Yes, the tea was safe to drink.
25 May 2024 — It was my intent today to spend it reading some of the NASA/JPL-Caltech Mars reports and photographs on the Mars explorations. But as news of more Russian missile attacks on Ukraine began to trickle in from my OSINT group, I decided to dust off my draft on the Putin/Xi meeting last week, finish it, and post the general outline tonight.
When Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping first declared their “no limits” relationship in February 2022 and then stuck with it as all-weather friends after the invasion of Ukraine, they crossed the Rubicon in their confrontation with what they regard as the “hostile” U.S.-led world order.
Their summit last week, which defiantly deepened the relationship on both the economic and military fronts, placed the 21st-century Czar and Red Emperor well down the road toward a “new era” beyond the liberal world order they plotted when taking tea at Zhongnanhai, the walled leadership compound in central Beijing. Analogously speaking, they are now halfway to Rome where Julius Caesar, in the historical reference in the title of this post, provoked civil war and established a dictatorship on his return from conquering the peoples of Gaul.
The meeting took place as Russia has been gaining ground on the battlefield against NATO-backed Ukraine, thanks in no small part to the economic lifeline from Beijing, while Joe Biden imposed 100% tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles, doubled the 25% tariff on solar cells, initially imposed by Donald Trump, to 50%, and tripled the levy on Chinese EV lithium-ion batteries.
It appears that China’s strategy of straddling both support for Russia and continued economic ties with the West is becoming as untenable as wishful thinking in the West that it could drive a wedge between Putin and Xi. The “powerful driving force” of their proclaimed solidarity is fostering precisely the “bloc” system and “Cold War mentality” decried by their rhetoric — even if they are not entirely misplaced in blaming the West, which in many ways is a co-culprit in stoking the intensifying clash I have previously written about in numerous posts.
As is always the case in patterns of escalation, one is a condition of the other. Push entails pushback, then pushback against pushback and on and on.
The West is powerless, and defeated.
In short, we are already getting a clear picture of what the new era ahead will look like. As conflict overwhelms the diminishing ballast of integration forged during the period of globalization, solid blocs — geocultural, geopolitical and geoeconomic — are so hardening they will not be easily dismantled once firmly in place.
This fortification of a “multipolar world” is relegating the hopes of constructive planetary cooperation on climate change to the ranks of other impossibilities – like a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians. In the historical frame, that may be the most consequential casualty of where we are headed.
It is richly ironic that Biden’s new tariffs on Chinese green technologies are justified by the claim that fair competition has been stifled by industrial policies of the very kind the U.S. is now itself implementing through the Inflation Reduction Act, which, in turn, are rattling America’s own allies in Asia and Europe under the same claim. And that is on top of the even richer irony that the planetary imperative to battle global warming has become the province of renewed nationalism.
One can imagine Biden’s logic: “If I don’t project a decisive image of protecting American jobs and industry from Chinese exports, all those votes in the upcoming election by the besieged working middle class in America’s swing states will go to Trump, who not only denies climate change altogether, but has essentially pledged to disrupt American democratic norms”.
In my mind, that election is over and Trump will win. And there are many reasons for that but I will leave that for another post.
When bidding farewell to Putin at the doorstep of the Kremlin on a state visit to Moscow in March 2023, Xi’s departing words were: “Right now there are changes — the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years — and we are the ones driving these changes together.”
China and Russia have not only charted but repeatedly reaffirmed that divergent path, which will now be mirrored by the West. The protracted period of post-Cold War purgatory is definitively over and another era which divides the world anew is just beginning. I have quoted Antonio Gramsci numerous time but his 1937 quote still holds steady:
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”.
We are now in the formative years of a new period whose name and character we don’t yet know. In politics, as in relationships, beginnings matter. But it will be a new world order.
And the machinations – where human life has no value – are in full gear. I began to explain some of this on Twitter and Linkedin last night and today. And it is one reason why Biden will lose the election.
Russians have massed troops on the border next to Belarus in what appears to be the opening of the 2nd new front in 2 weeks. While the Biden Administration’s insane policy of forbidding Ukraine from striking Russians inside Russia is about to cost Ukraine thousands of lives.
I quoted historian Daniel Mullen who said:
The Russia/China approach is the ‘two-headed serpent’ strategy: if Russia presses Ukraine trying to go to Kyiv and China feints an attack on Taiwan, the U.S., which no longer has the doctrine of winning on two fronts at once, would be forced to sacrifice one or the other.
Granted, I have simplified it but the purpose of this post is just to provide my grand narrative. More to come.