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As America has become more protectionist, China has also used its trading power to expand its global influence. This month has seen the launch of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, a vast new free-trade area in the Asia-Pacific that includes China and several American strategic allies, such as Japan and Australia — which the US is not taking part in. Granting or withholding access to the Chinese market gives Beijing a tool of influence that is simply not available to Moscow.

But will gradualism work? Or do Russia and China need some kind of dramatic moment to create the new world order that they seek?

History suggests that new governing systems for the world generally emerge after some kind of seismic political event, such as a major war.

Much of the security and institutional architecture of the current world order emerged as the second world war was closing or in its aftermath, when the UN, the World Bank and the IMF were set up and their headquarters were situated in the US. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Gatt) came into force in 1948. Nato was created in 1949. The US-Japan Security Treaty was signed in 1951. The European Coal and Steel Community, the forerunner of the EU, was also founded in 1951. After the end of the cold war, rival Soviet-backed institutions such as the Warsaw Pact collapsed and Nato and the EU expanded up to the borders of Russia. China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, the successor to the Gatt.

The question now is whether Russia and China’s ambitions for a “new world order” will also need a war to come to fruition. A direct conflict with the US is simply too dangerous in the nuclear era and will not happen unless all sides miscalculate badly (which is always possible).


Iranian, Russia and Chinese warships on a military drill in the Indian Ocean last year. Will Russia and China’s ambitions for a ‘new world order’ need a war to come to fruition? © Iranian Army office/AFP/Getty Images
Russia and China may, however, feel that they will be able to achieve their ambitions through proxy wars. An unopposed Russian victory in Ukraine might signal that a new security order was emerging in Europe, involving a de facto Russian “sphere of influence”. A successful Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be widely read as a sign that the era of American dominance of the Pacific was over. At that point, many countries in the region that currently look to the US for their security, such as Japan and South Korea, might choose to accommodate themselves to a new China-dominated order.

Alternatively, a new world order might emerge through tacit acquiescence from Washington. That outcome does not seem likely with the Biden administration in power, unless there are some dramatic last-minute concessions from the US over Ukraine. But Donald Trump could return to the White House in 2024. At least rhetorically, he seems sympathetic to aspects of the Russian-Chinese world view.

The former US president sometimes denigrated Nato and suggested that America’s allies in Asia were free-riders. His “America First” philosophy eschewed traditional language about an American mission to support freedom around the world. At times, Trump was also frank in expressing admiration for both Xi and Putin. And, as a self-proclaimed dealmaker, Trump is sympathetic to ideas of spheres of influence.

https://www.ft.com/content/d307ab6e-57b3-4007-9188-ec9717c60023?63bac0e6-3d28-36b1-7417-423982f60790&fbclid=IwAR3o8hOHSVx3AX543UfNFaCmapB4WlLU8KhvE3758L-3ncteNSNaui0YLzw

The ever closer Chinese-Russian alliance will ensure the threat to the US-led world order will not disappear any time soon © Greg Baker/AFP/Getty Images
Yet Russia and China do not seem inclined to sit back and wait for Trump to return to the White House. They know that even Trump’s Republican party includes many hawks, intent on confrontation with both Russia and China. In any case, a great deal can happen between now and the next presidential election in November 2024.

Russia’s impatience is clear from Putin’s willingness to force a crisis over Ukraine. The prospects for a new world order that is more congenial to Russia may depend on whether his Ukrainian gamble works. But even if Putin fails to achieve his goals in Ukraine, the threat to the US-led world order will not disappear. A rising China, led by an ambitious President Xi, will make sure of that.

[Crafty_Dog]

January 31, 2022
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New Political Strategies in a New Economic Order
Coordinated protectionism may soon be the norm.
By: Antonia Colibasanu

At several debates I’ve attended since the beginning of the year – and in several responses I’ve received from readers – one question is inevitably asked: In these unprecedented times, how are states using their economic leverage to support their geopolitical imperatives? Put differently, how is geoeconomics changing?

To answer it, we need to consider the origins of the current global economic climate. The COVID-19 pandemic may have revealed and even aggravated some trends already underway, but the problems started with the 2008 global financial crisis, which heralded some fundamental changes. Most notably, it upended the U.S.-dominated economic order established at Bretton Woods after World War II. The United States is still the most dominant country, of course, but the world is decidedly more multipolar than it once was.

Among other things, Bretton Woods enabled the U.S. to establish the U.S. dollar as the world currency while the U.S. Marshall Plan provided the necessary investment to rebuild major European powers. It facilitated free trade-based globalization on an unprecedented scale, with the U.S. Navy securing global trade routes. It created a system whereby everyone was tied to a global market that would, in theory, discourage traditional imperial systems and thus prevent another world war. It was partly responsible for driving the Cold War and partly responsible for ending it. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the U.S. was the world’s only remaining superpower, the guarantor of a global government that supported the free flow of trade. Since then, other countries have regained economic, military and political power, even as the U.S. has lost or surrendered some of its own. In short, other nations, financial institutions and corporations took on a larger role in managing the global economy.

Financial markets have thus developed so quickly and so independently that neither the U.S. nor any other state could control them as they could in the latter half of the 20th century. Trading on the so-called secondary market – where rights on assets and guarantees on transactions were being bought and sold as if they were goods themselves – became so fluid and so abstract that it created the bubble that burst in 2008. Citizens the world over lost trust in their financial institutions as well as the governments that purport to protect them.

Many of these same citizens began to embrace both political and economic nationalism, but as important, they began to seek alternate systems operating parallel to the established ones. Enter cryptocurrencies. The viability of cryptos is still very much an open question, but the fact that they have been embraced as they have illustrates a loss of faith in traditional institutions.

So today, with supply chains disrupted, with cryptocurrencies gaining traction, and with the world still not fully recovered from the 2008 crisis, leaders everywhere are struggling to concoct a suitable policy mix. Coupled with the fact that governments the world over are devising ways to make their national economies more resilient, this changes the way governments use economic leverage to pursue their interests.

The problem that both governments and central banks are currently facing seems to be an inadaptation problem. If we look only at inflation, we should know central banks consider so-called “core inflation” to be the driver of monetary policy. “Core inflation” excludes short-term factors that may influence price – which means it excludes energy and food prices. The idea is that monetary policy can’t control them, and fluctuations in price will be eventually corrected.

This leads policymakers to consider inflation “transitory” when consumers are paying higher prices for food and energy. Consumers, for their part, aren’t so optimistic. In so many words, they think inflation will be higher than central bank economists think it will, and both participate in and thus influence the market – all while financial institutions and corporations also place their own bets, based on how they see policymakers and consumers acting on the market. The problem is that many of their actions are divergent as the gap between the two has widened over time.

This is a complex if obvious point: The political will to cooperate in solving financial problems – as happened after the 2008 financial crisis – was challenged by individual socio-economic problems, triggering a domino effect in which political and economic nationalism rose, especially in Europe.

The pandemic complicated things further. Central authorities are being challenged by the population on pretty much everything, from vaccination campaigns to lockdown measures. It has created an environmental challenge, resistance and skepticism. Hence why states feel compelled to provide a sense of protection – or, in some cases, protectionism.

Which brings us to the issue at hand. Since the heady days of relentless globalization in the 1990s, foreign direct investment seemed to be the preferred way for countries to economically leverage their geopolitical interests. The more a country was able to control investment flows and destinations, the easier it was for it to build political ties to various countries and regions. China, for example, has used this strategy to great effect in Africa and Europe.

But as globalization is diluting and we enter a deglobalization era, countries need to learn to understand their domestic markets better first, and then, based on their specific internal needs, pursue their interests internationally. In fact, China has been able to understand this and thus control its domestic market better than most. (It’s much easier to do in centralized economies and non-democracies.) Its tactics in this regard are telling. It was in no rush to end the lockdown in strategic ports like Tianjin, where measures ended last week, and Ningbo, where measures are still in place, and it also signaled it may ban exports of energy and key mineral resources. On Jan. 26, China and South Korea agreed to notify each other if either would ban such exports. This comes after China halted urea exports in November, creating supply chain disruption in the process. Beijing did it to secure its domestic market, particularly its semiconductor industry – which is key to maintaining economic leverage internationally.

Another way to leverage economic capacity for geopolitical ends is to at least influence, if not outright control, the flow of commodities and energy. This is the preferred tactic for Russia. Moscow wielded this weapon aggressively but only when it could afford to. High oil and gas prices usually coincide with military interventions abroad, such as in Afghanistan in 1979-1980 and Georgia in 2008. Rumors abound that a drop in gas prices was the only thing that spared Ukraine from a full-on Russian invasion after Moscow took Crimea in 2014. And as Russian forces amass on Ukraine’s border today, it’s important to note that the high price of energy arguably makes Russia sanctions-proof for the time being.

More abstractly, as countries navigate the new global economy, trying to keep their people happy while pursuing their interests abroad, they need to have a firmer understanding of financial markets and the role they play in those markets. Central authorities have the challenging task of monitoring virtually all market activity while being able to regulate precious little of it. Playing a more systemic role usually translates into the ability for a country to find ways to raise capital at lower borrowing costs and thus gain a greater ability to impact other countries’ borrowing costs. In the current financial system, where the market outpaces policies and their effects, such a task is getting even more difficult than usual.

What’s clear is that as the global economy changes, so too will government strategies for managing financial and commodity markets. This will likely result in protectionist measures, but because supply chains are so integrated and digitized, protectionism will likely be coordinated at least regionally if not globally. Until then, we will all have to live with the uncertainty.

[Crafty_Dog]

In Clash With U.S. Over Ukraine, Putin Has a Lifeline From China
President Biden could find his plans to punish Russia undermined by Xi Jinping, a longtime ally of Mr. Putin. But China moves cautiously during crises.



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China’s leader, Xi Jinping, left, with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir V. Putin, in Moscow in 2019. The two will meet Friday before the start of the Olympics in Beijing.
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, left, with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir V. Putin, in Moscow in 2019. The two will meet Friday before the start of the Olympics in Beijing. Credit...Pool photo by Alexander Zemlianichenko
Steven Lee MyersEdward Wong
By Steven Lee Myers and Edward Wong
Feb. 2, 2022
Updated 2:49 a.m. ET

BEIJING — As the United States moves to exert maximal pressure on Russia over fears of a Ukraine invasion, the Russian leader, Vladimir V. Putin, has found relief from his most powerful partner on the global stage, China.

China has expressed support for Mr. Putin’s grievances against the United States and NATO, joined Russia to try to block action on Ukraine at the United Nations Security Council, and brushed aside American warnings that an invasion would create “global security and economic risks” that could consume China, too.

On Friday, Mr. Putin will meet in Beijing with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, ahead of the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics that President Biden and other leaders have pointedly vowed to boycott.

Although details of any potential agreements between the two countries have not been disclosed, the meeting itself — Mr. Xi’s first in person with a world leader in nearly two years — is expected to be yet another public display of geopolitical amity between the two powers.



A Chinese promise of economic and political support for Mr. Putin could undermine Mr. Biden’s strategy to ostracize the Russian leader for his military buildup on Ukraine’s borders. It could also punctuate a tectonic shift in the rivalry between the United States and China that could reverberate from Europe to the Pacific.


“If there’s a war over Ukraine, and the Chinese and Russians overtly align with one another, suddenly the world we’re in looks like a very, very different one,” said Evan S. Medeiros, a professor at Georgetown University who served on the National Security Council during Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.

“China will be on the eastern front of what looks like a long-term global competition,” he added.

China’s leaders have watched the confrontation between Russia and the United States over Ukraine intently, with reports in Chinese state media highlighting the divisions among the NATO allies and criticizing the United States, gleefully at times.



The leadership has viewed the showdown as a test of American influence and resolve that could distract Mr. Biden from his administration’s focus on China as the pre-eminent strategic rival of the 21st century. That includes growing American support for Taiwan, the island democracy that China claims as part of its territory.



“In practical terms, China benefits on two fronts,” said Alexander Gabuev, an expert on Russia’s relations with China at the Carnegie Moscow Center. “First, a major security crisis in Europe will suck up a lot of oxygen that Team Biden needs to address China. Secondly, Russia will move even closer to China — on Beijing’s terms.”

Understand Russia’s Relationship With the West

The tension between the regions is growing and Russian President Vladimir Putin is increasingly willing to take geopolitical risks and assert his demands.
Competing for Influence: For months, the threat of confrontation has been growing in a stretch of Europe from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea.
 Threat of Invasion: As the Russian military builds its presence near Ukraine, Western nations are seeking to avert a worsening of the situation.
Energy Politics: Europe is a huge customer of Russia’s fossil fuels. The rising tensions in Ukraine are driving fears of a midwinter cutoff.
Migrant Crisis: As people gathered on the eastern border of the European Union, Russia's uneasy alliance with Belarus triggered additional friction.
Militarizing Society: With a “youth army” and initiatives promoting patriotism, the Russian government is pushing the idea that a fight might be coming.
In Washington, administration officials said they are worried that at the summit meeting in Beijing, Mr. Xi would offer Mr. Putin reassurances of Chinese support if the United States imposes heavy economic penalties on Russia, as the administration has threatened to do.

When the United States imposed similar penalties in 2014 following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Mr. Putin also turned to China as an alternative source of investment and trade, minimizing the impact, at least somewhat. That year, China went ahead and signed a $400 billion gas deal with Russia, though Chinese officials did negotiate favorable prices for their companies since Mr. Putin was in a bind.

Maria Snegovaya, a visiting scholar at George Washington University who co-wrote an Atlantic Council paper on American sanctions against Russia, said the 2014 events pushed Russia closer to China.

She predicted that China would again help blunt the impact of sanctions, noting that the country is now a big buyer of Russian weapons, fish and timber, and in 2020 it was the largest importer of Russia’s crude oil and natural gas.


“This provides Russia more flexibility in case the West sanctions some of Russia’s exports,” she said.

While China has often driven a hard bargain with Russia in the past, the economic ties between the two countries have soared since Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine.


China announced last month that trade with Russia had reached nearly $147 billion, compared to $68 billion in 2015, the year after it annexed Crimea and supported separatists in eastern Ukraine. Russia’s ambassador to China, Andrei Denisov, said the two countries could soon complete a deal for a second natural gas pipeline like the one called Power of Siberia, which began flowing in 2019.

Beyond any economic benefits, the two countries have found common cause in trying to weaken American power and influence. Officials and state media in both countries have in recent weeks echoed each other’s attacks on the United States, reflecting an increasingly jaded view of American intentions.

China joined Russia in accusing the United States of fomenting public protests that swept Kazakhstan. Sergei Naryshkin, the director of Russia’s foreign intelligence service and a hawkish compatriot of Mr. Putin’s when both served in the Soviet K.G.B., said last month that the United States planned “to aggressively and maliciously interfere” in the Olympics in Beijing.

Global Times, a nationalistic newspaper of the Communist Party, seized on the comments to declare that the plot had been foiled. “Failed attack campaign against Winter Olympics shows incompetence of U.S. government,” a headline declared.


Mr. Xi has met Mr. Putin 37 times as their countries’ leaders, more than any other head of state. In their last meeting, a virtual summit in December, Mr. Xi called him his “old friend,” and the two pledged to build an international political and financial system not dominated by the United States and the dollar.

Chinese officials view Russia’s drive to push back against NATO as a parallel to their own efforts to prevent the United States from building up alliances and partnerships in Asia to counter China.

Understand the Escalating Tensions Over Ukraine
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A brewing conflict. Antagonism between Ukraine and Russia has been simmering since 2014, when the Russian military crossed into Ukrainian territory, annexing Crimea and whipping up a rebellion in the east. A tenuous cease-fire was reached in 2015, but peace has been elusive.

A spike in hostilities. Russia has recently been building up forces near its border with Ukraine, and the Kremlin’s messaging toward its neighbor has hardened. Concern grew in late October, when Ukraine used an armed drone to attack a howitzer operated by Russian-backed separatists.

Ominous warnings. Russia called the strike a destabilizing act that violated the cease-fire agreement, raising fears of a new intervention in Ukraine that could draw the United States and Europe into a new phase of the conflict.

The Kremlin’s position. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who has increasingly portrayed NATO’s eastward expansion as an existential threat to his country, said that Moscow’s military buildup was a response to Ukraine’s deepening partnership with the alliance.

Rising tension. Western countries have tried to maintain a dialogue with Moscow. But administration officials recently warned that the U.S. could throw its weight behind a Ukrainian insurgency should Russia invade.

While there are many differences in the geopolitical situations of Ukraine and Taiwan, Mr. Putin’s use of historical myths and sheer military power to justify seizing Ukraine has resonance among hawks in Beijing. Mr. Xi, too, has intensified his warnings that Taiwan must never seek independence from a united China under Communist Party rule.

“There is a strong link between the two flash points,” said Artyom Lukin, a professor of international studies at the Far Eastern Federal University in Russia.

One notable difference is that while the United States has flatly said it will not send troops to defend Ukraine, it has maintained “strategic ambiguity” on Taiwan for decades and has left unsaid whether it would come to the armed defense of the island. That ambiguity has helped serve as a deterrent against a Chinese invasion.

China’s diplomatic and rhetorical support is not a blank check for Russia’s designs.


If the United States targets Russia with new sanctions, China could take measured steps in aiding its neighbor. As they did in 2014, Chinese banks and companies would need to calculate whether they could end up being penalized if they do business with any targeted Russian entities. Such penalties would jeopardize their commerce in the United States and elsewhere.


China has also never recognized Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and while the two countries conduct joint military operations, it is highly unlikely that China would ever explicitly support a military intervention.

Only weeks ago, China celebrated the 30th anniversary of an independent Ukraine following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The two nations have strong commercial ties, including in the defense industry. Although Chinese officials have made clear that the United States should address Russia’s “reasonable security concerns” in Europe, they have also emphasized the need for a peaceful resolution of the conflict over Ukraine.

“Beijing is in the uncomfortable position of seeing one sovereign country invade another sovereign country,” said Derek Grossman, an analyst on Asian security issues at the RAND Corporation. “That flies in the face of noninterference, which China, on paper at least, has assiduously upheld.”


