One foreign policy blunder being compounded by another.

Posted by Pointman on March 25, 2022 · 6 Comments 

There are times we’ve all met people in high authority who appear to be making moves you can’t quite understand, but usually that’s because they have access to information you don’t have or they’re executing a particularly Machiavellian plan. On the other hand, sometimes you realise in a blinding flash of insight into them that they just don’t bloody well know what they’re doing. You see them get into a negative feedback loop where one bad decision is quickly followed by another bad decision meant to reverse the damage from the original decision and it all begins to spin out of control with bigger and bigger oscillations into the chaos zone.

The invasion by Russia was caused by the West constantly breaking its word to Russia that there would be no further expansion of NATO eastwards right up to Russia’s borders and by the Ukraine consistently neglecting to abide by the Minsk accords. By simply keeping their word, that invasion and bloodshed would never have happened. Having not proactively managed the situation, the Biden administration then effectively declared economic war on Russia in retaliation for the invasion. The effect of that has been Russia going back to disengaging with the West but more seriously driving it into an alliance with China.

China, like some other major countries such as India, have not only refused to condemn the Russians but have not joined into the sanctions frenzy. Last Friday, the 18th March, Biden video called the Chinese premier and after an initial attempt trying to bully him about serious “costs and consequences” if he didn’t oblige got told in no uncertain terms that the Ukraine-Russia crisis he’d created was also his mess to resolve. Since threats hadn’t worked, Biden moved over to doing some bargaining.

The WH have not released a transcript of the two hour meeting which actually means they didn’t get what they wanted out of it, but after a bit of rooting around I found this summary of it from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The places I have to hunt for information these days would have stunned me forty years ago. It makes for very worrying reading. According to it, Biden said amongst other dubious things that the US does not support “Taiwan independence”. Those quotation marks are not mine but taken directly from the Chinese government statement.

From another source, that reveal of America’s position on Taiwan was repeated twice in the meeting and since the WH has not issued a statement rebutting those words were ever said, they probably were. This is a complete reversal of the decades long US position that Taiwan was an independent country which they would defend in the event of the Chinese trying an invasion of it. In an effort to get China onside with their sanctions strategy against Russia, they threw Taiwan under the bus. Effectively, Biden just green lit the Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Don’t worry, after the Afghanistan and Ukraine humiliations, a third one won’t hurt as much.

The day after the failed video conference, the US started imposing sanctions on China by announcing visa restrictions on prominent Chinese citizens giving as a reason China’s abuses of human rights, something which never bothered the administration before. There’s an obvious implication that if China doesn’t change its mind and support America’s sanctions war with Russia, there will be more to come. China changing its mind and being seen to be intimidated by America? Never going to happen.

What is going to happen though is that it’ll drive China and Russia into deeper ties against their common enemy America. Russia will gain a relatively new trading partner with a population of 1.5 billion people and lose the liability of trading with western countries who are essentially vassal states of the US and slam sanctions on Russia at a nod from the WH. There’s no danger of that happening with China. All the Russian goods and energy that used to flow westward will from now on start to flow eastwards, and that’s seriously bad news for the economies of western Europe.

As America ramps up its sanctions against China, the net result is China gets first dibs on all that juicy Russian gas and oil, something which the West used to have. Not any more. “We’ll never forgive, we’ll never forget”. When you hear of a proposal to build a pipeline between Russia and China, it’ll be the equivalent of hearing a starting pistol being fired and the race will be on. In lane one, it’ll be Russia completing its end of the pipeline and turning off all gas and oil supplies to western Europe. In lane two, western Europe dumping renewables and getting back to some realistic energy polices or get ready for some long, hard, cold winters sitting at home with no heat, no light, no electricity nor any gas.

The Labour politician Denis Healey is credited with coining the advice, “when you’re in a hole, stop digging”. In barely a year, the criminally incompetent Biden administration has managed to keep digging until it moved a relatively benign global political landscape into Cold War Mk 2 with the West up against not only Russia, but now one united with China as well.

Rest assured though, they’re so dumb the present situation they’ve created won’t stop them digging the world into an even worse one. I shudder to think what that might be.

©Pointman

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Filed under Article · Tagged with China, Russia, Taiwan, Ukraine