No reverse gear for Putin or Xi

The problem with think-tankers, policymakers and academics is that there is no reverse gear where their thinking is concerned. Just as an entire industry has developed focusing on the imagined threat of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, within Washington there is a congealed mass of thinking that refuses to acknowledge that the principal threat to the United States comes no longer from Moscow but Beijing. Since the 1970s, there has been a storied succession of scholars who have simultaneously chased the chimera of Peace with Honour with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the doctrine that the only foe of the US and its Atlantic allies is Russia. That such an analysis flies in the face of ground reality is of no concern to those worried that all their years, indeed decades, of presumed expertise in “how to resist and defeat the Russian threat” may no longer be a tenth as relevant in the 21st century that it was until the meltdown of the USSR by the close of 1991. It is clear that President Putin made a miscalculation about the extent to which the members of NATO would go in order to make Ukraine into what Afghanistan had been for the Soviet Union, a quagmire that would enervate and help destroy the Russian Federation. In their minds, the key to a second fragmentation of Russia on the lines of what happened during 1991-93 was to use the attack on Ukraine in order to bleed Russia into exhaustion. Given the Sinophilia that usually accompanies Russophobia, they neglected to factor in that a proxy war between Russia and NATO would be a gift to the CCP. Attention would be drawn away from Asia and the Indo-Pacific, back to Europe and the Atlantic. The worse the situation between Russia and NATO became, the better for the PRC. Since the war started a year ago, it is China that has kept Putin afloat through its purchases of Russian oil in particular, not to mention other tangible assistance sent to Russia via cutouts in Africa in particular. Given their distaste for the stance that India took during the USSR-US Cold War, it came as no surprise that it was the much smaller contribution of India to Russia’s export performance that occupied their minds and not that of China.
Xi Jinping, awash with western leaders beseeching him to help them persuade Putin to commit hara-kiri on himself by withdrawing his forces from the legal borders of Ukraine, has every interest in prolonging a conflict that has so diverted attention away from his own expansionist moves. A comparison of the quantum of assistance given to Ukraine and that to other countries that are suffering horribly from conflict would be instructive. By its obsession with a European country to the relative neglect of countries in Africa, South America and Asia where the population is undergoing as much hardship, NATO members led by the US have lost a substantial amount of trust and goodwill within continents other than Europe and North America. Its manner of prosecuting the Ukraine war has been a far bigger disaster for the key members of NATO than they are presently calculating. Of course, the vacuum created by such loss of goodwill is immediately sought to be filled by the PRC. Whenever they can prise themselves loose from western diplomats desperate for Xi to get Putin to reverse course, Chinese diplomats are heading to countries outside the Atlanticist world. In each, they express sympathy and surprise at both the western obsession with Ukraine and the lack of similar attention to the countries where Chinese diplomats are visiting. Despite all the expertise that NATO members have, or perhaps because of it, they do not understand that just as Putin has no reverse button that he can press and survive, neither has Xi. Given the mechanics of power within the CCP, Xi cannot be seen as reversing from his proclaimed course of winning back territories that were Chinese only in the fantasies of policymakers in Beijing. Given that, those pushing harder and harder in support of their strategy of pumping up weapons deliveries to Ukraine so that the Russian army retreats in the way it did in Afghanistan in 1988 are putting at risk the future of the Indo-Pacific in favour of prolonging a war that is bleeding no so much Russia as Ukraine. From the start of his term, Xi has clothed himself in the raiment of a warlord, as the only leader who can win greater Lebensraum for the PRC. All his actions have been in the direction of such aggression and expansion. Just as there is no reverse gear for Putin, there is none for Xi.
MDN