Memories also linger of the last Olympics in Beijing, the Summer Games in 2008. During the opening ceremony, news spread that Russian troops had moved into Georgia, another former Soviet republic bristling at Russian interference.

“The attitude of the Chinese government is still relatively prudent,” Cheng Xiaohe, a professor of international studies at Renmin University in Beijing, said, “but it mainly shows a cautious attitude on the basis of sympathy and support for Russia.”

Steven Lee Myers reported from Beijing and Edward Wong from Washington. Claire Fu and Rick Gladstone contributed research and reporting.


Steven Lee Myers is the Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times. He joined The Times in 1989 and has previously worked as a correspondent in Moscow, Baghdad and Washington. He is the author of “The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin,” published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2015. @stevenleemyers • Facebook

Edward Wong is a diplomatic and international correspondent who has reported for The Times for more than 20 years, 13 from Iraq and China. He received a Livingston Award and was on a team of Pulitzer Prize finalists for Iraq War coverage. He has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton. @ewong

[Crafty_Dog]

February 4, 2022
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Thinking About Global Annihilation
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman

We are in the midst of a major confrontation between the U.S. and Russia. I was there when President Ronald Reagan bluffed the Soviets into trying to keep up with developing space-based weapons the U.S. didn’t actually have. I was there when, as the Soviets threatened to send an airborne force to intervene in the Arab-Israeli War, the U.S. went to DEFCON 3. One of my earliest memories as a child growing up in the Bronx was the Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956, when Russian tanks were reported to have leveled the old neighborhood my parents came from and where my relatives still lived.

(MARC:  Coincidentally, I just reread James Michener's book about all this "The Bridge at Andau" and yes Russian tanks did level neighborhoods and shoot down many, many civilians.  They took substantial casualties from the heroic Hungarian people in doing so.)

I am a connoisseur of global crises, especially the ones between the U.S. and the Soviets. They have the fine patina of subtlety coupled with dishonesty. Crises aren’t the sole domain of Washington and Moscow, but for my money, there is no crisis like a U.S.-Russian crisis. Even the Roman Empire couldn’t annihilate the world.

Given my expertise in crises, I’m taking in the current one as a sommelier imbibes a vintage they know well – expectantly, but prepared to be disappointed. So far the crisis has all the hallmarks of the classics. The Russians have mobilized three groups of tanks and claim not to be planning war. They have made demands that cannot possibly be agreed to, and are insulted when the demands are rejected. The United States has invoked the wrath of NATO, whose members promptly scatter like a herd of cats. NATO will later accuse the United States of abandoning its commitment to the alliance. This crisis will ultimately end in some incoherent outcome guaranteed to trigger more down the road. And in due course, a horde will come of unreadable dissertations and memoirs of the crisis, showing how the authors singlehandedly forced the other side to capitulate.

As a crisis I give it an 86 out of 100, drinkable but badly missing something. The something is the threat of thermonuclear war. What hardware has been mobilized lacks the energy of two nuclear powers moving their defense posture to just below global catastrophe, the tense meetings in bars in Vienna, Voronezh or Arlington, where “almost” senior civil servants talk to each other as if they have any chance of effecting the crisis, transformed into statesmen at the keyboard. Finally, there is intense uncertainty of a population about a future already defined by reality.

The standard-bearer for such episodes is the Cuban missile crisis, a fine blend of danger and bullshit. I was 13 when the crisis occurred. We lived then in Queens, New York, by Idlewild Airport, later named John F. Kennedy International Airport. I knew that Idlewild could be used as a military airfield, and it was loaded with fuel, and so I knew that in the war to come the Soviets would put two missiles about three miles from my precious butt. I knew the Russians were as well-armed as the Americans, and I knew this could only end in nuclear annihilation. I knew that because kids in 1962 took nuclear war as seriously as they took baseball. And as with baseball, they didn’t know much.

And in all the books and movies thereafter, the fear of war hung over everyone. Indeed, the episode was the stuff stories are built on. Robert Kennedy met with Anatoly Dobrynin, the Russian ambassador to the U.S., in a final desperate attempt to ward off the apocalypse. It turns out Kennedy taped all the meetings of the ExComm, the committee managing the crisis, and Soviet files were opened after the fall of the Soviet Union. Both of these documents reveal similar things: Each side wanted to make the crisis exciting so they could appear heroic and statesmanlike, but in fact it wasn’t what it appeared to be.

First, the Soviets had somewhere between two and 15 missiles in Russia said to be able to reach the United States. The U.S. had almost 200 reliable missiles, plus eight nuclear submarines also armed with nuclear weapons. The U.S. also had a large fleet of B-52 nuclear-armed bombers on continued alert. The Soviets had neither a significant long-range bomber force nor an operational nuclear capability.

When John F. Kennedy ran for president, he claimed there was a missile gap. It was a lie, but he knew that Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon couldn’t reveal the truth. The U.S. had the Soviets completely outgunned, not to mention the obsolete short-range missiles stationed in Turkey.

The reason that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev wanted Cuba is that, without a long-range missile capability, he could use Cuba as a launchpad for nuclear strikes involving shorter-range weapons. Khrushchev figured that the U.S. would not strike Russia if Russia could have the ability to kill a million or so Americans. It all depended on the Soviets getting the missiles operational before the U.S. found out. The U.S. found out just in time. But as we discovered after the crisis, the U.S. didn’t attack Russia even when the Russians had no means of retaliation.

Kennedy and Khrushchev both understood as much. The idea that thermonuclear war was barely averted isn’t quite right. One thing that the Americans didn’t know was that the Soviets had sent tactical nuclear weapons to Cuba that the Soviet military was free to use in an invasion. Their use might have triggered a U.S. strike on Russia. Nuclear war could have happened only if the U.S. had struck unilaterally, which wasn’t going to happen. The legend that we stood eyeball to eyeball and only for Russia to blink first is nonsense.

I love this crisis because of the extraordinary drama at the moment and the way both leaders tried to make themselves heroic. I love the memoirs of would-be heroes. I love the way the full story came out and that what appeared to be armageddon turned into a called bluff. This is what a great U.S.-Russian conflict looks like: mankind on the brink of annihilation, surrounding a pile of horse manure.

I strongly suspect the current crisis is in fact like the Cuban missile crisis, as some have claimed with deep terror. I, for one, hope it is.

[Crafty_Dog]

Long Live Ukraine, Taiwan and the Nation-State
A critical achievement of modern civilization may rest on the fate of these two small countries, in danger of being swallowed by imperial neighbors.
By Christopher DeMuth
Feb. 4, 2022 2:33 pm ET

Russia wants to absorb Ukraine and rule its people. China wants to absorb Taiwan and rule its people. The two powers isolate and degrade their much smaller neighbors at every turn and invoke stale grievances to justify conquering them outright. They have served notice on the world that they are prepared to make war to impose their will. Frantic countermeasures are under way, focused for the time being on averting an invasion of Ukraine or a Moscow-backed coup.

The bellicose Russian and Chinese overtures have provoked wide fear and revulsion. Fear because either military resistance or successful annexations could lead to further aggression by Russia and China and wider wars involving other European or Asian nations and the U.S. Revulsion because Taiwan and Ukraine are free democracies in the crosshairs of murderous dictatorships.

These are vital considerations for understanding and responding to the emergency. But there is another, more elemental consideration. Whatever their covetous neighbors say, Taiwan and Ukraine have the essential features of independent nationhood. Provenance and their own exertions have given them the moral right to national self-determination, for three reasons.


First, they occupy and police clearly defined territories inhabited and cultivated by millions of citizens. Their territorial boundaries involve a few incidental disputes, like those that pepper hundreds of other national borders; these are matters for routine diplomatic negotiation and are irrelevant to their neighbors’ designs on their entire territories.

Second, they are self-conscious polities with their own histories, traditions and institutions of government, commerce and civil society. Their diversities of ethnicity, language and religion are typical of many modern nations. People with ties of language and heritage to Russia and China enjoy full rights of citizenship. Most important, sundry group loyalties are thoroughly entwined with patriotic identity and allegiance: Large majorities regard Ukraine and Taiwan as their national homes, familiar and admirable, and are ready to fight and sacrifice alongside their countrymen to preserve their independence.

Third, they are peaceable. They have no interest, not to mention ability, in invading China or Russia (or any other neighbor), or to rule their peoples, subvert their institutions or interfere with their corresponding prerogatives as independent nations. Their militaries, and military alliances with other nations, are strictly defensive, with no purpose other than to counter manifest external aggression. The threats to national self-determination are wholly one-sided.

The national status of Ukraine and Taiwan is critical because the nation-state is a critical achievement of modern civilization. It is the product of centuries of social evolution and has proved the most productive, beneficial form of human politics yet devised. It is the indispensable building block of efforts to address regional and global problems. The order of self-governing nations deserves our attention and respect as a stupendous inheritance, one that needs our protection if we wish to keep it.

These assertions may sound strange. The nation-state was born in strife and bloodshed and has been the scene of horrific ethnic and religious conflict. Nationalism is said to have been the root cause of major wars. More than a few nation-states are brutal dictatorships indifferent to the welfare of their citizens. And who among us cannot recite a litany of objections to our own nation’s government and political system? No wonder that progressive idealism, once attached to “national self-determination,” has shifted to globe-spanning agencies and human-rights movements that transcend parochial national interests.

But these constructions are myopic and misleading. Folly, pride and malevolence are constants of our species, but so are reason, piety and benevolence—and the rise of the nation-state is thanks to its relative success in managing the former and making space for the latter. Nation building, beginning in the 16th century and gathering steam in the 18th, promoted diversity, equity and inclusion—and freedom to boot.

As Boston University’s Liah Greenfeld has demonstrated, the modern idea of social equality grew from efforts to transform class-ridden societies into inclusive national communities and to convert aristocracy-ridden governments into meritocratic ones.

The canonical freedoms of religion, speech, inquiry, association and enterprise were instituted to solve problems—wars of religion, out-of-touch ruling elites, static commerce, dogmatic science—that stood in the way of effective nationhood.

Whatever philosophers may declare, in practice there is no such thing as a supernational right: Rights of legal process, political participation, minority protection and security of hearth and home are enjoyed only by those who are part of a political community with the will and wherewithal to enforce them.

Most of today’s successful nation-states are conglomerations of racial, ethnic and religious groups that have become, on balance, sources of dynamism rather than conflict.

Each of these developments was spurred by competition with other countries that were learning the arts of nationhood and reaping commensurate rewards of wealth, independence, cultural achievement and mastery of the physical world. In premodern times, when “nations” meant racial, ethnic or religious groups, rivalry was based on immutable personal characteristics and tended to turn violent and zero-sum. When “nations” became geographic territories with diverse and overlapping population groups, rivalry shifted, productively, to institutional arrangements, management of domestic divisions and cultivation of the spirit of shared identity and purpose.

These tendencies aren’t the whole story, and we see a wide variety of practices and traditions among the world’s nearly 200 nation-states. That variety is itself a strength, akin to that of American federalism. Ukraine is said to be a “fledgling democracy” with a ways to go to meet supposedly high Western standards—but it is a conservative, relatively religious nation with a brave fighting spirit that is impressing friend and foe alike. Older and richer Taiwan features raucous conflict between progressive and conservative parties—yet they have mastered the art of regular, peaceful transfers of government. Fun fact: Taiwan’s constitution has a unique fourth branch, conceived by Sun Yat-Sen, that independently polices government performance and corruption with powers of censure and impeachment. Both major parties would like to be rid of this nettlesome innovation, but I hope that they keep it and that others take note.

For all its variety and many flaws, modern nationhood is in a class of its own and recognized as such. In the 1930s, Germany and Japan talked the talk of aggrieved nationhood—but they walked the walk of race-based, imperial conquest and had to be put back in their place at terrible cost by real nation-states of diverse traditions and interests. Today Russia and China conflate aggrieved nationhood with empire and subjugation and, for China, racial destiny. If they were normal nation-states, with the three essential features I have described, the world would be vastly more secure, peaceful and prosperous (even more so if Iran were to join the club). And their own great cultural achievements would be much more widely admired and studied.

The Russian and Chinese threats focus the mind on how the order of nation-states is to be protected. The “collective security” template at the heart of the League of Nations and United Nations, in which all member nations pledge to take seriously aggression against any other, is too wide and shallow to be effective. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s much firmer pledge has worked better but is limited to a restricted group of similar nations. But all three institutions undermined the national order by obscuring security responsibilities. The league and U.N. oxymoronically made “national self-determination” a dispensation from an “international community,” and NATO transferred significant European security responsibilities from its own nations to the U.S.

I think there is no better alternative than leaving security challenges to the judgement of individual nations from case to case, weighing their own national interests and their collective interest in protecting the national order. That, in any event, seems to be how things work in practice, as in the current crisis. Japan and Australia have effectively pledged to help defend Taiwan militarily in league with the U.S., while South Korea has demurred (it says it won’t fight alongside Japan). France, the U.K. and Poland, along with the U.S., have been outstanding supporters of Ukraine, while Germany has gone to extraordinary lengths to deny support.

Why is the Taiwan coalition planning on joining actively in military defense, while the Ukraine coalition is limiting itself to providing military supplies and intelligence and logistical support? Taiwan, excluded from most international organizations at China’s behest, has carefully cultivated bilateral political, commercial and cultural ties with the U.S. and other powerful nations, and it has been a conspicuously better world citizen than China, as during the Covid pandemic. Self-determination takes time, and Taiwan, which has been effectively independent since 1949, has had more time than Ukraine, which withdrew from the Soviet Union only in 1991. But the decisive reason is that the U.S. correctly sees China as a far more serious threat to American interests and menace to world peace and stability than Russia.

Whatever the upshot, I would like to see, in these and future cases, greater recognition of the integrity of the nation-state and its value to others. If Ukraine’s plight is judged less important than Taiwan’s to the interests of other nations, so be it. But that is no excuse for the disparagement of Ukraine, in some European and American quarters, as less than a “real” nation worthy of our attentions. The Ukrainians’ astonishing defiance in the face of massive military mobilization is an object lesson in the value of the nationalist spirit to international order. It is unmasking Russian ruthlessness while others equivocate, and may itself be a sufficient deterrent unto the day.

Here is a parting thought for giving nationhood a rhetorical boost in the councils of government and public opinion. The word genocide, meaning the extermination of a people for their race or ethnicity, describes an act so monstrous that its very application can influence debate and action. It could be useful to have a cognate, perhaps nationcide, to describe the extermination of the national civilization a people have built—customs, traditions, civil associations and practices of self-government—which many of them will deem as precious as life itself.

Mr. DeMuth is a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute.

[Crafty_Dog]

Xi and Putin Announce ‘No Limits’ Partnership Amid Deepening Standoff With West
By Dorothy Li February 4, 2022 Updated: February 4, 2022biggersmaller Print

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China’s leader Xi Jinping met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Beijing on the opening day of the Winter Olympics in a show of solidarity amid mounting pressures from the West.

Friday’s meeting also marks Xi’s first in-person meeting with his counterpart for nearly two years. The leader of the Chinese Communist Party hasn’t left the country since the onset of the pandemic in January 2020.

Facing U.S.-led efforts to pressure the Chinese regime over its human rights abuses, and Russia over its military buildup near the Ukraine border, the two leaders proclaimed a “no limits” friendship during the summit on Feb. 4. They also signed gas and oil contracts worth an estimated $117.5 billion.

Displaying a united front, the two leaders issued an over 5,000 word statement after the meeting, highlighting their opposition to what they called “interference in the internal affairs” by “other States,” in a veiled reference to Washington and its allies.

According to the English version joint statement released by the Kremlin, Moscow “reaffirms its support” for Beijing’s stance on Taiwan—the Chinese regime views the self-ruled island as its own territory to be taken by force if necessary.

The Chinese regime backed Russia’s opposition for the enlargement of NATO, issues at the heart of Moscow’s confrontation with the United States and its allies over Ukraine, according to the readout.

The two sides voiced their opposition to AUKUS, a newly-formed security alliance between the United States, the UK, and Australia, which experts have viewed as a game-changer for countering the Chinese regime’s aggression in the Indo-Pacific.

The summit came hours before Xi opened the Winter Olympics, a global event that has been overshadowed by a spate of diplomatic boycotts amid rising scrutiny of the communist regime’s suppression in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong.

Epoch Times Photo
Australian human rights groups gathered at Martin Place in Sydney on Feb. 4, 2022, to boycott the Beijing Winter Olympics. The picture shows the banners and signs at the rally. (Li Rui/The Epoch Times)
Putin is the most prominent guest at the opening ceremony on Friday. The United States and some major participants, including the UK, Canada, and Australia, announced they wouldn’t send any official delegation to the Games in protest against the regime’s human rights violations against Uyghurs in the far-western Xinjiang region.

The meeting also came amid growing fears of a potential war between Russia and Ukraine, which experts have said may lead to Beijing playing a major role in supporting the Kremlin.

The United States and its allies have warned Russia of harsh sanctions if it goes ahead with an invasion of Ukraine, but some 100,000 Russian troops remain near the border with no signs of de-escalation.

On Feb. 3, the United States warned Chinese firms that they would face consequences if they sought to help Russia by evading export controls imposed on the country in the event of an invasion of Ukraine.

The U.S. announcement comes hours after the Chinese regime signaled its “coordinated positions” on Ukraine during a meeting between the two countries’ foreign ministers, Wang Yi and Sergei Lavrov, in Beijing on Thursday, according to Beijing’s foreign ministry.

TAIWAN Air Force
A People’s Liberation Army (PLA) H-6 bomber flies on a mission near the median line in the Taiwan Strait, which serves as an unofficial buffer between China and Taiwan, on Sept. 18, 2020. (Taiwan Ministry of National Defense/via Reuters)
Some observers suggested that Beijing is closely watching how the United States and its allies act in response to the standoff over Ukraine, as the regime ponders its strategy towards Taiwan.

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

[Crafty_Dog]

The Chinese Regime Will Not Change Its Grand Strategy
Bradley A. Thayer
Bradley A. Thayer
 February 2, 2022 Updated: February 2, 2022biggersmaller Print

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Commentary

States possess grand strategies, that is, how they define their interests, the threats to those interests, and the means that they employ to advance their interests in the face of threats.

