President Biden hasn't met with Xi yet, has he? Quite possibly Xi wanted Trump in office, too. I think The West has to come to terms with their own idea of promoting Wall Street and capitalism as a tool to peace has failed.
It seems to me the communists have closed ranks and are moving to a greater expansionism to a global order far different than democracy has seen as a vision. The West is dealing with ideologues. There is no peace here. There is no possible peace if they have a far different agenda than The West has understood.
I think we are headed right back to the Cold War and the Era of Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. That is where Putin wants to be. No one can deny that.
I do not believe COVID-19 was developed for germ warfare on the entire planet. That was caused because an incompetent Donald John Trump decided the USA should stop paying scientists to tend to issues within the population of China. What people don't understand about the Chinese government is a crime. I swear.
Never measure the sophistication of a country by it's elite, measure a country by it's poor. Both China and Russia are Third World countries and chronically welcome The West to assist in their domestic affairs when it comes to the well being of it's people. At least until the last few years. When Trump pulled the scientists out of China, no one replaced them.
The poor of any country is very close to serious and profound poverty that causes famine, death and disease. Lifting up the poor improves the world for all of us and makes Earth a much safer place to live.
China and Russia have some very profound poverty in their country, much worse than the poverty found in the USA. I mean, the Chinese are eating wild animals like civets and the viruses are crossing species boundaries. In Russia, during the Olympics, Russians lost their homes in order to build the stadiums in Sochi. Russia didn't improve the housing or living standard of those displaced, they simply displaced them and basically wished them well to find a new place to live if they can.
The so called "Russian Occupied Territories" aren't doing any better with the influence of the Russian government than before they were occupied. The elite are happier, but, the people generally are not. There is a reason why Mariupol is emptying out of citizens. Putin doesn't care about those people, he wants the port to call his own. He doesn't care if there is a building standing.
Ideologies as a national standard is about politics, not a workable governance. What is going on with Ukraine is ideology. Ukraine wanted to trade with Russia. The Post Soviet Countries wanted to trade with Russia. Russia did not want to trade with them. Why? Because in his hearts of hearts Putin only saw communism as the one true god and The West is poison to it.
There are lots of ways to povide a so called "buffer zone" to a country's borders. Walls if that is an idea that actually works, but, also mutual economic benefit is a huge way to build national security without owning real estate. Mutual economic benefit is about jobs and national debts and deficits. It is a gigantic sense of security regardless the borders of a country. That measured, Russia and China should be great allies. They aren't and if they don't see the light of day by now, they never will.
I think in the issue of Ukraine, China will probably be unhelpful. I hope I am wrong, but, basically Xi is a dictator now as is Putin and they like it that way. In 2000, China and Russia signed "The Friendship Pact." I think that says it all. South Korea has a new president, by the way. I haven't read up about him yet, but, let's hope it isn't one that Bannon decided to make money on. Otherwise, we are stuck with another ideologue to deal with.
By Ian Johnson
...China's current system (click here) was launched in the late 1970s under Deng Xiaoping, who was willing to relax Communist Party control over society to allow China to flourish. Deng's two hand-picked successors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, had their flaws but possessed relatively similar ideas about broadening the Communist Party's appeal and pursuing better ties with neighbors.
Xi has none of these instincts. Raised by one of the country's founding fathers, he is the first leader to be born and raised in the People's Republic. He has a relatively limited education -- not his fault because it was due to the political turmoil of the Mao years -- but still telling. Once the turmoil ended in the late 1970s, his well-connected father put him on a track to success, with one careerist job following the next.\
Xi's vision is essentially to recreate the Chinese Communist Party of his father's generation. Soon after the party took power in the 1950s, so the myth goes, it was incorruptible, popular, and firmly in charge of society.
To that end, Xi's main goal is to strengthen party control over the economy, politics, education, and minority areas such as Xinjiang, or relatively autonomous regions, such as Hong Kong. In its own way, Xi's vision is ambitious in his effort to turn the clock back on 40 years of reforms, but it is a limited and inward-focused ambition. As the Australian scholar Geremie Barmé puts it, it is an "empire of tedium."...
