Finally, China and Russia have become a threat to the United States' quest to maintain economic and geopolitical dominance. The American response has been inconsistent. But policy has wholly included meddling in China and Russia's borderland struggles (Taiwan and the Ukraine, respectively), providing both material and spiritual support for the causes there against China and Russia.
There seems to be an implicit understanding among the American leadership that a miscue by China and Russia in these border regions could result in a bloody conflict that endlessly consumes lives and that this will turn the populations of China and Russia against their own leaders. More importantly, the US knows that sponsoring resistance in Taiwan and Ukraine will make the integratability of those places all the less certain for China and Russia, creating a permament thorn in the side for China and Russia - and perhaps even a staging ground to import revolution from those borderlands into either China or Russia proper.
With this basic understanding, it "makes sense" for the US to fund the defense of Taiwan and Ukraine. And, in turn, it "makes sense" for the US government to sell the American public on the causes in Taiwan and Ukraine as legitimate and morally sound (especially if doing so and rallying to these causes can distract Americans from their own flailing economy and domestic problems).
But all that ignores the danger of simply copy-pasting borderlands agitation strategy and applying it towards one rival and another. Because what is likely to happen, and has already come to pass, is that China and Russia have moved from seeing themselves as neighbors with conflicting aspirations to neighbors with a common cause and obstacle, that being the United States government and its policy.
Do the Americans recall their own history? For years, it was their very government's policy to drive a wedge between China and Russia (or, more accurately, the Soviet Union). Although a heavy price to pay, the US wars in Korea and Vietnam contributed to that wedge. So did the nuclear arms race that the US got the Soviets caught up in, because it became a concern to China's interests. Few developments were actually more critical to the course of the Cold War, because as relations between China and Russia soured between the 1950s and 1960s for these and other reasons, the result was limited collaborative economic power potential and output.
Of course, it helped that China had much less to offer at that time; and, even more than the Soviet Union, China did not have its own house in order. But you don't need to know this or have a degree in history to understand the significance of driving a wedge between rivals instead of drawing them together. But why does it seem that the American government has forgotten the lesson completely?
If you are an American, simply look at your own policy goals in the present, and the effect of not having that wedge to drive between Russia and China; if Russia is a resource-rich export land and your strategy is to simply boycott it to death by cutting off its access to markets, then you had better make sure China, the now highly industrialized neighbor, home to billions of people, is on board with your agenda; at the very least, you should make sure that China is not being pushed, by your very own policy, into Russia's arms as a customer with little to lose and, due to discount rates Russia is offering, ever more to gain. And you probably should make sure that your own country, and your allies, are not so depedent on Russian exports that your strategy of a boycott is dead in the water because it cannot even include gas, arguably the most important sector of Russia's economy.
But the incompetence of American leadership goes even deeper. In the US, since the presidency of Richard Nixon, both the establishment Democrat and Republican Parties have paved the way for US companies to outsource their entire industry to China. Accordingly, the US economy now depends on China. China is America's manufacturing base and, without it, the US shuts down. Zero preparations exist to bring that industry home. To undo half a century of the opposite would take years to establish. But it gets worse: all of this production and development has created great power in China, creating a
wealthy merchant class that has taken ownership of companies the world over and enabled China to more or less re-colonize Africa and take control of its minerals. The crux of the matter? No great crusade to undo this - led by the US or the Europe chained to it - can end in a truly beneficial outcome to either, because neither can afford to
remain in Africa after decades of projecting anti-colonialism guilt propaganda (to generate acceptance of, for example, mass immigration from Africa). And, as ling as neither the US nor Europe are there, China will step forward in their place.
Under the circumstances, it seems that perhaps the most the US can do to China is wag its finger and try to get people from buying cheap imports from China. Perhaps the US may pull the plug on such imports, but the damage this would do to the US almost assures that China need not worry. Just as critically, these dynamics mean the US cannot use the threat of policy application as a tool to stop China from pursuing its self-interest as a trading partner with Russia. And, the more Russia has a major industrial superpower partner like China literally at its side, the more laughable this idea that the American led boycott war against Russia will succeed.
So, to review, no chilling effect is possible to prevent China from collaborating with Russia, because China has little to lose and no amount of US threats can be taken seriously or should be taken seriously; in turn, the US is toothless to stop China from collaborating out of self-interest with Russia. And so the presumed US strategy of hoping to bring down Russia via sanctions, which can be carried out only to a negligible extent so the threshhold of self-ruin remains at a temporarily public-tolerable level, is entirely for naught - and so is the self-harm incurred in the process.
Let's recap: if you are the US, you have a strategy to isolate countries that you depend on, which you cannot cut off in the areas of export that matter. And, to what degree this strategy would even work, if carried out to the fullest, is nullified by the fact that, with regards to Russia and China, each can provide the solution to the other's resulting encumbrence. China has most of the world population and has become a major industrial country that not only can buy Russia's gas and oil, but needs it. Russia needs investment support and China has no shortage of industry at stake. Plus, as we have explored, whereas the allies of the US in Europe have withdrawn from Africa over the last century, China has, for all intents and purposes, recolonized it. Add in the fact that China and Russia collectively supply the world not just minerals, but food (for example, grain or rice), you are talking about control over the world's food supply. And these are not new facts; unlike reliance on natural gas from Russia, the importance of rice and grain flowing from these countries is practically timeless. It is almost hilarious how blindly and sincerely the US and its allies have set themselves up to fail.
The US leadership, it seems, thought it would just use Taiwan and Ukraine situations as bludgeons against China and Russia, respectively, and use its powerhand to dissuade China and Russia individually; this probably would have worked in the 1990s, when the US was the leading superpower and China had yet to become the world's factory and an expanding merchant. But then the US turned China into that factory and merchant In hindsight, if the US wished to play the global hegemon, it was a terribly incompetent decision, given both China's size and historical power, which unless a fluke was surely a sign that it would be possible all over again. That the US would miss this was more than possible, though - it was predictable. It's what you get with open borders, individual-first liberal capitalism.