Additionally, states make strategic choices to address the threats they face and to advance their interests in the ever-changing circumstances of international politics. Usually this is done by making modest changes such as a making a doctrinal change, establishing a new base or alliance relationship, building new weapons systems, or investing in new weapons technologies.

However, at times states execute major grand strategic changes to address threats. They undertake such a dramatic change, typically because the threat they face has become greater, even an existential threat.

In 1914, Britain made a major break with its grand strategic past when it decided to send its army and so made a continental commitment to support Belgium and France against the German invasion.

Likewise, the 1917 decision by President Woodrow Wilson to enter World War I on the side of the United Kingdom, France, and Russia was a major break with traditional U.S. grand strategy, which, like Great Britain, had avoided making continental commitments.

When the United States reversed course about two years later, when the U.S. Congress rejected the League of Nations Treaty and the Anglo-Franco-American Treaty of Guarantee, it made a similarly major step. However, such changes are rare in international politics, especially for hegemonic states.

While the grand strategies of all states are important, those of the great powers are especially so since their decisions have an exaggerated impact on international stability and the likelihood of war and peace. The Chinese regime possesses a grand strategy of domination and seeks to replace the United States from its position in international politics. The possibility of intense security competition, the new cold war between the United States and China, or conflict between them, compels the contemplation of whether China may execute a grand strategic change. If it could back away from its hegemonic ambition, this would allow a potential confrontation to be avoided.

Due to China’s prodigious growth, the global audience needs to understand China’s motivation and anticipated path in the world, and to have some conception of the degree to which China’s grand strategy is likely to remain on its current course or may be expected to change. Comprehending why China changes its grand strategy is critical for understanding its actions and direction in international politics.

Epoch Times Photo
Journalists and others film next to a large screen showing Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the newly built Museum of the Communist Party of China, in Beijing, on June 25, 2021. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)
Unfortunately for international stability, the Chinese seldom change their grand strategy. Historically, this is because China has been the hegemon in East Asia. Only rarely has the external and internal situation combined to cause the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to focus on its survival.

However, the Chinese abruptly changed their grand strategy in the Ming and Manchu dynasties, where at different times, they abandoned their hegemony and executed a grand strategic volte face, abandoning exploration and trade to turn inward as they did after Admiral Zheng He’s last voyage of exploration and conquest in the 15th century. In these cases, the Chinese retreated to focus on stabilizing their rule.

Moreover, there have also been “near misses,” circumstances that have almost brought about a grand strategic change but did not, as both the existential internal and external threats were not present, such as in the turbulent Boxer Rebellion (1898-1900), and the period of instability that surrounded the Tiananmen uprising of 1989.

Based on China’s history, for China to change its course, it must face a major domestic threat at the elite level. This is a dynastic challenge and may be thought of as a domestic peer competitor to the imperial regime. Second, the domestic peer challenge must occur at the same time that there is the threat from an external peer competitor. In each instance, the Chinese retreated when they faced peer competition simultaneously at the domestic and international levels. The combination of a challenge from a domestic peer competitor as well as external peer competitor is required to make China change its grand strategy.

China now may face this situation again. The United States, in conjunction with its ally Japan and with support from India, will serve as the external peer competitors. What is lacking is an internal threat at a sufficiently significant level. Given Xi Jinping’s grip on power, including the success of his anti-corruption and other campaigns at targeting his enemies, a successful internal threat is not likely. Only if the Chinese regime faced a challenge from the United States and its allies, and there was a dynastic struggle, might China change course and conflict, cold or hot, be avoided.

The former might occur, and it is incumbent upon the Biden administration to reassure a Japan concerned about this administration’s path, and to bring India into an alliance. However, the latter, a dynastic struggle, is less likely to occur. Xi is unlikely to be dethroned. Accordingly, the United States and its allies must steel themselves to face the threat from the Chinese regime. The CCP will not change its strategic course. Indeed, from its perspective, it should not as it has been an unalloyed success—rising to a position to challenge America with the active support of many in the United States and the West. For the United States and its allies, there is not going to be a quick or simple solution to the threat posed by the Chinese regime.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

[Crafty_Dog]

Though there are points in here where I am not in accord, Bolton is not a stupid guy and there are points with which I certainly agree completely.
============================

Entente Multiplies the Threat From Russia and China
The misguided idea that the U.S. needs to ignore one to focus on the other intensifies the danger.
By John Bolton
Feb. 15, 2022 12:22 pm ET
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Chinese President Xi Jinping looks on during a medal presentation ceremony in Beijing, June 8, 2018.
PHOTO: GREG BAKER/POOL/EPA-EFE/REX/SHUT/EPA/SHUTTERSTOCK

It’s been more than 75 years since the U.S. last faced an axis of strategic threats. Fortunately, that axis proved dysfunctional. Had it been otherwise, Japan and Germany would have systematically attacked the Soviet Union, not America, first.

Our current strategic adversaries, Russia and China, aren’t an axis. They’ve formed an entente, tighter today than any time since de-Stalinization split the communist world. Involving some mutual interests and objectives, displays of support, and coordination, ententes are closer than mere bilateral friendships but discernibly looser than full alliances. The pre-World War I Triple Entente (Russia, France and Britain) is the modern era’s prototype.

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Moscow is junior partner to Beijing, the reverse of Cold War days. The Soviet Union’s dissolution considerably weakened Russia, while China has had enormous economic growth since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. Russia’s junior-partner status looks permanent, given disparities in population and economic strength (whatever today’s military balance), but Vladimir Putin seems determined to move closer to China.

This entente will last. Economic and political interests are mutually complementary for the foreseeable future. Russia is a significant source of hydrocarbons for energy-poor China and a longtime supplier of advanced weapons. Russia has hegemonic aspirations in the former Soviet territory, Eastern Europe and the Middle East. China has comparable aspirations in the Indo-Pacific region and the Middle East (and world-wide in due course). The entente is growing stronger, as China’s unambiguous support for Russia in Europe’s current crisis proves.

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Washington would undoubtedly be more secure if it could sunder the Moscow-Beijing link, but our near-term prospects are limited. This entente, along with many other factors, renders especially shortsighted the common assertion that opposing China’s existential threat to the West requires reducing or even withdrawing U.S. support for allies elsewhere.

Barack Obama’s “pivot” or “rebalancing” to Asia produced a decade of variations on the theme that China matters and other threats don’t. Donald Trump agreed, although he wanted primarily to strike “the biggest trade deal in history” or impose tariffs if he couldn’t, along with assaulting China for the “Wuhan virus” when it became politically convenient. Some analysts argue that the global terrorist threat is diminishing and that hydrocarbon resources are becoming less important because of the green-fuel revolution. Both would mean that we could safely reduce U.S. attention to the Middle East. Thus, Joe Biden argued that withdrawing from Afghanistan was required to increase attention to China’s menace. Sen. Josh Hawley and others even believe we shouldn’t be deeply involved in the Eastern Europe crisis, to avoid diverting attention and resources from countering Beijing.

Such assertions about reduced or redirected U.S. global involvement are strategic errors. They reflect the misperception that our international attention and resources are zero-sum assets, so that whatever notice is paid to interests and threats other than China is wasted.

This is false, both its underlying zero-sum premise and in underestimating non-Chinese threats. Our problem is failing to devote anything like adequate attention or resources to protecting vital global interests. Political elites (who are noticeably lacking in figures like Truman and Reagan) focus on exotic social theories and domestic economics rather than national-security threats. America’s own shortsightedness, particularly an inadequate defense budget, makes us vulnerable to foreign peril. Washington must pivot not among competing world-wide priorities, but away from domestic navel-gazing.

Critically, those who exclusively fear China ignore the Russia-China entente. The entente serves to project China’s power through Russia, as Beijing also projects power through North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs. Moreover, Beijing closely assesses Washington’s reactions to crises like the one in Ukraine to decide how to structure future provocations.

Mr. Biden had it exactly backward in Afghanistan. The U.S. withdrawal not only signaled insularity and weakness, but allowed China and Russia to extend their influence in Kabul, Central Asia and the Middle East. Beijing and Moscow thereby also became more confident and assertive. And that’s not to mention that even the Biden administration admits that terrorism’s threat is rising again in Afghanistan.

Beijing is not a regional threat but a global one. Treating the rest of the world as a third-tier priority, a distraction, the U.S. plays directly into China’s hands. Pivoting to Asia wouldn’t strengthen America against China. It would have precisely the opposite effect and weaken our global posture.

We need to see this big picture before the Russia-China entente grows up to be an axis.

Mr. Bolton is author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.” He served as the president’s national security adviser, 2018-19, and ambassador to the United Nations, 2005-06.

[Crafty_Dog]

Second post of the day-- contrast with what Bolton advocates above:

The coalition of the unwilling

Western elites prefer not to fight authoritarianism

By Clifford D. May

In 1982, President Ronald Reagan addressed the British Parliament, expressing optimism about the “global campaign for democracy now gathering force.” Less than a decade later, the Soviet Union collapsed. After that, it was widely believed that authoritarianism was in decline and that the community of free nations was bound to grow and prosper.

That belief was incorrect. These days we monitor what political scientist Larry Diamond dubbed the “democratic recession.”

For example, the Economist Intelligence Unit, the respected research and analysis division of The Economist, the respected international magazine, produces a respected annual Democracy Index. The latest, issued last week, reports that the state of global democracy fell to a record low in 2021, with only 6.4% of the world’s population living in a “full democracy” and more than 33% living under authoritarian rule. That includes, of course, the 1.4 billion people living in the People’s Republic of China.

Those figures don’t shock me. What does: the EIU’s contention that the “real challenge for the West may not be to prevent China from one day becoming the dominant global power, which seems to be, if not inevitable, at least highly likely — but to manage that process in such a way as to avoid war and preserve democracy and the best of the Western enlightenment legacy.”

Did you get that? The EIU is untroubled by the prospect of the Chinese Communist Party replacing the United States as “the dominant global power.” The EIU advises that if we “manage that process” well, a few democratic societies and Western values may survive.

It gets worse: The EIU is not sure whether the triumph of authoritarianism over democracy should be regarded as bad or good. “If China’s ascendancy were to result in the spread of authoritarian rule and a rollback of democracy globally, would this bring about an improvement or otherwise in the lives of millions of ordinary people?” the report wonders. “Equally, we may ask to what extent the world’s democracies are succeeding in meeting these aspirations for a better life for all.”

The EIU is no outlier. Au contraire, it reflects the views of a broad swath of British, European and even American elite opinion.

Members of this “coalition of the unwilling” do not intend to exert themselves to defend what Mr. Reagan termed “the infrastructure of democracy” — the institutions, values and habits that guarantee freedom of speech, the press and assembly, along with property rights, competitive politics, an independent judiciary and the rule of law.

Within this coalition are both left-wingers and right-wingers — a horseshoe bent to run along parallel lines. The leftists believe America is so fundamentally flawed, socially unjust and systemically racist that it has no business passing judgment on Chinese, Russian, Iranian, Cuban, Venezuelan and other despots. The rightists believe America can and should become a fortress, ignoring conflicts in far-off lands about which we know nothing (to coin a phrase).

Examples? George Soros, a leftist billionaire, joined forces with Charles Koch, a rightist billionaire, to found (and fund) the Quincy Institute, which champions neoisolationism and therefore promotes appeasement of the regimes ruling China, Russia and Iran.

Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, recently appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show to denounce “warmongers on both sides in Washington” who want “Russia to invade Ukraine” to “lock in this new Cold War” to financially benefit the “military-industrial complex.”

Mr. Carlson found that “a credible view.”

Last month, Xi Jinping, secretary-general of the Chinese Communist Party, gave a virtual address to the Davos World Economic Forum whose globalist and plutocratic members are apparently unconcerned about the crushing of freedom in Hong Kong, the reeducation camps in Xinjiang, the destruction of Buddhist monasteries in Tibet, and the distinct possibility that a lethal virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Mr. Xi welcomed Russian strongman President Vladimir Putin as his guest of honor at the Beijing Olympics, which have been compared to the Berlin Olympics of 1936. One difference: Though the Nazi regime’s antisemitism was hardly a secret, the mass murders were still a few years off and, to many, still unimaginable. By contrast, Beijing’s genocide of Turkic Muslims is infamous and ongoing.

As I write this, I see on the website of Amnesty International a slightly out-of-date note that the Olympic Games “promise to be a memorable sporting spectacle, but the watching world cannot willfully ignore what is happening elsewhere in China.” Tough talk! Much more prominently featured on the website: Amnesty’s allegation that Israel is guilty of apartheid, carrying the implication that the democratic Jewish-majority state has no right to exist.

The top dogs in many American and European corporations, Hollywood film studios and sports franchises also defend — and perhaps kowtow to — Mr. Xi and his CCP.

So, what policy does the EIU propose the Free World adopt in response to the rise of authoritarianism? It recommends that the “U.S. and its Western allies should focus their energies on rejuvenating their political systems so that they can provide a desirable alternative model to that of China. Far better that the U.S. and the world’s democracies demonstrate the advantages of their system of government by redemocratizing their politics, rather than by trying to isolate or contain China.”

With apparent pride, the EIU further notes that it seeks “to avoid the tendency to present China in adversarial terms, or to presume that the Western way is the natural order of things.”

Reagan famously said: “Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation.” What he’d say about the current generation’s defense of freedom we can only imagine.

Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a col-umnist for The Washington Times

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/chinas-malevolent-naval-aggression/#slide-1

[Crafty_Dog]

The Ukraine War Exposes Russia and China’s Competing Visions for Eurasia
undefined and Senior VP of Strategic Analysis
Rodger Baker
Senior VP of Strategic Analysis, Stratfor
7 MIN READFeb 25, 2022 | 18:47 GMT



Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying discusses the Russia-Ukraine crisis during a press conference in Beijing on Feb. 24, 2022.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying discusses Russia-Ukraine tensions during a press conference in Beijing on Feb. 24, 2022.
(NOEL CELIS/AFP via Getty Images)

China continues to publicly back Russia despite the Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine. But the conflict is exposing Beijing and Moscow’s competing visions for the future of Eurasia, which will continue to stress their relationship. China sees the continental area as a broad corridor of trade routes linking the Pacific and the Atlantic. But Russia’s assertion of its sphere of influence along its western frontier challenges this view by risking a more permanent rift between Moscow and Europe. Talk of new Cold War dynamics undercut China’s ability to create economic and political links across Eurasia through its Belt and Road infrastructure investments.

Cracks in the Foundation

The Chinese Foreign Ministry has refrained from directly criticizing Russia for invading Ukraine. Chinese media coverage has even used some of Russia’s own arguments in downplaying the military intervention. Beijing is also offering Moscow a partial buffer against sanctions through new deals for increased energy trade, expanded agriculture trade, and the likely use of alternatives to the SWIFT international payment system. But while not openly critical, China has refrained from providing active diplomatic support for Russia’s military actions and its recognition of the breakaway republics in eastern Ukraine. Beijing has longstanding ties with Ukraine (including in the defense sector). And Chinese leaders are concerned with the precedent set by Russia of foreign support for breakaway provinces (which, in China’s case, could include places like Xinjiang, Tibet, or even Taiwan).

The mixed reaction from Beijing reflects a deeper unease in its broader relationship with Moscow. While there are several areas of strategic alignment between the two neighbors, including their mutual concern with the United States, there remains an underlying mistrust between them. China is a rising Eurasian power, Russia is declining. That alone creates unevenness in their relationship — one that Moscow resents and Beijing eyes with caution. In the past, China’s economic power complemented Russia’s military and historical power across Central Asia, leaving more room for cooperation than competition. But China’s growing military prowess, and its increasing political influence, challenge Russia’s traditional influence in its near abroad. Moscow may not be able to match China’s economic largess, but it continues to use historical and cultural ties, the Eurasian Economic Union, and its security relationships to try and temper Chinese influence. While Beijing tolerates this, it perpetuates a sense of mistrust.

China’s Focus on Economic Power

At its core, the fundamental difference between the two large neighbors is their differing visions of the future of Eurasia. Russia continues to see itself in light of an embattled Eurasian heartland power, one that needs to build a shell around itself to ensure its strategic security. This is about distinct spheres of influence and a division between Russia and Europe. China, on the other hand, sees the future of Eurasia as a vast corridor of trade — a crisscross of land routes that ease Beijing’s current vulnerability at sea, reorient its underdeveloped interior provinces away from their wealthier coastal neighbors, and enable China to use economic heft as a tool of influence and security across Asia, Europe and even into Africa.


In many ways, China’s vision better matches British geographer Sir Halford J. Mackinder’s concern of the potential power of what he called the World Island. In the early 20th Century, Mackinder saw the potential for modern technology (the railroad) to crisscross and connect Europe, Asia and Africa into a vast supercontinent. A single Eurasian power could then harness the resources and manpower of the three continents, and then turn that combined power out to the seas. Neither Russia, Germany nor the Soviet Union — all prospective Heartland powers — ever linked Eurasia, much less the World Island. This was in part due to cost. But mostly it was because, in the 19th and much of the 20th Century, the expansion of political power was often tied to territorial aggrandizement, and no country or coalition was able to conquer and control Europe and Asia.

In the 21st century, China seeks political power through economic rather than military tools. Beijing does not have to conquer its neighbors or the more distant reaches of Eurasia; it can instead expand its influence through trade, technology, investment and infrastructure development. China, then, is a modern imperial power — one that grows its reach for the most part without needing to grow its physical territory. In the South China Sea, Beijing has used its military as a tool of coercion to back its vast territorial claims and occupy several unoccupied islets. But China has avoided direct military confrontations or the use of military force to seize territory from others in the strategic waterway.


Only in the past 20 years or so has Beijing begun revising its military for the expected future need of operations abroad. Even then, China remains rather conservative in its use of military force as a tool of foreign policy — particularly when compared with its peer great powers Russia and the United States, or even Western European countries like France. Beijing has a grand vision of power and influence, but it seeks to attain it through means shy of war for as long as possible.

Russia’s Focus on Military Power

By comparison, Russia is a holdout of the past, a country that has regularly used its military as a tool of coercion and influence in its near abroad. Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia in support of Moscow-inspired secessionist movements was repeated and expanded upon in its 2014 intervention in Ukraine and its annexation of Crimea. And it has been taken to the extreme with Russia’s current invasion of Ukraine, one aimed not at the minimal goals of establishing buffers along the Russian southern front, but of either the “Finlandization” or reassertion of Russian influence and control of Ukraine.

