The summit between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin is further evidence of the increasingly global nature of the threats facing the USA and its allies.
As well as to discussing Xi’s “peace plan” for war with Ukraine, the Moscow meeting further crystallizes the anti-Western axis of the twenty first century.
Putin wrote that Russian-Chinese relations “today are practically the cornerstone of regional and even global stability.”
He greeted his “dear friend” Xi, who expressed “deep gratitude”, adding that China’s “friendship” with Russia was “growing daily.”
There may be little joy in Kiev in regards to the Chinese proposals, and there should be even less in Washington, because they amount to little greater than a Sino-Russian propaganda exercise.
Putin characterised Russia’s war of unprovoked aggression against Ukraine as an “acute crisis,” which could definitely be put that way.
Beijing’s Western sympathizers within the nearly 13 months of Moscow’s unprovoked aggression against Ukraine have repeatedly swindled to explain that China was embarrassed by Russia’s behavior, China wanted to “separate” from Russia, and China was not significantly helping Russia’s war effort.
These claims were demonstrably unfaithful, at the same time as the apologists offered their apologies, and have now been fully exposed.
Today, it’s the Western apologists of China who should be ashamed.
Actually, China is the most important winner of the war with Ukraine, regardless of the way it ends.
If Russia is victorious in whole or partly, China’s ally will prevail over fierce Ukrainian resistance and substantial US and NATO assistance, thereby increasing the threat to other former Soviet constituents and to Western Europe generally.
And if Moscow is defeated, Beijing’s ally might be much more depending on China, and due to this fact much more captive. It’s difficult to describe a series of scenarios more suited to Xi.
Unfortunately, Ukraine and the remaining of the previous Russian Empire won’t be the one targets of this recent Eurasian Axis.
By denying the legitimacy of the dissolution of the USSR, the Kremlin calls into query the safety of all former Soviet republics, including the three Baltic states, now members of NATO.
In East Asia, Taiwan is urgently bolstering its defenses, while the USA, Japan and other allies are considering larger structures of collective self-defense to quell any hegemonic ambitions of China.
Others on China’s Indo-Pacific periphery are understandably upset.
Russia and China, the everlasting members of the Security Council, immunized by the veto power granted to them by the UN Charter and recognized by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as legitimate nuclear weapons states, are on the move, accompanied by various onlookers akin to North Korea, Iran , Belarus and other nations which have not yet come out of hiding.
After China’s recent surprising brokerage of a deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran to restore broken relations, who can predict what their next diplomatic ploy is perhaps?
Much more vividly, after a long time of the West pretending there was a “rules-based international order” and the alleged deterrent effect of the International Criminal Court, Xi arrived in Moscow just days after the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Putin.
The Kremlin leader immediately disregarded the order, heading to Russian-occupied Ukraine, each Crimea and Donbass.
Neither China nor Russia are parties to the ICC’s Rome Statute, and neither is probably going to sign any time soon. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman directly denied the ICC’s actions, calling on the court to “respect the jurisdictional immunity of the top of state under international law.” (America can be not a member of the ICC, mainly due to its own fundamental illegality.)
Furthermore, through the COVID pandemic and to today, China has shown exactly what it thinks of the World Health Organization by systematically obstructing the UN investigation into the origin of COVID and protecting China’s interests from other affected nations.”
Neither Russia nor China will significantly contribute to significant agreements or actions in international negotiations on climate change.
Even in international trade and investment, the prospects for a long-term struggle between the Eurasian axis and the West are growing rapidly.
A lot for the advantages and protections of multilateral diplomacy. The only excellent news that may come out of the Putin-Xi meeting is that Westerners who had previously neglected the evil intentions of Russia and China might be woken up – and never a moment too soon.
John Bolton was President Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor in 2018-19 and US Ambassador to the United Nations in 2005-2006.