Incidentally, the US is now paying the price. China just abstained from voting on the UN Resolution to condemn Russia for invading the Ukraine. US media is calling China's non-committal stand a win. But what China's abstention actually shows is China is less concerned about Russia's expansion, even if further destabilization and conquest in Europe results, than the opportunity it sees. China knows this is either its own chance to run its own program of divide and conquer - sitting it out while Russia and US destroy themselves and cashing in as the middle man and supplier. It is incredibly naive to think that China, especially not conditioned for modern anti-Russia hysteria or Western color revolution sloganeering is going to let US/NATO win out and extend itself into Russia via regime change. And that it why it is also
incredibly naive to think that any of what is going on is going to end favorably for the US, or will be allowed by China to end in such a manner.
There is, of course, a certain irony in the US building China up into the global player it is today. And, if the US actually knew what it was doing, we might even believe that to be intentional, because that sort of thing could have been used to keep Russia in check.
Incidentally, an idea borne from British supremacy in the 1800s was that a unilateral power is a guarantor of peace if it can use its dominance to force will and foster competition among smaller powers to keep them competing in league and keep any one power from rising up to challenge. In reality, playing the rising power off against the others often resulted in smashing them into each other and into oblivion. So, a lot of the "Pax Romana" or "Pax Britannica" hype postulating the above is bunk - and, at worst, self-justifying bunk.
An optimist might say the US was simply too peace-oriented, so the result is a strong China entering into play in the US-Russia rivalry and not China and Russia smashing heads. But if there ever was a sincere desire to prevent bloodshed, to keep China out of Taiwan and Russia from the Ukraine, the US merely had to keep Russia and China suspicious of each other - or just refrain from doing what brought those two countries closer. In our current timeline, much like in the past, Russia would have been kept from launching into Ukraine amidst uncertainty as to how its neighbor, China, would react. Likewise, the same chilling effect would result from China not knowing what Russia would do if the situation with Taiwan turned hot. And there were plenty of opportunies to keep China and Russia at odds, beginning with the geopolitics that allowed them to become avid trading partners which paved the way for increased trust. One key moment came when Russia put out feelers in a proposal to join NATO. The US accepting the proposal would have most assuredly kept China and Russia out of sync. But really anything could have, with the trigger point being anything from future control over the Arctic to China's growing investment in Ukraine to China's lack of energy resources in contrast to Russia's abundance of them. Or even China's growing world influence, and vice versa - especially following America's disasters in the Middle East and Russia's friendship building with those US-opposed, native forces there.
And yet a tripolar world can be a guarantor of peace in ways that a unipolar world cannot. It presents the opportunity for each to achieve security by making sure the other two are not united. When this is the case, no party will have the confidence to pursue a course of action that would result in a devastating alignment of the other two non-belligerent powers. It is thus a sort of self-policing mechanism. The worse case scenario, of course, is when one party slips and lets the other two unite in common interest to become such a dual threat. In other words, China and Russia not at odds should have been a national security concern for the US on par with, say, the Cuban Missile Crisis of the 1960s, when the Soviet Union had nukes pointing at the US from Cuba. But recent US policy and priority went in other directions.
The US continued to act with such arrogance to perceive itself as the world hegemon despite evidence suggesting otherwise, and the combined power of the opposition parties being so much more, and the hegemon being so despised, that victory over it is not only certain to the contending parties, but so desired that each's concern of betrayal and entrapment by the other party is temporarily overridden. At that point, the three-way dynamic is no longer functioning. And in good part, that goes back to the failure of the US, probably due to both arrogance as well as incompetence, to establish each party to the other as any kind of remote threat.
Unless you believe the US government is actually this incompetent, it is actually almost easier to believe the whole thing is a two-part global conspiracy; first, to drive up energy costs and grind production to a halt (amidst the market changes and shortages that are a given if the sanction war on Russia, and disruptions in the Ukraine, materialize) and create overall dependence on government aid for all except the ultra-wealthy elite (the Covid-crisis, destroying small businesses, plays to this); second, China, Russia and its dependents moving from the dollar will influence dollar stability, making the dollar susceptible to mass inflation due to both excessive printing to fund a proxy war against Russia and/or China. Meanwhile, war itself will create a war production economy, the sort of environment where demand and output is consistent, and economic reorganization can most easily takes place without resistance or uncontrollable market response. It becomes, basically, the opportune time for a "Great Reset" - just as it was amidst the rise of the Federal Reserve during World War I. I strongly advise reading about the Hamilton project; the behind-doors planning in that regard closely resembles the meetings at Jekyll Island prior to World War I, leading to the establishment of the Federal Reserve.
Ironically, the resurgence of the three-way dynamic is now pretty much the only thing the only thing preventing World War III; the US is surely by now aware that if it gets too entangled with Russia, China will take the opportunity to expand its power starting with an assault to resolve the Taiwan question. China may even sow up loose ends with North Korea to assure China's place as Asia's hegemon. Surely the US knows that its destruction, and Russia's, leaves China on top. And, sadly, that is the only point of this three-way system that is in play and remains. The opportunity to use it to keep Russia from pursing aggression is long gone. Now, it merely all but guarantees that Russia will be able to complete its aggression, because the results of full-scale US engagement point towards China picking up the baton. And yet China might still align with Russia, as trust between Beijing and Moscow is possible and built upon a mutual understanding that the US world empire, and its client states and outposts, are a nemesis. Had the US actually thought to keep Russia and China out of sync, none of this would be happening.