Modern Russia’s use of its military to reshape its near abroad mirrors the actions of the Soviet Union. Russia uses the military as a tool of coercion, to enact a fait accompli (as with its annexation of Crimea) and as a tool of brute force (as with the current invasion of Ukraine) to actively change regimes along its periphery. While China may appreciate Russian actions keeping the United States focused on Europe instead of the Indo-Pacific, Beijing is concerned that Moscow’s actions may re-strengthen Euro-Atlantic ties and fracture China’s ability to keep trade flowing through former Soviet territories into Europe. China’s economic interests across Eurasia will increasingly be put at risk by Russia’s military and political actions that fragment rather than unite the supercontinent.

A Closed vs. Open Eurasia

Chinese rail and road connections to Europe rely on transit through Russia, or key countries in Russia’s near abroad. If Russian actions and Western sanctions and security dynamics lead to even a light version of the old Iron Curtain, China’s economic and political leverage falters, and Beijing will once again be dependent upon the maritime routes that remain vulnerable to U.S. maritime power. Russia may be satisfied as a continental power, but China sees its continental connections as a path toward global power, secure first on land, and then expanding into the seas. The tension between these two visions will strain Beijing’s ties with Moscow as their actions run counter to their interests. China wants to open the space, Russia wants it closed. In short, China’s attempt to bridge Eurasia may be undermined by Russia’s attempt to dig a moat. And at some point, that challenge may prompt Beijing to deem the costs of its continued close cooperation with Moscow outweigh the benefits.

[Crafty_Dog]

February 26, 2022
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On Ukraine, China Keeps Its Options Open
Many expected Beijing to throw its support behind Russia. That hasn’t happened.
By: Allison Fedirka

With all that’s happening in Eastern Europe, it’s understandable why so much attention has been paid to Russia, Ukraine, NATO, the European Union, the United States and anyone else with skin in the game. China, meanwhile, is flying under the radar, which is exactly where it wants to be.

Given its rocky relationship with the U.S. and the publicly lauded meeting between presidents Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin earlier this month, many expected Beijing to throw its support behind Russia. But that hasn’t happened. So far, the Communist Party of China has employed a measured response that emphasizes dialogue among the interested parties. This is hardly evidence of the Russia-China alliance touted by much of the mainstream media. The truth is their relationship is much more tenuous and, at times, competitive.

They have competing fundamental interests that cannot be overcome simply by having a shared enemy in the U.S. These include India, Mongolia, Central Asia and, to a lesser extent, the balance of power in the Pacific, especially with regard to North Korea, Vietnam and so on. Even if they could temporarily set their differences aside, China doesn’t have much to offer Russia right now other than financial support.

To be clear, financial support is important – more so than, say, military support. For the sanctions regime against Russia to work, a lot of countries have to participate. Any abstention could create a potential loophole for circumvention. Hence why Moscow has been reaching out to Syria, Iran, China and other countries like those in the Eurasian Economic Union.

On that front, Beijing seems to be weighing its options. It must consider its own domestic economic problems, which are many. China’s shadow lending, its intervention in market affairs, its dependence on imports and its supply chain struggles create a very precarious situation. It has weathered COVID-19 well enough, but its struggles predate the pandemic. Financial aid, then, becomes a risky prospect. It would divert government funds away from the public at a time when state coffers play a crucial role in generating growth and preventing defaults, and it would make itself a target of U.S. sanctions. China cannot afford another trade war or restricted access to U.S. dollars, which are essential for China’s floundering tech companies and foreign investment.

There is speculation that China is biding its time, using the war as an opportunity to negotiate a new relationship with the United States. So far, it appears to be little more than speculation. Similarly, several media reports suggest that the war will inspire China to finally invade Taiwan. This, too, is unlikely. China’s decision to invade Taiwan has nothing to do with Russia or instability in the global system. If that were the case, China would have invaded long ago. But it has refrained from doing so because it is politically fraught and militarily daunting. An invasion would result in massive casualties and would likely invite U.S. and Japanese reprisals. Instead, it has opted to conduct menacing flights and naval posturing to wear down Taiwanese defense forces rather than any real action.

When countries pick sides in a global conflict, they do so based on how it benefits them. China could help Russia, but there may not be an upshot. If anything, taking a strong pro-Russian stance may actually hurt the Chinese economy. The U.S., meanwhile, has an interest in making sure China does not support Russia and in improving relations with Beijing. China is wisely keeping its options open.

[Crafty_Dog]

March 4, 2022
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How the Ukraine War Might Shift the Global System
By: George Friedman
War is agony for everyone involved. Wars are bloody affairs that have consequences not just for the soldiers who fight them but also for the governments that decided to wage them. In fact, an uncomfortable and thus overlooked fact of war is that sometimes these consequences are more significant than what the war was fought over. I believe this to be the case in Ukraine.

It’s nearly impossible to properly analyze a war in its first few days. The misinformation and disinformation, propaganda and supposition are simply too much to overcome. But what I’ll say is this. If Russia loses this war, or if the war proves to be a long and grinding affair, the Russia that President Vladimir Putin wished to create will never materialize. He once said that the collapse of the Soviet Union was one of the greatest geopolitical catastrophes in history. Ukraine, then, may be his way of proving that the collapse has been overcome, that the boundaries of the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire have been restored, and that Russia is now in the first ranks of great powers.

In any case, one of the most consequential events so far is that the invasion of Ukraine has galvanized NATO, the alliance originally meant to counter Soviet attacks. Moscow had hoped to pit the alliance against itself, with some members ignoring retaliation action in favor of maintaining their strong commercial ties with Russia. The striking example is Germany, which had deep trade relations with Russia and, thanks to NATO, has been able to ignore its military needs in favor of its economic interests. But even Berlin chose to accept the economic costs. (To this I should add Japan, which has been overlooked I suspect because it isn’t European. Even so, Japan chose to act in concert against Russia – no small development, considering it is the third-largest economy in the world, one that has serious territorial disputes with Russia.) And important though the global economic response has been, it is weak insofar as it is not a military response, and is therefore not a substitute for war. As of now, the commitment to Ukraine does not include military action in the event the sanctions regime fails.

The coalition, then, is partly a group bound by treaty obligation and partly a group of separate players, none of which is prepared, or able, to wage war. In that sense, NATO has not been resurrected at all; there is a coalition in place to employ sanctions to force Russia out of Ukraine that leaves no room for escalation.

Russia, meanwhile, seems undeterred by sanctions. The measures will indeed hurt the Russians, but, knowing that sanctions would inevitably come, Moscow figured that having Ukraine as a buffer is worth the economic pain. This means that NATO and its allies may have to resort to military means to achieve their desired results. That clearly isn’t going to happen. But neither can Russia withstand sanctions indefinitely. It seems that Russia needs a rapid Russian victory just as badly as NATO needs a rapid Russian defeat.

Put simply, while NATO members seem to be unified only in theory, we can’t say their alliance has been “resurrected” by the Ukraine war because the alliance as a whole has not chosen to wage war, as was its original purpose. And since NATO was created to manage Russia, I’d argue that doing the job it was meant to do doesn’t represent a fundamental shift in the international system.

More interesting is China, which had signed a “love is forever” treaty with Russia before the war broke out. Reports had circulated in Chinese media that invading Ukraine would be a mistake. If Russia thinks it can survive, China, which would be subject to sanctions if it helped Russia, knows it cannot. China is far more the economic animal, basing its internal system on financial and productive systems. As such, it is the largest exporter in the world. The United States' imposition of some tariffs was troubling. The imposition of a sanction system could be catastrophic.

What Beijing would like to do is to solidify agreements with the United States on dollar-based investing to stabilize China’s economy. (And here there is an opportunity for China to influence Russian actions.) This could create an opportunity for an entente with the United States, something China needs and something the U.S. wouldn’t mind on certain terms. And that might be the most interesting outcome of the Ukraine war, if it happens

[DougMacG]

Leave Ukraine and Europe's problems to Europe.  Why should we care.

Leave Hong Kong, Taiwan and Asian threats to Asia.  Why should we care.

News items, Germany re-arming, Japan re-arming, nuclear non-proliferation dead.  US disarming. Deterrence dead.  Mutually assured destruction dead.  Threatened consequences for 'small invasions' none?

What could go wrong.

[G M]

Ukraine is happening BECAUSE of our moronic "elites" blundering foreign policy.

Leave Ukraine and Europe's problems to Europe.  Why should we care.

Leave Hong Kong, Taiwan and Asian threats to Asia.  Why should we care.

News items, Germany re-arming, Japan re-arming, nuclear non-proliferation dead.  US disarming. Deterrence dead.  Mutually assured destruction dead.  Threatened consequences for 'small invasions' none?

What could go wrong.

[Crafty_Dog]

We should have respected Putin's very clear expression of Monroe Doctrine.

Huge error on our part!

The people who committed this error and many, many others, are in charge.

China watches to see the consequences for Putin's invasion.

IMHO it would be huge error on our part to simply say "Not our problem."

Would Taiwan, to which China has far superior international law claim than Putin does to Ukraine, have Uke fighting spirit?  After US abandonment of Afghanistan and Ukraine in its moment of need?

At the moment this is my simple syllogism:  If America does not turn Ukraine into a quagmire for Putin, then Taiwan falls, and America is done or. 

[G M]

Our “elites” can’t be bothered to defend Americans on American soil. After Afghanistan, anyone who hasn’t learned the lesson that the US is a weak enemy and a traitorous friend deserves whatever their poor decision making brings them.

If Taiwan wants to remain free, they better already be building their nukes.

We should have respected Putin's very clear expression of Monroe Doctrine.

Huge error on our part!

The people who committed this error and many, many others, are in charge.

China watches to see the consequences for Putin's invasion.

IMHO it would be huge error on our part to simply say "Not our problem."

Would Taiwan, to which China has far superior international law claim than Putin does to Ukraine, have Uke fighting spirit?  After US abandonment of Afghanistan and Ukraine in its moment of need?

At the moment this is my simple syllogism:  If America does not turn Ukraine into a quagmire for Putin, then Taiwan falls, and America is done or.

[Crafty_Dog]

If Taiwan falls, America too e.g.

a) 85% of the free world's advanced chips are made there.
b) China escapes South China Sea
c)  Whatever is left of American people's will collapses
d) etc etc etc

[G M]

“At the moment this is my simple syllogism:  If America does not turn Ukraine into a quagmire for Putin“

Can we discuss how to turn America into a quagmire for BurnLootMurder and Antifa the next time our rulers unleash them upon us? Is armed defense for Ukrainians only?

[G M]

If Taiwan falls, America too e.g.

a) 85% of the free world's advanced chips are made there.
b) China escapes South China Sea
c)  Whatever is left of American people's will collapses
d) etc etc etc

So perhaps we should stop putting money in their pockets, yes? Unfortunately our illegitimate government is making lots of money there, so that isn’t happening.

[Crafty_Dog]

"Unfortunately, our elites are making lots of money there, so that isn’t happening."

[G M]

"Unfortunately, our elites are making lots of money there, so that isn’t happening."

Remember when the Dems were so upset about Swallwell banging a Chinese spy that they kicked him off the House Intelligence Committee?

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.theepochtimes.com/china-changed-supply-chain-strategy-with-russia-3-months-ahead-of-ukraine-invasion-showing-it-had-foreknowledge-analyst_4317762.html?utm_source=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2022-03-05&utm_medium=email&est=McCIePWBzQnI62zeaJ2Er%2B89VGhXRK2ZQH0PRXv2iaP79IOXic4LjhHjcOFYP370NK09

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-should-diplomatically-recognize-taiwan-as-a-free-country-pompeo_4316284.html?utm_source=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2022-03-05&utm_medium=email&est=OVYfJrsQm%2B7ZT3%2BqgrI%2Fngg4faAeGkoIp6vDkj%2BtOAGp%2FVSZvaEXJ9gyKqEEgNeXhkwN

THREAT FROM COMMUNIST CHINA
US Should Formally Recognize Taiwan as a Free Country: Pompeo
By Frank Fang and Rita Li March 4, 2022 Updated: March 4, 2022biggersmaller Print
Washington should formally recognize Taiwan as a sovereign country, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on March 4 during a speech in Taipei. He said it is an imperative move that “can no longer be ignored, avoided, or treated as secondary.”

“The United States government should immediately take necessary and long overdue steps to do the right and obvious thing—that is to offer the Republic of China [Taiwan]—America’s diplomatic recognition as a free and sovereign country,” he said in a 20-minute speech.

Pompeo, who was the top U.S. diplomat under former President Donald Trump, was invited by Taiwan think tank Prospect Foundation to give a speech at the Grand Hyatt on Friday.

He arrived in Taiwan on March 2 for a four-day visit, as another five-member delegation sent by President Joe Biden wrapped up a two-day visit after meeting with President Tsai Ing-wen.

Pompeo called on Washington to change its policy of “strategic ambiguity,” wherein the United States neither openly confirms nor denies it will militarily safeguard Taiwan.

“While the United States should continue to engage with the People’s Republic of China as a sovereign government,” said Pompeo, “America’s diplomatic recognition of the 23 million freedom-loving Taiwanese people and its legal, democratically-elected government can no longer be ignored, avoided, or treated as secondary.”

“This isn’t about Taiwan’s future independence. It’s about recognition of an unmistakable, already existing reality. … There’s no need for Taiwan to declare independence because it’s already an independent country.”

Epoch Times Photo
Former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivers a speech during his four-day trip to Taiwan, in Taipei, on March 4, 2022. (Chiang Ying-ying/AP Photo)
The same opinion was expressed by Tsai in a previous interview with BBC. “We are an independent country already and we call ourselves the Republic of China,” she said.

Pompeo’s call does not align with the current official U.S. policy. The United States ended formal ties with Taiwan in 1979 and gave diplomatic recognition to the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Yet Biden said last October that the United States was committed to defending Taiwan if the self-ruled island was attacked by the Chinese regime. Such remarks were seen as a departure from a long-held U.S. position of “strategic ambiguity.”

Pompeo’s comments angered Beijing.

“Pompeo is a former politician whose credibility has long gone bankrupt. Such a person’s babbling nonsense will have no success,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said on Friday at a press briefing in Beijing.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) claims Taiwan as its own territory and considers the island as the most sensitive issue in its ties with the United States. Beijing has routinely harassed Taiwan and threatened to unite it with the mainland by force if necessary.

“China’s saber-rattling against Taiwan comes from fear and paranoia,” said Pompeo, calling the democratic island “a living example of the success of freedom and democracy” that is dismissed in China, including Hong Kong.

“So long as this exists,” he said, “it severely undermines the credibility and authority of the CCP, especially with the Chinese people who are under their thumb.”


Future of Taiwan and US Intertwined
If the Chinese regime successfully seizes Taiwan, it would change the global balance of power “in the most fundamental ways, decidedly in the CCP’s favor,” Pompeo said during his Friday speech, given Beijing has been touting its rise over American decline.

“The PRC [People’s Republic of China] believes that it is stronger than the West and that America is in decline. We saw this when Yang Jiechi gave an arrogant tirade against the United States and anchorage during their very first meeting with the Biden administration.”

Pompeo was referring to the first high-level, in-person bilateral meeting in Alaska last March when Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Yang, China’s senior foreign policy diplomat. The latter criticized Washington’s foreign and trade policies, and claimed that democracy is failing and minorities are treated poorly in America.

“This arrogance, this belief that the West is weak makes Xi [Jinping] dangerous,” said Pompeo. “The very belief that the PRC could prevail in a diplomatic, economic, military confrontation puts our friends at risk and makes the conflicts much greater.”

As America is the most decisive backer of Taiwan’s freedom against China’s aggression, said Pompeo, the future of the two nations are closely intertwined.

Epoch Times Photo
The Chinese delegation led by Yang Jiechi (C), director of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission Office, and Wang Yi (2nd L), China’s Foreign Minister, speak with their U.S. counterparts at the opening session of U.S.-China talks at the Captain Cook Hotel in Anchorage, Alaska, on March 18, 2021. (Frederic J. Brown/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)
He said Beijing also considers seizing Taiwan as the ultimate goal of its decades-long communist ideological commitment, and failure to do so is “a major stain” of the CCP’s reputation at home.

“Under Xi, the CCP’s ideological hubris has reached new heights. Thus, taking over Taiwan [as] a necessary mission is not only to boost Xi’s egomania claim of greatness, but indeed to solidify it.”

The Trump administration had pushed for arms sales and laws to help Taiwan deal with pressure from China, and support for its participation in major international organizations.

On March 3, Tsai presented Pompeo with the Order of Brilliant Star with Special Grand Cordon in recognition of his contributions to promoting Taiwan-U.S. relations.

Ukraine
Addressing reporters following his speech, Pompeo said that Taiwan and Ukraine face similar risks, each having to deal with an authoritarian regime that wants to “use aggressive military force to bully around smaller nations.”

Prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Xi on Feb. 4 before the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Beijing. Following their meeting, the two leaders declared a “no limits” partnership, according to a 5,000-word joint statement.

The statement also reveals that the two nations support each other’s geopolitical stance: Moscow supports Beijing’s claim that Taiwan is part of China, while Beijing denounces the enlargement of NATO—a political justification for Putin to invade Ukraine.

Epoch Times Photo
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping arrive to pose for a photograph during their meeting in Beijing, on Feb. 4, 2022. (Alexei Druzhinin/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images)
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has fueled speculation that the Chinese regime could be emboldened to invade Taiwan.

Events unfolding in Ukraine since the start of the invasion might have now given Xi “great pause” about launching military action against Taiwan, Pompeo said, but he warned that the CCP poses more than just military threats.

“Much of what Xi does to the world isn’t military. Much of what he does is diplomatic. It is information warfare. It is economic warfare,” he explained.

“We have to confront the Chinese Communist Party in every dimension.”

He criticized Xi for Beijing’s failure to use its role as a member of the United Nations Security Council to condemn Russia for attacking a sovereign state.

