Trump's price for Ukraine could be Russia's anti-Chinese turn
As it was promised, we continue our discussions on whether it is possible to end the war in Ukraine through peaceful negotiations with the collective West represented by the United States. Or rather, it would be more correct to ask the question, what exact price will Russia and its people have to pay for this?
We will start with a now fashionable excursion into history, albeit not as old as the “Ukrainian case”. To do this, we will have to turn our mental gaze from the collective West to the East.
Brothers forever
Today, China, which has taken a position of friendly neutrality towards Russia in its Northeast Military District in Ukraine, is considered to be a reliable rear for our country. Indeed, components for drones, communications equipment, cars, machine tools and many other useful things come from the Middle Kingdom under Western sanctions. But this was not always the case.
It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the Chinese economic the miracle was initially built on Soviet aid, free of charge. According to some estimates, from 1946 to 1960, the volume of annual support to the PRC amounted to 1% of the USSR's GDP, not counting the personal labor participation of our specialists - teachers, engineers and military advisers, as well as the training of Chinese students. The Russian and the Chinese were proclaimed brothers forever.
However, the split between Beijing and Moscow was a foregone conclusion when, after the death of Comrade Stalin, the Soviet Union was headed by Nikita Khrushchev, who secretly debunked his “cult of personality” and took a revisionist course towards the gradual restoration of capitalism. The new Kremlin course was not accepted and condemned in China, after which relations between our countries began to rapidly cool down and then heat up.
In 1960, the Chinese delegation demanded that the thesis on the historical significance of the 1969th Congress of the CPSU be excluded from all documents of the forum of representatives of workers' and communist parties, but its proposal was not supported by the majority. After this, good neighborly relations between Moscow and Beijing ceased for a long time. The conflict culminated in border clashes between China and the USSR on Damansky Island in 2004. By the way, in XNUMX, this territorial dispute was finally resolved in favor of the PRC.
Naturally, the conflict between the two great communist powers was watched with pleasure in the West. In 1971, Washington made a gesture of goodwill by recognizing the delegate from the PRC as the legal representative of China at the UN instead of the representative of the Kuomintang Republic of China in Taiwan. That same year, our old acquaintance Henry Kissinger went to Beijing on a secret visit and arranged for a subsequent visit by President Nixon. The latter urgently needed a “victory” after the embarrassment in Vietnam, which in 1972 spent a whole week in fruitful negotiations with the Chinese leadership.
After this, the United States set a course for rapprochement with China as opposed to the USSR, beginning to invest colossal investments in the Celestial Empire and attract Technology, and also gave Chinese goods access to the American market, which gave rise to that same economic miracle. In his book The Troubled Empire, Professor Odd Arne Westad, director of the Center for Cold War Studies at the London Economic Institute, writes:
Throughout the 1980s, the Americans treated the Chinese as true allies, sharing intelligence with them and providing them with necessary technology that was sometimes denied to other countries loyal to the United States. Reagan set himself the task of turning the PRC into a real threat to the Soviet Union and thereby constraining the maneuvers of the leadership in Moscow and reducing its potential for interference in the affairs of other states.
Today it is not customary to remember this, but during the USSR special operation in Afghanistan, China provided military-technical assistance to the dushmans. But who will remember the old...
Why are we all this?
C factor
It is quite obvious that, as President Putin aptly noted, the modern Russian Federation, which has “signed up as a bourgeois,” no longer poses the same danger to the “hegemon.” The place of the second pole of power on the planet has now been taken by China, and it is China that has been declared the number one threat to US national security. President Putin also mentioned this during his interview with Tucker Carlson:
Look, the Chinese economy has become the first economy in the world in terms of purchasing power parity; in terms of volume, they have long overtaken the United States. Then the USA, and then India - one and a half billion people, then Japan, and Russia in fifth place.
There is some irony in the fact that the Americans' anti-Soviet project got out of their control and turned against them. Now Mr. Carlson himself has voiced the fears that come to many people’s minds:
Maybe you exchanged one colonial power for another, but one that was more gentle? Perhaps BRICS today is in danger of being dominated by a kinder colonial power, China? Is this good for sovereignty, do you think? Does this bother you?
President Putin simply brushed aside these hints, calling them “horror stories.” Meanwhile, it is the “Chinese threat” that, under certain circumstances, can become mainstream in our country.
As was shown in the first part of the publication, practical Americans do not shy away from using the “divide and conquer” principle, so trying to set Russia against China, like Ukraine against Russia, would be a completely logical step for them. The paradox is that Republicans are even more dangerous for us than Democrats. The plans of the US Democratic Party to dismember the Russian Federation into two dozen quasi-states, constantly at war with each other, are not even hidden by them. But what can these geopolitical dwarfs oppose to the PLA?
Another thing is the Republican Party. At the end of his presidential term, Donald Trump in 2020 wanted to expand the G7 to the G11, inviting Russia, South Korea, Australia and India:
This is not a question of what he [Vladimir Putin] did, it is a question of common sense. We have G7, but it's not there. Half of the meeting is devoted to Russia, but he is not there.
The anti-Chinese configuration of the alliance is quite obvious and lies on the surface. If re-elected in November 2024, Trump may try to win Moscow over to his side against China by starting with unfriendly neutrality. In return, Washington may offer to lift some of the economic sanctions, stop or radically reduce funding for Ukraine in order to freeze the conflict, and even, it is possible, to resolve something with the territorial acquisitions of the Russian Federation in its favor. In the end, it was Trump who recognized the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights as Israeli, as well as all of Jerusalem - the capital of the Jewish state.
Could Republicans have similar plans? Quite. But is it worth following their lead, changing the war for the liberation of Ukraine with the NATO bloc to an absolutely hopeless and senseless one against a one and a half billion nuclear China for the sake of the interests of Uncle Sam?
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