“I don’t think we should give any quarter to Xi Jinping, in terms of him having tried to play this both ways. Xi Jinping has not done the things that nations must do when other nations are attacked, and are victims of aggression,” he said.

Beijing has said it respects Ukraine’s sovereignty, but has refused to denounce Russia for its aggression against its neighbor or calling Russia’s attack an invasion. On Feb. 25, the communist regime abstained from voting on a U.S. National Security resolution demanding Moscow to stop its attack on Ukraine and withdraw its troops immediately.

Pompeo warned that if Xi provided Putin an economic lifeline, then China’s financial sector would face consequences.

“I hope that the world will make very clear to Xi Jinping that if he runs afoul of one of these sanctions regimes, that it could be Chinese banks that are next, it could be Chinese financial institutions more broadly that are next,” he said.

He added: “And this will convince China to deny that oxygen, deny that fuel for Vladimir Putin to have the resources to continue his campaign that has deep ramifications for how Russia might participate, [if it] were the case that Xi Jinping ever decided to make an aggressive military action in Asia.”

Epoch Times Photo
An island that lies inside Taiwan’s territory is seen with the Chinese city of Xiamen in the background on Feb. 4, 2021. (An Rong Xu/Getty Images)
Pompeo was asked to assess the possibility that Beijing could invade Taiwan in the “next six years,” a timeline suggested by Adm. Philip Davidson, who was then-head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, during a congressional hearing in March 2021.

He responded, “You can’t answer how likely it is in a static way because it [depends] on the willingness of the Western world to demonstrate that the cost for Xi Jinping engaging in that kind of activity is just too high.”

[Crafty_Dog]

third

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/gorbachev-says-u-s-became-arrogant-after-soviet-union-collapsed/

[Crafty_Dog]

Of course, the counter argument here is to respect Russia's Monroe Doctrine:

Taking Dictators Literally and Seriously
Putin told us for years what he’d do. The West didn’t listen. Will we now listen to the world’s other threatening autocrats?
By The Editorial Board
Follow
March 4, 2022 6:40 pm ET


Politicians and foreign-policy sages say we need to “learn lessons” from whatever disasters befall the world. Well, here’s one of the most important to emerge from Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine: Take autocrats literally and seriously when they tell us what they intend to do.


Anyone purporting to be shocked by Mr. Putin’s actions in Ukraine shouldn’t be. He told the world he was going to do it. As far back as 2007, in a speech at the Munich Security Conference, Mr. Putin excoriated the European security order and teed up NATO enlargement as a “serious provocation” that would justify a serious Russian response. His tone was fierce. In 2008 he reportedly told then-President George W. Bush he didn’t consider Ukraine a real country.

The same year he waged a proxy war in Georgia, another former constituent part of the Soviet Union. His strategy was to use pro-Russian separatist movements as cover for military intervention—a tactic he repeated in 2014 in the Ukrainian regions of Crimea and Donbas.

In an essay last summer, Mr. Putin asserted that Ukraine sits on historically Russian territory. He often describes Ukrainians and Russians as “a single people.” Why did so many in the West refuse to take any of this seriously? Mr. Putin must be wondering why the rest of the world is outraged that he is doing what he made little or no effort to conceal.


This experience should ring alarms concerning the rest of the world’s autocrats. What have they been telling us that we’ve convinced ourselves they couldn’t possibly mean?

In Beijing Xi Jinping speaks of Taiwan in much the same way Mr. Putin does Ukraine. In 2013 the Chinese leader said a resolution to the Taiwan matter couldn’t be delayed indefinitely. In 2015 he stressed ethnic solidarity between the mainland and Taiwan in a meeting with Taiwan’s then-President Ma Ying-jeou.

In 2019 Mr. Xi said “unification between the two sides of the [Taiwan] Strait is the great trend of history.” He doesn’t necessarily mean peacefully. In the same speech he said, “we make no promise to abandon the use of force.” He has linked unification with Taiwan to his broader program of national unity and rejuvenation.

Beijing’s strong-arm repression of Hong Kong demonstrates the Xi regime is ready to trample treaties and violate its economic self-interest in pursuit of a nationalist agenda that fulfills Mr. Xi’s ambition. China’s concentration camps in Xinjiang reveal a regime immune to global embarrassment. How convincing is the argument that Mr. Xi would never be so foolish as to invade Taiwan?

In Iran the regime gives all indications it’s pursuing a nuclear weapon, and it’s not hard to guess what the targets would be. A senior Iranian military official has warned that Israeli air bases are “within reach” of Iranian conventional missiles. Tehran funds proxies to fight its battles across the Middle East, including in Yemen where Houthi rebels with Iranian arms launch drone and missile attacks on Saudi and Gulf Arab cities.

Israel and the Gulf states take these threats literally and seriously. The U.S. and Europe have instead become bogged down for years in negotiations with Tehran tacitly premised on the notion that Iran doesn’t want a nuke, or to use one, and is merely exploiting its nuclear program as a bargaining chip for some other goal.

***
A pathology of the West’s liberal internationalists is refusing to believe dictators who do the courtesy of saying exactly what they want. This is the opposite of the mindset that won the Cold War. Taking communism seriously as a dangerous, expansionist ideology allowed the U.S. and its allies to understand dangers such as the potential for a Soviet invasion of Western Europe and to deter them.

The fall of Soviet communism in Europe and China’s economic development tempted many to think the West would only face opponents like us—motivated by economic self-interest and ready to make a deal. For years those rivals have told us they have other plans, and told us what they are willing to do. Mr. Putin is demonstrating that it’s time to stop lying to our ourselves about the mission of the deadly serious men who run these threatening regimes

[DougMacG]

Pompeo:  Recognize Taiwan!

And offer them NATO membership.

[Crafty_Dog]

Obviously there are some large, even huge holes here e.g. What of the Russian-Chinese alliance? That said, worth the reading.

I have interjected some comments.

===========================================


https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/heres_the_truth_on_ukraine_as_far_as_i_can_tell.html

March 9, 2022
Here's the truth on Ukraine, as far as I can tell
By Dan Truitt

First, and most importantly, virtually no one in the US has got this right, including conservative outlets and pundits. Putin's a thug, but he's an excellent politician and a strong leader. And he’s not crazy, as some seem to surmise. He is a cold, calculating, strategic thinker who has disciplined his mind and body for decades. He’s a Russia first guy. Think Donald Trump minus all that hot air, Big Macs, and add a willingness to off his enemies.

We promised Russia we would not expand NATO when the Soviet Union fell. We went back on that promise

(MARC:  Not quite:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB4C08m3JOY )

and incorporated almost the entire Eastern Bloc into NATO.

Then after 9/11, Bush II unilaterally cancelled the '72 ABM treaty, which until then had frozen nuclear weapon development in the Soviet Union and the US, effectively ending the arms race. Bush's rationale was that we needed to develop new nuclear weapon tech to defeat terrorism. Like we were going to nuke Osama Bin Laden.

 Bush's rationale for NATO expansion was also terrorism. So, Bush triggered a fresh arms race. Bush was a decent man, but the more time goes by, the more he looks like an absolute moron to me.

Ukraine belonged to Russia for centuries. They have almost identical cultures and languages. Kiev used to be the capital of Russia.  Putin's war is a war of defense. Russia (rightly, in my view) feels threatened by NATO expansion. Russia is a mainly land-based, continental power which desires a buffer with the West. Ukraine serves that purpose perfectly.

MARC:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mciLyG9iexE

The US triggered a coup d'état in Ukraine in 2014, overthrowing the democratically elected president who was Russia friendly,

(MARC: This obfuscates that Putin had his heavy thumb on the scale-- see e.g. Belarus)

 and installing a pro-western, pro-NATO leader. Putin has had his eye on Ukraine ever since but dared not do anything when Trump was in power because he feared and respected Trump.

So, Putin in the meantime brilliantly helped move along a green revolution in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, leaving Europe, with its wind farms and solar panels, hungry for more energy, which they bought from Russia in the form of NG.

Trump's right: Putin is a genius. Unfortunately, we seem to be in a historically rare period in which the leaders of 1.5 billion people, i.e., the West, are to a person either feckless, obtuse, senile or some combination of the three.

Now that we have President Potted Plant in office, Putin has made his move. BTW, the story is that Russian annexed Crimea some years ago. Putin’s version is that the Crimeans had a plebiscite, and over 90% voted to leave Ukraine and join Russia.

MARC:  Very interesting!

That alone should give you an idea of what a dysfunctional country Ukraine is.     

Putin has no intention of "reconstituting the Soviet Union." That's a big fat lie. This war is the West's fault, not Putin's. At any time, we could have discussed these issues with him. Instead of seeking closer ties with Russia (as Trump was attempting -- he even talked about disbanding NATO, since Russia is no longer a territorial threat to Europe), we constantly antagonize Russian with our NATO expansion.

What we should be doing is assuring Russia we are not a threat, make treaties with Russia bringing us closer together (after all, they are a European, Orthodox Christian nation), and turning our united efforts against the real threat: China. We couldn't have mishandled this more.

Contrary to popular opinion, the Ukrainians are not making a heroic stand against the Russkies. They're getting their asses kicked. They're hiding in population centers, and Russia, trying to get to them, is killing a lot of civilians as collateral damage.

They're fighting a relatively clean war, (if there is such a thing) and all Zelensky has to do is meet with Putin and agree to Putin’s four demands: 1) Ukraine cannot join NATO, 2) NATO arms out of Eastern Europe (honoring our promise to Russia’s then leader Gorbachev), 3) a ban on NATO missiles within striking distance, and 4) autonomy for the two predominantly Russian provinces in east Ukraine.

Numbers 2 and 3 are a pretty big ask, but here you see how Putin himself may have read The Art of The Deal: always ask for more than you want.

Zelensky could end this in two hours if he wanted. Instead, he seems to have developed a Churchill complex. He’s begging for money and arms, which will prolong the bloodshed. No one is reporting the billions in medicines, foodstuff, and other aid the Russians are shipping into Ukraine.

These insights I'm getting from the Greek press (I live here), which is being much more even-handed, from people inside Russia, and from Ukrainians whom I know. I’ve also watched the 4-hour Putin Interview documentary by Oliver Stone, which skewed left but provided a fascinating look at Putin the human being. I repeat: he is not crazy. He has a surprisingly good sense of humor. Just to remind you, I’m not a fan.

The US can't seem to kick its Cold War habit of looking at Russia as the enemy. The enemy, the real threat, is China, not a country of 125 million with a GDP less than that of 16 million Canadians.

I'm wondering what President Potted Plant is going to do when China invades Taiwan? Now that is a threat to world peace. We get almost all our microchips from the Taiwanese. I wonder also how we will survive the next 3 years with this idiot in the WH. The answer, as always is prayer, and lots of it.

Image: Victoria Borodinova, Pixabay, Pixabay License.

[G M]

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2022/03/09/ukraine-war-an-almost-complete-collection-of-everything-were-doing-wrong-n1564668

[Crafty_Dog]

Not sure I agree with the notion of "leave the innocent Russian people alone".

Maybe they need a sharp wake up call to replace their leader?

[G M]

Not sure I agree with the notion of "leave the innocent Russian people alone".

Maybe they need a sharp wake up call to replace their leader?

Remember how the London Blitz made the English surrender?

Never get into a suffering contest with an Eastern European.

[Crafty_Dog]

Churchill did not lie the British into attacking Germany.

Germany & Russia started it.

[G M]

Churchill did not lie the British into attacking Germany.

Germany & Russia started it.

The average Russian will blame us for their suffering, not Putin.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.theepochtimes.com/ukraine-war-will-change-indo-pacific-and-the-world-experts_4331987.html?utm_source=China&utm_campaign=uschina-2022-03-13&utm_medium=email&est=lZI6HheNcg4kBVUAWpd9ta2LHJXhto3ittrKy8L1CYz0AjmFq9G2%2BezJV2FqwZDzV0SX


Ukraine War Will Change Indo-Pacific and the World: Experts
By Andrew Thornebrooke March 12, 2022 Updated: March 12, 2022biggersmaller Print

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The Russian war on Ukraine will affect global strategy and alter the political and security landscape in the Indo-Pacific for decades to come, according to defense and security experts.

“Putin’s war on Ukraine is like the 9/11 terrorist attacks,” said Yasuhiro Matsuda, a professor of international politics at the University of Tokyo, during a recent interview with the Hudson Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

“It will change the world.”

Matsuda said that Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping shared a point of view with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, and that both believed the West was in decline and ultimately useless for their aims.

Matsuda said that he feared Xi’s beliefs would become more extreme, as Putin’s apparently have, with increased age and isolation, and because the Chinese leader personally emulated Putin.

“I think that their worldview might become more and more extreme,” Matsuda said.

“The personal dictatorship is very dangerous,” he added, noting the amount of control that Xi personally held over China.

Matsuda went on to say that, although Xi emulated Putin in his ruling of China, he was now likely taken aback by the Russian failure in Ukraine, for which China is likely to be suffering reputational damage due to its support of Russia.

“This time, Xi Jinping is kind of disappointed by Putin because the Russian military’s performance is so bad … Xi Jinping bet on Putin’s gamble, but it was not successful,” Matsuda said.

CHINA-SCO-SUMMIT-DIPLOMACY
Russian President Vladimir Putin (l) shakes hands with President of the Peoples Republic of China Xi Jinping during a welcoming ceremony at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Council of Heads of State in Qingdao on June 10, 2018. (Sergei Guneyev/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images)
Partnership
Xi fears that China is being encircled by U.S. influence in Japan and Korea, and through security partnerships like AUKUS, a trilateral security pact between the United States, Britain, and Australia, Matsuda said.

For this reason, Xi was likely looking to Russia in order to resist U.S. diplomatic and economic pressures, as it could use Russia’s war in Ukraine to divert allied resources away from the Indo-Pacific and towards Europe.

This is one reason, Matsuda said, Xi has apparently abandoned the CCP’s core value of national sovereignty and allowed Ukraine to be invaded, even though China previously signed a treaty pledging to defend Ukraine in the event of a nuclear attack.

According to Matsuda, Putin would not have been confident enough to invade Ukraine without knowing that the CCP would tacitly support the invasion. It has also been reported that Chinese officials explicitly asked Russian authorities to postpone the invasion of Ukraine until the end of the 2022 Winter Olympics.

Despite Russian military failures in Ukraine and increasing condemnations of alleged Russian war crimes, Chinese leadership recently reaffirmed that Russia is its foremost “strategic partner.”

The CCP also committed to purchasing natural gas with ruble and brought Russia into Chinese banking systems to help ease the brunt of Western sanctions.

Despite the apparent effort to split Western attention, however, the Pentagon stated that the Indo-Pacific remained its priority theater, and added that China was the “pacing challenge” and the issue of Taiwan was the “pacing scenario.”

TAIWAN-CHINA-MILITARY-DRILL-ARMAMENT
Taiwanese sailors salute the island’s flag on the deck of the Panshih supply ship after taking part in annual drills, at the Tsoying naval base in Kaohsiung on Jan. 31, 2018.(Mandy Cheng/AFP via Getty Images)
The Struggle for Taiwan
The CCP maintains that the island of Taiwan is a breakaway province and must be united by force, if necessary, with the mainland. The island has been self-governed since 1949, however, and has never been controlled by the CCP.

Tensions over the possible invasion of Taiwan by the CCP have raised fears of a war between nuclear powers, as it is possible that the United States would join a war to defend Taiwan’s continued de facto independence.

During a recent discussion of the war in Ukraine and its implications for the Indo-Pacific hosted by the Center for a New American Security, a defense-focused think tank, experts addressed the issue of how Ukraine was shaping Indo-Pacific strategy and the difficulty of gauging just how the struggles of the Russian military in Ukraine were coloring Xi’s plans for Taiwan.

“I think it’s impossible for us from the outside to actually adjudicate the trade-offs in Xi Jinping’s mind,” said Ashley Tellis, a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based think tank.

“My own instinct is that he would be reminded more clearly than before about the risks of what a potential invasion entail.”

To that end, Tellis said that it was vital the Untied States ensure that Taiwan had enough military capabilities to convince Xi that a fight would not be worth the reward.

“The only way that you reinforce deterrence between China and Taiwan is that you make certain that [Taiwan’s] defensive capabilities are increased,” Tellis said. “Whether those capabilities are increased unilaterally or through the assistance of the United States. That’s the only thing that holds balance.”

Tellis added that building a robust sense of “Taiwanese nationalism” and a “capacity to resist China” were the two variables that could realistically increase the cost to China in the event of a war.

“Irrespective of what Xi thinks, objectively we simply make it harder for him to pursue unification through force,” Tellis said.

Relatedly, Tellis said that the United States now faced a global challenge in maintaining its support of the international liberal order in the face of CCP and Russian aggression.

To that end, he said, the United States’ ability to deter China and Russia, and balance the peace throughout the Indo-Pacific, could prove to be the test that makes or breaks its status as the most powerful nation on earth.

“It impacts our vision of how we see our own role in the world,” Tellis said.

“If we don’t do it right, then I think our status as a superpower itself becomes open for debate.

[G M]

https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1502983736534749188

At least the MIC is making money! Certainly no MANPADs will fall into wrong hands!

[G M]

https://mobile.twitter.com/wretchardthecat/status/1502931277326209029

[G M]

https://mobile.twitter.com/wretchardthecat/status/1502931277326209029

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/398198.php

[Crafty_Dog]

Not really sure where to put this one , , ,

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18335/anti-american-dictatorships

[Crafty_Dog]

Russia, China and the New Cold War
Matt Pottinger, an architect of Trump’s security strategy, sees Ukraine as analogous to Korea, a ‘hot opening salvo’ in a global conflict between the free world and a bloc of dictatorships.
By Adam O’Neal
March 18, 2022 2:24 pm ET


Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought death, destruction and debate over historical analogies. Is this the summer of 1914, with great powers stumbling into a horrific global conflict? Or is it the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939? What about Moscow’s 1939-40 Winter War against Finland? Will Vladimir Putin’s gambit end like the Soviet Union’s 1979-89 misadventure in Afghanistan?

Matt Pottinger has been thinking of another conflict. Mr. Putin’s attempted conquest, and his burgeoning partnership with China’s Xi Jinping, reminds Mr. Pottinger of the Korean War. “In 1950, Stalin and Mao and Kim Il Sung badly miscalculated how easy the invasion would be and miscalculated American resolve, much as we’re seeing today,” Mr. Pottinger, 48, who served in the Trump White House’s National Security Council, says this week. “The roles are now reversed, with Xi playing the role of Stalin and Putin playing the role of Mao sending his troops to the slaughter. It’s even conceivable that this war may end in a similar fashion, with some kind of a stalemate in a divided country.”

The analogy extends to the free world. Although the Cold War began in 1945, “it really took several more years for public attitudes in the West to catch up to what strategists like Winston Churchill and George Kennan knew about the nature of the Soviet Union.” With the Korean conflict, “the Cold War crystallized in the public imagination in the West.” Today, it’s “really hard to avoid the conclusion that these developments reflect a new cold war that Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have initiated against the West.”

Mr. Pottinger believes the new conflict’s “ideological underpinnings” formed as the old one was winding down. “The Chinese leadership was badly rattled by the events of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, the lopsided American-led victory over Saddam Hussein’s forces in the first Gulf War and then the collapse of the Soviet Union.” They came to regard the U.S. as their “primary adversary.”


In this view, Ukraine is the “hot opening salvo in a cold war pitting Washington and its allies against a fragile but increasingly powerful bloc of dictatorships.” The logic of the Cold War “will provide us with explanatory and predictive value. It’ll help us understand and anticipate the moves by Putin and Xi and the other dictatorships that play supporting roles in their global strategy, such as Iran,” he argues. “We would be remiss not to learn lessons from the original Cold War, not least because we won.”

In recent decades American policy makers tried and failed to convert Beijing into a responsible contributor to the U.S.-led international order. Today there is a bipartisan consensus that the Chinese Communist Party is the greatest external threat to American security, but much of Washington was slow to accept it. As President Trump’s senior director for Asia, then deputy national security adviser, Mr. Pottinger urged them along.

He contributed to the 2017 National Security Strategy, which called China a “revisionist” power and warned that “great power competition” had returned. H.R. McMaster, who served as White House national security adviser in 2017-18, called Mr. Pottinger “central to the biggest shift in U.S. foreign policy since the Cold War, which is the competitive approach to China.”

His understanding of the Chinese threat and the dangerous new global environment is more widely held now, though not everyone accepts the idea of a new cold war. A former Journal reporter in China fluent in Mandarin, Mr. Pottinger says reading Chinese government documents that aren’t translated into English has shaped his views.

“When Xi Jinping gives speeches—especially important ones and ones where he is laying out an aggressive case for Chinese actions in this de facto cold war that he’s waging—those speeches are kept secret, but they’re not kept secret forever,” he says. “They surface in Chinese-language-only party publications. More often than not, those speeches are ignored by Western analysts, news reporters and even intelligence agencies.”

An example is a November 2021 address in which Mr. Xi said, in Mr. Pottinger’s paraphrase, “that the Korean War was an act of enormous strategic foresight by Comrade Mao Zedong, as he calls him in the speech. It’s a recurring theme in a lot of Xi’s speeches, the idea that China now needs to study the spirit of that war.”

Mr. Xi laid out what Mr. Pottinger describes as almost a case for pre-emptive war: “He says that Mao Zedong in that war had the strategic foresight to, quote, ‘start with one punch so that 100 punches could be avoided.’ He talked about how Mao had the determination and bravery to adopt an attitude of not hesitating to ruin the country”—that is, China—“internally in order to build it anew.” Mr. Pottinger puts this in contemporary terms: “The attitude of being willing to destroy institutions, companies, attitudes and even political norms is something that neither Xi nor the Communist Party that he leads should shy away from.”

The personal relationship between Messrs. Xi and Putin has become central to China’s conflict with the West. “It is an unnatural partnership in many ways, because it’s not deep and wide, society to society, economy to economy, nation-state to nation-state. But it is extremely meaningful from the standpoint of two men,” Mr. Pottinger says. “Those two men happen to be the dictators that make all of the important decisions in their respective systems. And these two guys have a mind meld that we’ve not seen between a Chinese and Russian leader since Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin met six months before the North Korean invasion of South Korea.”

Messrs. Xi and Putin met ahead of the Beijing Winter Olympics a few weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine, and Mr. Pottinger says “there’s little question” that both “understood that an invasion was in the offing.” On Feb. 4, Moscow and Beijing released a 5,000-word statement declaring their relationship had “no limits.” It’s important to take that claim seriously, Mr. Pottinger says: “What you really have are two revanchist, authoritarian dictatorships that have decided, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, to go back to back and point their guns outward to say, ‘Look, we’re not going to worry about our long border dispute, which has been a recurring theme for centuries. We’re going to help each other expand our respective spheres of influence to undermine democracies.’ ”

They saw an opportunity in signals of weakness from President Biden: “When Biden came into power, one of the first things he did was end the negotiation over New Start”—the 2010 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty—“and gave Putin the five-year renewal that Putin was seeking. He eased off on restrictions on Nord Stream 2”—Russia’s gas pipeline to Europe—“and he also began to restrict lethal aid to Ukraine.”


At the same time, the administration began negotiations to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which President Trump left in 2018. “We’re not actually even negotiating directly, but using Russian and other diplomats as a go-between,” Mr. Pottinger says. “This sends a profound signal of weakness.” Israel and Arab states “see a Biden administration that’s more eager to cut deals with our common adversary than to engage meaningfully with longstanding partners.”


Does all that suggest Russia wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine if Mr. Trump had won in 2020? “We’ll never know,” Mr. Pottinger answers. Mr. Putin might have “wanted to see whether President Trump would unilaterally take action to undermine NATO and he didn’t want to interrupt that process while it was a possibility.” That said, “there was a genuine unpredictability about President Trump and what he might or might not do, and that may have, more frequently than people appreciate, caused Xi and Putin to delay some of their plans.”

Mr. Pottinger thinks Mr. Trump’s record isn’t viewed with enough nuance: “President Trump’s statecraft, as idiosyncratic as it was, was a lot more sophisticated than either the press or even American adversaries really understood.” Mr. Pottinger sums that approach up as a “close and respectful diplomacy at the top, but also his willingness to knee his counterparts in the groin.” In Russia’s case that included Mr. Trump’s opposition to Nord Stream 2, hard bargaining on New Start, supplying lethal aid to Ukraine, expulsion of Russian spies and diplomats, and sanctions.


Mr. Pottinger argues that Russia’s aggression has discredited the idea that the U.S. can divert its attention from other regions while confronting China. “The war in Ukraine underscores why we cannot compartmentalize our cold war to a specific geography or even to a specific player. There’s no question that Beijing is the mother ship of authoritarianism in the world now,” he says. “But if we fail to see how these adversaries are linked with one another and how they are increasingly coordinated with one another, we run the risk of making big blunders.”

America has a powerful counter in its alliances. The 30-nation North Atlantic Treaty Organization has shown impressive cohesion in the face of Russia’s onslaught in Ukraine. Asian-Pacific alliances are looser, but Mr. Pottinger talks up the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue involving Australia, India, Japan and the U.S. “India made the disappointing, and in my view a mistaken, decision not to hold Russia accountable for its invasion of a peaceful sovereign neighbor,” he says. “We shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves on what the Quad can ultimately achieve. But it is nonetheless a substantive group that gives Beijing quite a lot of heartburn.” The group is “talking about things like supply chains and building in resiliency and figuring out ways to counter Chinese disinformation.”

What about Taiwan? In light of Mr. Putin’s difficulties in Ukraine, “a logical and dispassionate analysis would suggest that Chinese war planners are having second and third thoughts,” Mr. Pottinger says. “But logic and dispassionate analysis are not the hallmarks of Xi Jinping. Xi is viewing the world in the reflection of fun-house mirrors at this point.”

He says unwinding Taiwan’s economic ties to the mainland is critical and that President Tsai Ing -wen “has made significant progress in really taking charge of the military services that she commands and getting them to focus on truly asymmetric capabilities, by which I mean ones that are not only quite lethal to China, but also quite affordable for Taiwan.” The Taiwanese “need to show China that the war doesn’t end at the beaches. It will continue in the ports, in the cities, in the countryside and in the mountains.”

The U.S., he says, also needs a show of strength and determination: “What we have to do is double our defense spending immediately. We’re still spending about half of what we spent as a percentage of GDP during the Reagan administration, and the Reagan administration wasn’t even the peak of our Cold War spending.” Can the U.S. afford a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget? “Our defense expenditures are minor in comparison to our entitlement programs. Universal healthcare is an amazing thing, but it’s not going to save Europe and Taiwan or, in the end, our own national security and way of life.”

If this is a new cold war, what would victory look like? “It involves trying to manage the conflict so that it does not become a head-on confrontation between nuclear great powers. Winning involves permitting the weaknesses of the authoritarian powers to erode their advantages over time. Winning involves maintaining solidarity and common cause with the people of Russia and China even as we call out candidly the actions of the dictators who lead those two nations.”

Mr. Pottinger is fundamentally bullish on the West’s chances against Messrs. Putin and Xi. “We need to shed a sense of defeatism, and we need to have the courage of our convictions about what makes our system unique and powerful. That means doubling down on capitalism and democracy and freedom, but containing—I’ll use the C-word—China and Russia’s ability to exploit our freedoms and our markets in ways that are parasitic,” he says.

“The longer the dictators stay in power, the sharper the paradox between confidence and paranoia. And I think both of these men are getting less and less reliable information in their diets and are therefore prime to make strategic miscalculations,” he says.

While Messrs. Putin and Xi may share an antipathy for the democratic West, their countries aren’t natural allies: “I think that the logic of national interest will eventually reassert itself over the interests of two dictators who drew up this pact. That’ll take time to play out, but I think in many respects, it’ll be only downhill from here between Moscow and Beijing.”

Mr. O’Neal is a Europe-based editorial page writer for the Journal.

[G M]

They need to put "Free world" in quotes. Formerly free world is more accurate.

Russia, China and the New Cold War
Matt Pottinger, an architect of Trump’s security strategy, sees Ukraine as analogous to Korea, a ‘hot opening salvo’ in a global conflict between the free world and a bloc of dictatorships.
By Adam O’Neal
March 18, 2022 2:24 pm ET


Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought death, destruction and debate over historical analogies. Is this the summer of 1914, with great powers stumbling into a horrific global conflict? Or is it the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939? What about Moscow’s 1939-40 Winter War against Finland? Will Vladimir Putin’s gambit end like the Soviet Union’s 1979-89 misadventure in Afghanistan?

Matt Pottinger has been thinking of another conflict. Mr. Putin’s attempted conquest, and his burgeoning partnership with China’s Xi Jinping, reminds Mr. Pottinger of the Korean War. “In 1950, Stalin and Mao and Kim Il Sung badly miscalculated how easy the invasion would be and miscalculated American resolve, much as we’re seeing today,” Mr. Pottinger, 48, who served in the Trump White House’s National Security Council, says this week. “The roles are now reversed, with Xi playing the role of Stalin and Putin playing the role of Mao sending his troops to the slaughter. It’s even conceivable that this war may end in a similar fashion, with some kind of a stalemate in a divided country.”

The analogy extends to the free world. Although the Cold War began in 1945, “it really took several more years for public attitudes in the West to catch up to what strategists like Winston Churchill and George Kennan knew about the nature of the Soviet Union.” With the Korean conflict, “the Cold War crystallized in the public imagination in the West.” Today, it’s “really hard to avoid the conclusion that these developments reflect a new cold war that Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have initiated against the West.”

Mr. Pottinger believes the new conflict’s “ideological underpinnings” formed as the old one was winding down. “The Chinese leadership was badly rattled by the events of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, the lopsided American-led victory over Saddam Hussein’s forces in the first Gulf War and then the collapse of the Soviet Union.” They came to regard the U.S. as their “primary adversary.”


In this view, Ukraine is the “hot opening salvo in a cold war pitting Washington and its allies against a fragile but increasingly powerful bloc of dictatorships.” The logic of the Cold War “will provide us with explanatory and predictive value. It’ll help us understand and anticipate the moves by Putin and Xi and the other dictatorships that play supporting roles in their global strategy, such as Iran,” he argues. “We would be remiss not to learn lessons from the original Cold War, not least because we won.”

In recent decades American policy makers tried and failed to convert Beijing into a responsible contributor to the U.S.-led international order. Today there is a bipartisan consensus that the Chinese Communist Party is the greatest external threat to American security, but much of Washington was slow to accept it. As President Trump’s senior director for Asia, then deputy national security adviser, Mr. Pottinger urged them along.

He contributed to the 2017 National Security Strategy, which called China a “revisionist” power and warned that “great power competition” had returned. H.R. McMaster, who served as White House national security adviser in 2017-18, called Mr. Pottinger “central to the biggest shift in U.S. foreign policy since the Cold War, which is the competitive approach to China.”

His understanding of the Chinese threat and the dangerous new global environment is more widely held now, though not everyone accepts the idea of a new cold war. A former Journal reporter in China fluent in Mandarin, Mr. Pottinger says reading Chinese government documents that aren’t translated into English has shaped his views.

“When Xi Jinping gives speeches—especially important ones and ones where he is laying out an aggressive case for Chinese actions in this de facto cold war that he’s waging—those speeches are kept secret, but they’re not kept secret forever,” he says. “They surface in Chinese-language-only party publications. More often than not, those speeches are ignored by Western analysts, news reporters and even intelligence agencies.”

An example is a November 2021 address in which Mr. Xi said, in Mr. Pottinger’s paraphrase, “that the Korean War was an act of enormous strategic foresight by Comrade Mao Zedong, as he calls him in the speech. It’s a recurring theme in a lot of Xi’s speeches, the idea that China now needs to study the spirit of that war.”

Mr. Xi laid out what Mr. Pottinger describes as almost a case for pre-emptive war: “He says that Mao Zedong in that war had the strategic foresight to, quote, ‘start with one punch so that 100 punches could be avoided.’ He talked about how Mao had the determination and bravery to adopt an attitude of not hesitating to ruin the country”—that is, China—“internally in order to build it anew.” Mr. Pottinger puts this in contemporary terms: “The attitude of being willing to destroy institutions, companies, attitudes and even political norms is something that neither Xi nor the Communist Party that he leads should shy away from.”

The personal relationship between Messrs. Xi and Putin has become central to China’s conflict with the West. “It is an unnatural partnership in many ways, because it’s not deep and wide, society to society, economy to economy, nation-state to nation-state. But it is extremely meaningful from the standpoint of two men,” Mr. Pottinger says. “Those two men happen to be the dictators that make all of the important decisions in their respective systems. And these two guys have a mind meld that we’ve not seen between a Chinese and Russian leader since Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin met six months before the North Korean invasion of South Korea.”

Messrs. Xi and Putin met ahead of the Beijing Winter Olympics a few weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine, and Mr. Pottinger says “there’s little question” that both “understood that an invasion was in the offing.” On Feb. 4, Moscow and Beijing released a 5,000-word statement declaring their relationship had “no limits.” It’s important to take that claim seriously, Mr. Pottinger says: “What you really have are two revanchist, authoritarian dictatorships that have decided, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, to go back to back and point their guns outward to say, ‘Look, we’re not going to worry about our long border dispute, which has been a recurring theme for centuries. We’re going to help each other expand our respective spheres of influence to undermine democracies.’ ”

They saw an opportunity in signals of weakness from President Biden: “When Biden came into power, one of the first things he did was end the negotiation over New Start”—the 2010 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty—“and gave Putin the five-year renewal that Putin was seeking. He eased off on restrictions on Nord Stream 2”—Russia’s gas pipeline to Europe—“and he also began to restrict lethal aid to Ukraine.”


At the same time, the administration began negotiations to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which President Trump left in 2018. “We’re not actually even negotiating directly, but using Russian and other diplomats as a go-between,” Mr. Pottinger says. “This sends a profound signal of weakness.” Israel and Arab states “see a Biden administration that’s more eager to cut deals with our common adversary than to engage meaningfully with longstanding partners.”


Does all that suggest Russia wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine if Mr. Trump had won in 2020? “We’ll never know,” Mr. Pottinger answers. Mr. Putin might have “wanted to see whether President Trump would unilaterally take action to undermine NATO and he didn’t want to interrupt that process while it was a possibility.” That said, “there was a genuine unpredictability about President Trump and what he might or might not do, and that may have, more frequently than people appreciate, caused Xi and Putin to delay some of their plans.”

Mr. Pottinger thinks Mr. Trump’s record isn’t viewed with enough nuance: “President Trump’s statecraft, as idiosyncratic as it was, was a lot more sophisticated than either the press or even American adversaries really understood.” Mr. Pottinger sums that approach up as a “close and respectful diplomacy at the top, but also his willingness to knee his counterparts in the groin.” In Russia’s case that included Mr. Trump’s opposition to Nord Stream 2, hard bargaining on New Start, supplying lethal aid to Ukraine, expulsion of Russian spies and diplomats, and sanctions.


Mr. Pottinger argues that Russia’s aggression has discredited the idea that the U.S. can divert its attention from other regions while confronting China. “The war in Ukraine underscores why we cannot compartmentalize our cold war to a specific geography or even to a specific player. There’s no question that Beijing is the mother ship of authoritarianism in the world now,” he says. “But if we fail to see how these adversaries are linked with one another and how they are increasingly coordinated with one another, we run the risk of making big blunders.”

America has a powerful counter in its alliances. The 30-nation North Atlantic Treaty Organization has shown impressive cohesion in the face of Russia’s onslaught in Ukraine. Asian-Pacific alliances are looser, but Mr. Pottinger talks up the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue involving Australia, India, Japan and the U.S. “India made the disappointing, and in my view a mistaken, decision not to hold Russia accountable for its invasion of a peaceful sovereign neighbor,” he says. “We shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves on what the Quad can ultimately achieve. But it is nonetheless a substantive group that gives Beijing quite a lot of heartburn.” The group is “talking about things like supply chains and building in resiliency and figuring out ways to counter Chinese disinformation.”

What about Taiwan? In light of Mr. Putin’s difficulties in Ukraine, “a logical and dispassionate analysis would suggest that Chinese war planners are having second and third thoughts,” Mr. Pottinger says. “But logic and dispassionate analysis are not the hallmarks of Xi Jinping. Xi is viewing the world in the reflection of fun-house mirrors at this point.”

He says unwinding Taiwan’s economic ties to the mainland is critical and that President Tsai Ing -wen “has made significant progress in really taking charge of the military services that she commands and getting them to focus on truly asymmetric capabilities, by which I mean ones that are not only quite lethal to China, but also quite affordable for Taiwan.” The Taiwanese “need to show China that the war doesn’t end at the beaches. It will continue in the ports, in the cities, in the countryside and in the mountains.”

The U.S., he says, also needs a show of strength and determination: “What we have to do is double our defense spending immediately. We’re still spending about half of what we spent as a percentage of GDP during the Reagan administration, and the Reagan administration wasn’t even the peak of our Cold War spending.” Can the U.S. afford a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget? “Our defense expenditures are minor in comparison to our entitlement programs. Universal healthcare is an amazing thing, but it’s not going to save Europe and Taiwan or, in the end, our own national security and way of life.”

If this is a new cold war, what would victory look like? “It involves trying to manage the conflict so that it does not become a head-on confrontation between nuclear great powers. Winning involves permitting the weaknesses of the authoritarian powers to erode their advantages over time. Winning involves maintaining solidarity and common cause with the people of Russia and China even as we call out candidly the actions of the dictators who lead those two nations.”

Mr. Pottinger is fundamentally bullish on the West’s chances against Messrs. Putin and Xi. “We need to shed a sense of defeatism, and we need to have the courage of our convictions about what makes our system unique and powerful. That means doubling down on capitalism and democracy and freedom, but containing—I’ll use the C-word—China and Russia’s ability to exploit our freedoms and our markets in ways that are parasitic,” he says.

“The longer the dictators stay in power, the sharper the paradox between confidence and paranoia. And I think both of these men are getting less and less reliable information in their diets and are therefore prime to make strategic miscalculations,” he says.

While Messrs. Putin and Xi may share an antipathy for the democratic West, their countries aren’t natural allies: “I think that the logic of national interest will eventually reassert itself over the interests of two dictators who drew up this pact. That’ll take time to play out, but I think in many respects, it’ll be only downhill from here between Moscow and Beijing.”

Mr. O’Neal is a Europe-based editorial page writer for the Journal.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/five-questions-for-natan-sharansky?fbclid=IwAR0HEWTManxPr6NXw-34bxacaTc3FDD3udVp_Wt63nLRekJPP2X609TLqac

[Crafty_Dog]

Russia: Beijing Should Not Be Allowed to Profit
Joseph V. Micallef
 March 20, 2022 Updated: March 20, 2022biggersmaller Print



History will show that the Ukrainian war marked the beginning of the end of the Russian state.

Over the last two decades, Vladimir Putin and his cronies, a criminal conspiracy masquerading as the Russian government, have looted the Russian economy, destroyed the Russian middle class and have plunged millions of pensioners into poverty. For their grand finale, they are setting the stage for the eventual disappearance of Russian sovereignty—either by the dissolution of the Russian state or by the transformation of Russia into a Chinese vassal.

The prospect of de facto Chinese control of Russia’s vast resources and territory should give the United States cause for concern. Such an outcome will eventually lead to the creation of a Eurasian superstate; the likes of which has not been seen since the Mongols swept across the Eurasian plain in the 13th century. All the more reason to ensure that Beijing does not accelerate Russian dependence by allowing Chinese companies to flout the sanctions regime.

It is imperative that the United States and its allies step in and sanction those Chinese companies that flout the sanctions that have been imposed on the Russian government and Russian companies. Sanctioning Russia while allowing Chinese companies to flout those sanctions with impunity will lead to the worst possible outcome for the United States and its allies.

Four weeks into the Ukrainian war, the conflict is going very badly for Russia. Gone is the prospect of a quick collapse of the Ukrainian military and an abandonment of Kyiv by the Zelenskyy government, paving the way of a pro-Russian government of national unity. Instead, the Ukrainian military rallied and posted a tenacious defense. In some cases, even going on the offensive.

The Russian military has failed to make any significant advances or capture any additional Ukrainian cities over the last two weeks. Indeed, for the first time since the conflict began, some military analysts are even suggesting what would have been inconceivable four weeks ago—that Ukraine could actually fight Russian forces to a standstill.

Instead, the Russian military has shifted to terror tactics of shelling and aerial bombardment of Ukrainian cities—a strategy that will do little to advance the war effort, given the Ukrainian resolve to resist the Russian invasion, and ensures that Ukrainians will harbor a multi-generation hatred of Russia, while the rest of Europe will harbor a multi-generational distrust of the Kremlin’s intentions.


In the meantime, the Russian military has suffered staggering losses of men, equipment, and materials. The much-vaunted Russian air force has failed to sweep the sky over Ukraine of opposing air power, and the Russian advance has consistently been bogged down by logistical problems that are more characteristic of a third-world force than what is supposed to be a military superpower.

The strategy of “rubbleizing” Ukraine’s cities will create a nightmare of urban warfare for Russian troops should they choose to invade the cities. It’s questionable, given the progress to date, if the Russian armed forces have the military strength and logistical reserves to surround all of Ukraine’s principal cities—especially Kyiv.

Even if they were to do so, they face the prospect of fighting another Stalingrad or a replay of the Warsaw ghetto uprising—only this time it will be broadcast across social media in real time. Indeed, from Russia’s perspective, it is hard to see how the outcome could have been any worse.

Putin has threatened to deploy some 40,000 Syrian militia, and the Russian media’s constant references to American funded “bio labs” in Ukraine, a claim also echoed by Chinese state media, has raised concerns that Russia may deploy chemical or biological weapons. Western military analysts have also expressed concern that the Russian military may deploy sub-kiloton “theater” nuclear weapons in a determined show of force.

It’s hard to see how any of these actions will change the progress of the war given the Ukrainian resolve to resist. Indeed, all they will do is further inflame Western public opinion against the Kremlin.

At this point it is imperative that the United States takes the lead in identifying an off-ramp that can bring the conflict to a speedy close. Russia is now a pariah state, the Putin government toxic. Even if a peace agreement is reached, and/or Putin is eventually replaced, it will be years before Russia can expect to normalize relations with the United States and the European Union.

Moreover, the danger of dependence on Russia’s energy exports has been driven home to the EU. Europe will aggressively diversify its sources of energy away from Russia.

On the other hand, neither is it in America’s and the EU’s interest to push Russia into China’s open arms. Make no mistake, amid the chaos and destruction of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is Beijing that is emerging as the big winner.

By enabling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Beijing has ensured the Kremlin’s long-term dependence on Chinese support while at the same time positioning itself as an unofficial interlocutor between the United States and Russia.

China has little interest in a speedy resolution of the conflict in Ukraine. The longer the war continues, the more incensed public opinion in the West will be and the more dependent Moscow grows on Beijing’s support. China has an agenda here also. It’s not only about securing long-term supplies of Russian energy and minerals or replacing Russian influence in Central Asia.

How long will it be before China raises the delicate matter of those “unfair treaties,” starting with the Treaty of Nerchinsk (1769), that were foisted on the Qing Dynasty by Czarist Russia between the 17th and 19th centuries, which saw thousands of square miles of Chinese territory transferred to Russia?

I have noted elsewhere that Russia has three possible outcomes: integration with the West, vassalization by China, or dissolution. The first outcome seems unlikely in the short term, even if the Russian people eventually succeed in excising the malignant cancer that is the Putin regime. The most likely outcome now is for Moscow to become an economic vassal of Beijing, or to try to go it alone until economic collapse leads to the breakdown and dissolution of the Russian state.

The United States and its allies need to ensure that the economic and political isolation of Russia does not play out in China’s favor. It is imperative that Chinese efforts to assist Moscow in evading sanctions are met with equally steadfast U.S. and EU sanctions on China and its companies.

The Ukrainian war will lead to the widespread devastation of Ukraine’s cities and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of civilian casualties. Ukraine, however, will survive. Russia will not!

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

[Crafty_Dog]

Toward a New Conservative Foreign Policy Consensus
A “new” conservative foreign policy consensus must be the “old” prudential melding of power and security on the one hand with prosperity and the preservation of American principles on the other.
By Mackubin Owens

March 21, 2022
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 upended political discourse in the United States. Although his election affected debates in both domestic and foreign affairs, the impact on the latter seems to have been the most consequential. As one commenter noted, Trump’s election has led to the bonfire of many of the established concepts of American foreign policy and grand strategy. The bonfire continues to rage.

Much of the debate has taken place on the political Right. Although there are some distinctively conservative views of America’s approach to the world—a commitment to national sovereignty and a concomitant distrust of supranational institutions; a realist recognition of the role of power, including military power, in foreign affairs; and a concern for order and stability at home and abroad—conservatives have disagreed among themselves regarding the purpose of American power.

Foreign Policy Taxonomies

Political scientists and international security specialists have employed two dominant paradigms to examine foreign relations: “realism,” which focuses on the relative power of states in the international system; and “liberal internationalism,” which stresses the role of cooperation, norms, and international institutions in the international system.

These two paradigms have given rise to various taxonomies of policy—for example, “primacy,” “strategic disengagement,” “selective engagement,” and “cooperative internationalism.” U.S. foreign policy, however, has never fit perfectly into any one of these categories.

Historians provide a different perspective. A taxonomy that has gained traction in the recent past can be traced to the work of Walter McDougall of the University of Pennsylvania and Walter Russell Mead in his book, Special Providence. Mead identified four “schools” of American foreign policy since the founding of the republic. First, the Jeffersonians, concerned primarily with liberty at home, have traditionally been suspicious of a large military and large-scale international projects. George McGovern’s plea to “come home, America” and the presidency of Jimmy Carter are recent examples of this approach.

In contrast, Hamiltonians have tended to support international engagement in order to support not only American power but also prosperity. They have focused on armed diplomacy on behalf of opening foreign markets and expanding the U.S. economy.

Jacksonians support a strong military, albeit one that should be used rarely. Once employed, however, the Jacksonians believe the goal should be the application of overwhelming force in order to bring the enemy to its knees. World War II is the clearest example of the Jacksonian use of force.

Finally, Wilsonians are moral missionaries, willing to use force in order to spread democracy, as in the case of George W. Bush in Iraq. But they also prefer to cede sovereignty to international (actually transnational) institutions, as in the case of Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden.

Throughout most of American history, the debate among conservatives has been between Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians. That changed in the wake of 9/11 when George W. Bush combined Wilsonianism and Hamiltonianism, a hybrid that goes under the rubric of “neoconservative,” an approach that has called forth the ire of many conservatives. Indeed, many interpreted the election of Trump as an explicit rejection of neoconservative foreign policy.

Trump’s Foreign Policy

Analysts have struggled to categorize Trump’s foreign policy. It seems to have represented a fusion of Hamiltonianism and Jacksonianism. But what did this mean in practice? As I argued in American Greatness a year after Trump’s election, it was possible to discern the outlines of a “Trump doctrine” based on five pillars. Some other writers argued along similar lines.

The first pillar was a healthy nationalism, not ethnic or racial nationalism but civic nationalism, better described as patriotism. This is fundamentally a belief that the primary purpose of American power is to advance the interests of American citizens, not an imaginary global community. In so doing, he aroused the anger of our unpatriotic and anti-nationalist elite who fancy themselves “citizens of the world.”

The second pillar—and a corollary of the first—was a state-centric view of international politics, which Trump called “principled realism.” This approach views international institutions and “global governance” with great skepticism. It holds that the United States should not cede sovereignty to international institutions in order to be embraced by the mythical “international community” nor should the primary purpose of U.S. foreign policy be to defend a rule-based liberal international order.

Of course, under this doctrine, the United States supported international institutions to the extent that they advance U.S. interests. But while it is in the interest of the United States to cooperate with other states within this international system, such cooperation depends on reciprocity. This is especially important in the areas of trade and alliances. In principle, free trade is good for countries in the international system but for too long, the United States has pursued trade agreements that have not favored the United States. The principle of reciprocity is necessary to redress this imbalance.

The third pillar was armed diplomacy. For too long, American policymakers have treated force and diplomacy as an either-or proposition. But understood properly, force and diplomacy are two sides of the same coin. As Frederick the Great observed, “diplomacy without arms is like music without instruments.” The threat of force increases the leverage of diplomats. The Trump Administration’s approach to Russia, Iran, and North Korea were examples.

The fourth pillar of the Trump doctrine was prioritizing economic growth and leveraging the new geopolitics of energy. The Trump Administration moved expeditiously to lift regulations that hampered U.S. domestic productivity across the board, but especially in the area of energy production. Under Trump, domestic oil and gas production increased as a result of the technical revolution associated with hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) and directional drilling. Trump exploited America’s energy potential to take advantage of the new geopolitics of energy. Biden’s reversal of Trump’s energy policy has contributed to the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.

The fifth pillar was a defense of liberal principles. Critics claimed that the Trump Administration subordinated defense of such principles to other considerations. Of course, prudence dictates that the United States should attempt to spread its principles only when it can do so in a cost-effective manner. Experience illustrates that the United States has been safer and more prosperous in a world populated by other democratic republics. But the United States faces limits. It cannot unilaterally spread democracy throughout the world.

The “National Conservative” Option

So where do we go from here? In a recent New York Times column, “Hawks Are Standing in the Way of a New Republican Party,” three “national conservatives,” Sohrab Ahmari, Patrick Deneen, and Gladden Pappin offer a rebuke of their comrades on the Right, whom they accuse of pushing “liberal imperialism.” Although they don’t use the term in the Times piece, theirs is a denunciation of neoconservatives.

From the post-Cold War ‘Washington consensus’ (the idea that privatization, deregulation and free trade would lead to broad prosperity) to the post-9/11 regime-change wars, ‘crusader’ foreign policy immiserated ordinary people: Thoughtless NATO expansion bred resentment in a wounded-but-still-strong Russia, setting the stage for recurring crises; economic ‘shock therapy’ applied by disciples of Milton Friedman empowered predatory oligarchs in post-Soviet lands; the shattering of Arab states in the name of ‘freedom’ created ungoverned spaces across vast swaths of the Middle East and North Africa, kindling terrorism and sending millions of migrants into Europe.

The authors would replace this “old, broken fusion of pro-business libertarians, religious traditionalists, and foreign-policy hawks” with a new consensus, based on two pillars.

The first is a “sound restraint, especially where the United States doesn’t have formal treaty obligations, and a general retrenchment of the Western alliance’s ambitions.” The second is “domestic industrial prowess and energy independence.”

Both of these pillars have something to commend them, but as in the case of the viewpoint that Ahmari, et al., attack, something is missing: prudence, which ultimately must be the basis of a sound foreign policy consensus. Aristotle called prudence the virtue most necessary for the statesman. Prudence requires an examination of the means available in light of the ends one seeks. This means answering these questions: what are the U.S. interests at stake? What are the courses of action available? What are the risks associated with the various courses of action? What is the likelihood of success?

Regarding the first pillar, the idea of restraint in U.S. foreign policy is nothing new. As John Quincy Adams wrote in 1821, “Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will [America’s] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

But there are sound geopolitical reasons for an American foreign policy based on forward defense and alliances focused on what the great geopolitical writer, Sir Halford Mackinder, called the Eurasian “heartland.” Mackinder argued that control of the Eurasian heartland by a hostile power could threaten peripheral maritime powers like Britain and the United States. Nicholas Spykman contended that the solution to Mackinder’s geopolitical dilemma was to establish a series of alliances on the “rimlands” of Eurasia, the amphibious littorals between the heartland and the great off-shore islands of Great Britain and the American continent to prevent the formation of such a coalition. This is the geopolitical rationale for continued U.S. support of NATO on the one hand and Japan on the other. If George Kennan is the father of containment, Nicholas Spykman is its godfather.

NATO proved its worth during the Cold War, but some on the Right now question its viability. I would argue that the geopolitical and strategic justification of NATO is still operative, but that as the current Russo-Ukrainian conflict illustrates, our overreach in the wake of the Cold War created a problem and needs to be reconsidered. Arguably, NATO made a strategic error by expanding too far to the east. Although the inclusion of the Visegrad states of Central Europe (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia) made both cultural and strategic sense, including the Baltic States and threatening to embrace other former Soviet states, especially Ukraine, was a strategic “bridge too far.”

Regarding the second pillar, the authors are right to note the shortcomings of “market fundamentalism”—the belief that adherence to free markets is always the best policy—to address strategic issues. Experience teaches that market and free trade often fail to account for changing geopolitical circumstances. But the sort of “industrial policy” that they recommend has a long history of failure, which they fail to acknowledge.

Toward a New Consensus

Since the end of the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy has oscillated between the poles of what might be called “idealistic Wilsonianism,” based on liberal internationalism and its faith in transnational institutions (Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden) and “muscular Wilsonianism”: attempts to spread democracy by force (George W. Bush and a substantial part of the Republican Party foreign policy elite). Trump rejected both foreign policy approaches, which accounts for the fury he aroused from both factions.

Conservatives need to achieve a new consensus on foreign policy but the program offered by the New York Times authors, one based on restraint as the single guiding principle, falls short because doctrinaire restraint is just as formulaic and lacking in prudence as the options they criticize. The content of such a consensus has been described by a number of writers, including Henry Nau, Robert Kaufman, and Colin Dueck. This approach goes by a number of names including “conservative internationalism” (Nau) and “conservative nationalism” (Dueck).

I call my own formulation “Prudent American Realism.” No matter the name, what this general approach has in common is the recognition that the internal character of regimes matters and that our foreign policy must reflect the fundamental principles of democratic republicanism. But unlike liberal internationalism, which holds that international law and institutions alone are sufficient to achieve peace, this approach understands that there are certain problems that can be addressed only through the prudent exercise of power.

In addition to fusing principle and prudence, a new conservative foreign policy consensus should stress several operational concepts. First, it must distinguish between friends and allies, on the one hand, and enemies and adversaries, on the other. Joe Biden’s quest for a nuclear agreement with Iran while stiff-arming Israel and the Sunni states of the Middle East violates this principle.

Second, a new consensus should accept the need for forward defense, forward presence, and freedom of navigation. Its geostrategic goal should be to maintain America’s traditional maritime alliance along the rimlands of Eurasia, in order to keep a potential Eurasian hegemon contained.

Third, this consensus should recognize that the internal character of regimes matters for U.S. foreign policy, a principle that can be found in Thucydides, who noted that an important goal of both Athens and Sparta was to establish and support regimes similar to their own, democracies in the case of Athens and oligarchies for Sparta. The inference one can draw is that the security of a state is enhanced when it is surrounded by others that share its principles and interests.

But although the internal character of regimes matters, a new conservative foreign policy consensus should recognize the need to limit our aspirations when it comes to “spreading democracy” abroad. The Times authors are also right to denounce what often passes today for liberal “values:” a virulent cultural libertinism that dissolves bonds of family and tradition.


Fourth, this consensus must accept the classical connection between force and diplomacy. For too long, American policymakers, motivated by the assumptions of liberal internationalism, have acted as if diplomacy alone is sufficient to achieve our foreign policy goals. A new conservative foreign policy consensus recognizes that diplomacy and force are two sides of the same coin.

Finally, as the authors of the Times column rightly argue, a new conservative foreign policy consensus should not hesitate to use economic power as an instrument of foreign policy. Finance, trade, technology, and energy are powerful means of leveraging national power.

A “new” conservative foreign policy consensus must be the “old” prudential melding of power and security on the one hand with prosperity and the preservation of American principles on the other. U.S. foreign policy should take its bearings from George Washington’s Farewell Address:

If we remain one People, under an efficient government, the period is not far off, when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest guided by justice shall Counsel.

Such prudence should guide U.S. foreign policy.

[Crafty_Dog]

Meanwhile, Watch China in the Pacific
With the world focused on Ukraine, bad actors in Asia are on the march.
By The Editorial Board
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March 24, 2022 7:05 pm ET



The world is rightly focused on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but don’t sit on the Indo-Pacific. A spate of bad news outside Europe this week is a reminder that the U.S. and its allies face challenges from authoritarian regimes on multiple fronts.

North Korea on Thursday fired an intercontinental ballistic missile, its 12th missile test this year. The first ICBM launched since November 2017, it flew higher than any North Korean missile has. The missile landed in waters off Japan’s western coast, but the test demonstrates again that Pyongyang could threaten the U.S. mainland.

The missile launch violated United Nations Security Council resolutions, but that doesn’t seem to trouble China or Russia these days. The Russian foreign ministrysaid this week it hopes to expand bilateral relations with the North, and China seems to like the idea that dictator Kim Jong Un torments the West.

South Korean President Moon Jae -in’s conciliatory policy toward the North has clearly been a failure. The good news is that South Korean President-elect Yoon Suk -yeol, who takes office in May, ran on a platform of improving air and missile defenses and deepening cooperation with Washington.


Meanwhile, China keeps expanding its military reach in the Pacific. Beijing has “fully militarized” at least three islands it built in the South China Sea, the Associated Pressreported this week. “The function of those islands is to expand the offensive capability of the PRC beyond their continental shores,” U.S. Indo-Pacific commander Adm. John C. Aquilino said. “They can fly fighters, bombers plus all those offensive capabilities of missile systems.”

China may also be negotiating a security deal with the Solomon Islands, according to documents that appear to have been leaked from the island government. The deal could eventually lead to Chinese forces deployed to the South Pacific nation a few hours of flight time from Australia.

A Chinese military base with offensive capabilities could follow. Canberra has long guaranteed the Solomon Islands’s security but China has gained ground as it assisted the government after opposition protests last year. China’s assistance always come with a fee.

By the way, remember Afghanistan? President Biden would like to forget, but Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi dropped by Kabul on Thursday to meet with Taliban officials. China, which has been growing its footprint in Central Asia for years, has no qualms about dealing with unsavory regimes and will look to cut favorable deals on mining or infrastructure.

This is the way the world usually works. Trouble in one theater provides incentive for other rogues to create trouble while the U.S. and other democracies are preoccupied.

Our advice to the Solomons and other smaller nations is to think twice before getting in bed with Beijing or Moscow. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s support for Russia are helping to clarify who are friends of the free world and who isn’t. China stands with North Korea and Russia with Syria.

America’s closest allies are success stories like Japan, Germany, Poland and South Korea. The West isn’t perfect, but who would you rather have on your side?

[Crafty_Dog]

Beijing Gains From the Ukraine Invasion
Non-Western countries hedge their bets, giving confirmation to Chinese geopolitical assumptions.
By Dan Blumenthal
March 27, 2022 4:33 pm ET


Conventional wisdom has it that Beijing miscalculated by supporting Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine war. Xi Jinping’s partner faces both unexpectedly fierce resistance from the Ukrainian military and surprisingly strong Western punishment. Some in Washington expect China to attempt to extricate itself by brokering a peace deal. This is unlikely to happen. In many ways China has benefitted from the conflict, as Russia tests the international system with disappointing results for the West.

True, Beijing is taken aback by Russian military failures. The war will surely lead Mr. Xi to question his military’s ability to attack Taiwan. Yet Mr. Xi has long heralded a new era in international relations that overturns the U.S.-made world order. Mr. Putin signed on to this agenda in the Chinese-Russian Joint Statement of Feb. 4. From Beijing’s perspective, a new international politics is emerging.

Far from backing away from an anti-Western position, top Chinese diplomats are pressing their case. Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng have made statements since the invasion blaming the U.S. for not considering Russia’s security concerns and denouncing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s eastward expansion. In China’s telling, the world should have sympathy for Ukraine not because it was attacked by Russia, but because it is the victim of a reckless U.S. bid to maintain geopolitical dominance.

According to Beijing, the lesson for small countries is don’t be used as a pawn. The U.S. will manipulate them into fighting proxy wars against its adversaries.


China’s main target is Asia. In its narrative, the region can avoid Europe’s fate if it resists Washington’s efforts to contain China. The Chinese Foreign Ministry has taken aim at the recently released U.S. strategy for the Indo-Pacific, which envisions a political and economic order free of Chinese coercion. Mr. Le warned that this strategy will “provoke trouble, put together closed and exclusive small circles or groups, and get the region off course toward fragmentation and bloc-based division.”

The American strategy “is as dangerous as the NATO strategy of eastward expansion in Europe,” he added. “If allowed to go on unchecked, it would bring unimaginable consequences and ultimately push the Asia-Pacific over the edge of an abyss.” This is a clear warning that if Washington builds an alliance system in Asia akin to NATO, China reserves the option to resist forcefully. In this view, Russia’s case for attacking Ukraine sets a useful precedent.

Yet the world’s response to the Ukraine invasion should ease Beijing’s worry about the formation of anti-China blocs. Outside the West, America’s partners seem to prefer neutrality when confronted with authoritarian aggression. India, a crucial pillar of Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy, hasn’t condemned Russia. In Southeast Asia, a region the U.S. views as strategically critical, most have remained neutral. While these countries may feel differently if China starts a conflict, the U.S. cannot count on that.

America’s partners in the Middle East, strategically important to the U.S. because of their energy resources, are staying neutral as well. The Syrian war and Iran’s regional aggression have made these countries more dependent on China and Russia.

Even more gratifying for Beijing is that Japan’s support of Ukraine has caused heightened tensions with Russia. Moscow has called off negotiations to resolve territorial disputes and likely promised Beijing that it would resume joint exercises in the waters around Japan.

It turns out that the Sino-Russian Joint Statement was less an aspiration than a description of the current state of international relations. With so many countries staying on the sidelines in the wake of the Ukraine invasion, China has an opportunity to build greater support for its anti-American vision. Over the past decade, Russia has done much of this work by providing arms and extending its influence. China will also exploit distaste for promiscuous use of U.S. sanctions and American hectoring on human rights.

China hasn’t miscalculated. It was right about the geopolitical fundamentals. And since few countries joined the West in resisting Russian aggression against a sovereign nation, Beijing may conclude that fewer still would punish it for an attack on Taiwan, which most of the world doesn’t recognize as a country. Washington must urgently make a sustained diplomatic case to its partners that such an attack would devastate international security and prosperity.

China doesn’t need allies to support its aggressive plans. It merely needs nations to stay neutral, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has given China more confidence that most of the world will stay on the sidelines.

Mr. Blumenthal is director of Asian studies at the American Enterprise Institute and author of “The China Nightmare: The Grand Ambitions of a Decaying State.”

[Crafty_Dog]

The Russia-Ukraine War and Ideological Frameworks: Democracy Versus Autocracy
6 MIN READMar 28, 2022 | 21:15 GMT



Russia's invasion of Ukraine is frequently characterized as part of a broader struggle between democracy and autocracy, a lens that the West also has used to counter Chinese actions. In a Feb. 24 press briefing, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg brought his comments to a close by declaring, "Democracy will always prevail over autocracy. Freedom will always prevail over oppression." Less than a week later, in his first State of the Union address, U.S. President Joe Biden said, "In the battle between democracy and autocracy, democracies are rising to the moment, and the world is clearly choosing the side of peace and security." And more recently, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told France24 that "democracy is standing up against autocracy," highlighting the role the European Union and its partners are playing in countering Russian actions in Ukraine.

This ideological lens serves certain political purposes by creating a moral framework that Western leaders can use to encourage a unified and lasting response to the Russian invasion. Western leaders and thinkers have long equated democracy with freedom and human rights while associating autocracy with aggression and repression. This binary evokes the simplicity of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan's epithet for the Soviet Union as the "evil empire" and George W. Bush's labeling of North Korea, Iran and Iraq as an "axis of evil." Such emotional appeals are memorable and simpler than explaining the strategic significance of far-away Eastern Europe for U.S., Australian or South Korean national security. The democracy versus autocracy framework is bite-sized and easy to rally around, and it justifies the economic sacrifices citizens in the United States, Europe or other partner countries must accept in countering Russian actions.

But these simple slogans, if not carefully constrained, can take on a life of their own, complicating strategic options and leading to unachievably broad missions. Many U.S. allies and partners in the Middle East and Indo-Pacific are considered autocracies, such as Vietnam, which is a key rising regional partner for the United States. So framing the Russia-Ukraine war as a struggle between democracies and autocracies risks either constraining U.S. relations with its partners or undermining political unity by leaving room for Russia, China or others to accuse the United States and its partners of hypocrisy. The latter outcome would enable more countries to avoid picking sides in the war, thus undermining Western attempts to unify an economic and political response.

Attempts to reframe events in binary terminology simply run counter to the interests and actions of much of the multipolar world. China is a massive global economic consumer, producer and investor, and Russia remains critical to the supply of key mineral and agricultural commodities and military hardware. Few developing nations want or can afford to choose a side in a new global Cold War, and even key U.S. partners like Japan, South Korea and India retain critical connections to Russia and China. As Chinese and Russian information operations have highlighted several times, much of the world is not actively engaged in the West's current sanctions regime against Russia. This is often due to countries' lack of major economic ties to Russia, as well as to the prioritization of local issues over the far-away war in Eastern Europe.

The democracy versus autocracy framing also makes de-escalation in the Russia-Ukraine war nearly impossible, as a long-term struggle between two political systems will only end when one idea is victorious and the other is defeated. Even if Russia were to withdraw from Ukraine tomorrow, that would not end the assertion that Russia is an autocracy and not a democracy, thus prolonging the wider ideological conflict. The binary, therefore, encourages a Cold War framework of a constant struggle between two competing political systems.

But this time around, the democracies risk being seen as the long-term aggressors. Russia may be invading Ukraine now, but if the West's ultimate goal is not merely the withdrawal of Russian forces but the end of autocracy itself, then Russian and Chinese assertions that the West is trying to force political regime change become more believable. And if the West intends to advance democracies globally, these goals could encourage a revival of extreme Western liberalism, the missionary zeal to drive global political change and assert a single North Atlantic political philosophy as the only legitimate — and inevitable — global philosophy.

An ideological framework can also take on a political life of its own, as social dynamics can play a powerful role in a democracy's political process and policies. Politicians capitalizing on moral fervor may find themselves trapped by their own constituents, encouraged to take actions that may not match strategic necessities but are politically expedient. This can reduce options for working with active or potential partner countries when challenging larger strategic competitors like Russia and China. For example, while the impact of sanctions against Russian energy can be mitigated by expanded energy imports from other producers, social and political fervor can undermine logical efforts to increase imports from places like Iran or Venezuela, as these countries are also "autocracies."

Bifurcating the world into two competing political systems risks creating an ever-widening set of potential targets and fails to identify a clear achievable end goal. If autocracy itself is the target, then, in the simplest terms, the West is seeking to replace autocracy with democracy. But that raises several challenging questions. First, what is the line between democracy and autocracy? Are so-called flawed democracies OK? How does the United States manage relations with NATO allies Turkey or Hungary? Are soft autocracies OK? Should the West create space and incentives for the transition to democracy, or should it actively pursue the democratization of autocracies? Would that entail purely economic and political tools or military tools as well? Like the war against terrorism, which evolved from a focused U.S. response to 9/11 and continued well after the death of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, a battle against autocracy can quickly become vast and ill-defined.

Finally, lumping all countries into one of two categories fails to account for the very different geopolitical positions of each country. China is not Russia, and Taiwan is not Ukraine. Superficial analysis conflates the two and shapes policy that may be inapplicable or even counter-productive. In the Cold War, had the United States recognized the political friction between the Soviet Union and China earlier, it may have been able to exploit the Chinese-Soviet split sooner, perhaps even undercutting the idea of the domino theory and altering U.S. policy toward Vietnam. A democracy versus autocracy framework is a valuable tool that can be used to shape and maintain cohesive action against Russia, but it needs to be carefully applied. Without tailoring policies to the geopolitical context and realities of different countries, the self-averred coalition of democracies risks costly and counterproductive policies.

[Crafty_Dog]

March 29, 2022
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The Emerging Order
By: George Friedman

I am writing this from Dubai, on a trip I will describe on my return to the United States. A summit was held in Israel over the weekend between Bahrain, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Israel and the United States. The meeting was designed to back the U.S. into a corner. The United States wants to reach a new understanding with Iran, roughly built on the negotiation platform that was abandoned by President Donald Trump in 2018 as insufficient in dealing with the Iranian threat. Israel and the four Arab countries, plus some others, oppose the Biden initiative, and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was there to persuade them. It did not seem to work. A paper in Dubai headlined that a new Israeli-Arab front had been created. The question has been frequently asked if unity among Arabs and Israel might be reached. The answer seems to be that it’s possible due to fear of Iran and hostility toward American plans for Iran. I have nothing to do with any of this, but watching from close up is always interesting.

My focus remains on Ukraine and Russia and what is emerging as a truly tragic outcome. More talks are scheduled to be held this week in Istanbul. The tragedy is that the settlement being discussed appears to affirm what had originally been the case. The Russians are now claiming that their only intention in the war was to secure the eastern Donbas region, not to occupy Ukraine. Going to war over that would appear to be pointless, since much of the Donbas region has been under informal but very effective Russian control since the events of 2014. It is a region dominated by ethnic Russians, and while Ukraine was not happy with the occupation of Ukrainian territory, it was hardly in a position to seriously challenge Russia. What made the Russian claims dubious, of course, were the columns of tanks heading south from Belarus toward Kyiv, among other things. They seemed to be making war on Ukraine in general and not merely formalizing control of an area they already controlled. It is likely that their demands are going to be more extreme, demanding control of the land between Donbas and Crimea, in effect seizing southeastern Ukraine. But as I said, they fought a war designed with even broader ambitions.

The Ukrainians seem prepared to discuss ceding Donbas and promise Ukrainian neutrality. It is not clear what neutrality means in this context. Switzerland claimed neutrality during World War II, which meant that Germany and the Allies both took advantage of its banking system and operated espionage organizations there. That’s one kind of neutrality. Another kind is Sweden’s. It is not in NATO and has limited acquisition of Western military equipment, but no one doubts where it stands.

What would neutrality mean in Ukraine? Ukraine may not join NATO and may take care to buy Chinese equipment, but after the events of the past month, it is difficult to image Kyiv equally trusting Western Europe and the United States and also Russia. There can be formal neutrality and neutrality over weapons acquisition, but Ukrainian intelligence will likely be swapping information with the West rather than with Russia. How can Ukraine be neutral in such a situation?

The obvious way is to obfuscate. The reality is that Russia demonstrated that it is incapable of carrying out large-scale, multi-front operations and therefore must halt operations. The Ukrainians have demonstrated the ability to raise and organize their population to resist and on occasion defeat Russia, but they cannot continue to absorb the casualties Russia could inflict by sheer weight of forces, however incompetent Russia’s war effort. In the end, Russia can replace its generals, retrain its midlevel officers, and discipline and motivate its enlistees. It will take years, but it can do it if it develops a new culture of political warfare. The Ukrainians cannot protect themselves against a well-armed, well-trained professional force until they themselves rearm and train a professional force. Neutrality makes this difficult if neutrality means acquiring weapons and perhaps training from the West (read: NATO countries) is precluded.

Russia has failed badly in its attempt to occupy Ukraine and is now claiming that it never meant to. Fair enough. Ukraine has managed to resist an incompetent force. Fair enough. But Ukraine, in accepting neutrality, must adopt Swedish neutrality – formal neutrality covering its real intent. And that makes the matter difficult.

That Turkey is running the negotiations is interesting. What occasional cooperation there has been with Russia in the Middle East doesn’t hide the historical distrust. Turkey needs a weak Russia. Turkey also has an appetite for Ukrainian territory, having in the past occupied it. Turkey is the perfect interlocutor. Nobody is sure what it wants, and that may make each side cautious.

I started this with the Iranian negotiation, a negotiation that has created what once would have been considered impossible: an Israeli-Arab front confronting the Americans over their opening to Iran. Lean back and imagine how strange this is. And imagine how strange the Russo-Ukrainian situation is. The tragedy is that it took thousands of dead to bring us to the point at which it all started. And with Iran, it has taken us to a place Iran can’t believe it’s in: looking for a break from the Americans while the Arabs and Israelis try to rein the Americans in. When we think of the New World Order, look no further

[G M]

https://www.theburningplatform.com/2022/03/29/gradually-then-suddenly/

Plan accordingly.