Xi Jinping is in Moscow for several days of talks with Vladimir Putin, further solidifying the world’s most important “no limits” bilateral relationship, the leaders of the bloc that is replacing the imploding “West.” This is Xi’s first visit to Russia since that country began their special military operation in Ukraine.
The summit may even yield a cease fire, at least one Russia, China, and Ukraine can agree to - if not the United States and NATO.
The United States led a coup in Ukraine in 2014 and installed a puppet. Victoria Nuland was caught organizing it on the phone. Ukrainian Banderite Nazis began killing 14,000 Ukrainians in the Donbass. NATO has nuclear capable missile sites in Poland and Romania and would have installed them in Ukraine if they ever joined NATO. China and Russia both have hypersonic missiles. The United States doesn’t but they soon will. Putin repeatedly told the West that, when they do and they are installed in Ukraine on the Russian border, he would have 5-7 minutes to decide whether or not to retaliate. The west never intended to honor the Minsk Accords. Putin offered Ukraine a peace proposal in December 2021. The United States, Germany, and France quashed a March 2022 peace agreement brokered by Turkey and mediated by former Israeli Prime Minister Bennett.
The United States think they can use Ukraine to dismember Russia the way they used NATO dismembered Yugoslavia. They cannot. Russia is not Yugoslavia. China knows the neoconservatives in Washington think China is next on the chopping block after Russia. But Xi and Putin know what Nuland and her fellow lunatics apparently do not. Russia isn’t going to lose. If you doubt it, watch the war analysis of Douglas McGregor or Scott Ritter. “The West” have been ignoring Russia’s legitimate security concerns long enough. The outcome of the war is no longer in doubt.
The neoconservatives are married to quite a few abject fantasies. One of them is that China is about to provide weapons to Russia. Russia doesn’t need weapons from China. Unlike the United States, Russia still has an industrial capacity and can put itself on a war footing quickly, which it has. Russia just needs China to keep doing what it has already been doing for years: providing them with relief from American-led financial terrorism by keeping their Cross-Border Interbank Payment System linked with Russia’s System for Transfer of Financial Messages, their Union Pay card linked with Russia’s Mir card, and the yuan a stable currency for the cross border settlement of international trade.
China has definitively seized the initiative of global leadership in the last month but to understand where this sudden momentum came from we need to go back to the meeting Xi held in Riyadh on December 9, 2022 with the Gulf Cooperation Council and Arab League. The council includes “Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).” China is their largest trading partner and largest importer of their petrochemical products. The Arab League is a “voluntary association of countries whose peoples are mainly Arabic speaking” countries.
Xi suggested finance, investment, new technologies, and aerospace as areas for potential collaboration in the near term. China also seeks to cooperate on financial regulatory issues, facilitate access to China's capital market, create a joint investment facilities, and support their sovereign wealth funds. Xi urged oil suppliers to “make full use of the Shanghai Petroleum and National Gas Exchange as a platform to carry out yuan settlement of oil and gas trade,” another major step towards dedollarization and the rise of the petroyuan.
On January 15, 2023 Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang and Arab League (AL) Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul Gheit met in Cairo to call for expediting agreements made at the Riyadh summit the month before. Days later at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Saudi Arabia's minister of finance Mohammed Al-Jadaan announced his country’s willingness to settle oil payments in currencies other than the dollar.
China continues to provide the world with numerous concrete and mutually-beneficial reasons for joining the emerging power bloc it leads. Lately they have been coming in rapid succession. The Belt and Road Initiative is their ongoing development offer. China joined Russia and South Africa in naval exercises off the coast of Durban on February 18, 2023. China floated their ideological offer on February 20, 2023 with the succinct, systematic, and historically accurate intellectual demarche “U.S. hegemony and its perils.” China’s new global security initiative concept paper is their security offer (February 22, 2023). The paper makes peace and international law its central features, stresses the common identity of security and development, advocates for win-win cooperation, and upholds “the authority of the UN and its status as the main platform for global security governance. The Cold War mentality, unilateralism, bloc confrontation and hegemonism contradict the spirit of the UN Charter and must be resisted and rejected.”
On February 18, 2023 at the recent Munich Security Conference (which is dedicated to reproducing the American-led “rules based order”) China’s senior diplomat Wang Yi delivered a talk entitled “Everything China has Done is for Peace.” In it Wang said: “Some people do not want peace talks to succeed or fighting to stop. They don’t care about the life and death of Ukrainians or the harm done to Europe, but have larger strategic calculations in mind.”
China recently proposed a peace plan for Ukraine on February 24, 2023. China and Russia prevented the issuance of a unified communique from the February 24-25 G20 finance minster meeting in Bengalaru India by refusing any reference to war in Ukraine.
A March 1, 2023 report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute documented Chinese dominance in emerging technologies. Since the Australian Strategic Policy Institute is a war propaganda factory funded by the Anglo American settler colonial empire, they have a vested interest in stoking fear among the Australian public. That doesn’t mean they aren’t right, however. Their Critical Technology Tracker charts many of the leading edge industrial sectors China targeted in their Made in China 2025 industrial policies.
Xi was recently elected to a third five term as leader at the “two sessions” on March 9, 2023. Rhetoric at that congress from Chinese leadership marked a blunt departure from their traditional phraseology. Xi said “western countries - led by the U.S. - have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression against us, bringing unprecedentedly severe challenges to our country’s development (March 6, 2023).” China Foreign Minister Qin Gang called "wolf warrior diplomacy” a discourse trap. “Wolf warrior diplomacy” is a Western media commonplace, equating Chinese diplomacy with the Chinese action blockbusters “Wolf Warrior” and “Wolf Warrior II.” Qin: “Confucius said over 2,000 years ago that kindness should be repaid by kindness, and that enmity should be repaid by justice. China's diplomacy is full of kindness and benevolence, but when wolves get in our way and attack, Chinese diplomats must dance with the wolves to protect their country.”
Saudi Aramco committed to prioritizing energy supply to China for 50 years on March 21, 2021. China and Iran signed a 25 year oil agreement on March 29, 2021. Building on these accords and the December 2022 meeting with Gulf and Arab countries, talks in Beijing finalized a diplomatic masterstroke in a March 10, 2023 rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia. China sent their senior diplomat and Politburo member Wang Yi, not the foreign minister Qin Gang. This peace accord may have been China’s precondition for the ascension of these countries to the BRICS.
The Belt and Road Initiative and China-led multilateral organizations like the BRICS and Shanghai Cooperation Organization are flourishing. Of the 193 countries in the United Nations, either 147 or 152 countries have signed on to the Belt and Road Initiative which, according to the World Bank, includes “1/3 of world trade and GDP and over 60% of the world's population.” Countries participating in the Belt and Road Initiative are spread throughout the world.
The BRICS configuration continues to prove irresistibly attractive to the global south. One analysis of BRICS + tried to determine who might be joining the configuration soon. Likely candidates include countries that were invited by China to participate in the “2017 summit (Egypt, Kenya, Tajikistan, Mexico and Thailand) and BRICS foreign ministers’ meeting in May 2022 ahead of a new BRICS summit (Argentina, Egypt, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Senegal and Thailand), and inclusion of the G20 developing economies based on the 20-10-5 formula, (Argentina, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Turkey).”
Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov recently said that “over a dozen” countries asked to join, including Algeria and Iran. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt are in the process of applying. Afghanistan, Bahrain, Indonesia, Nicaragua, “two nations from East Africa, and one from West Africa” are known to be interested as well.
From the February 20, 2023 publication of U.S. hegemony and its perils,” to the March 16, 2023 departure of the first direct Beijing-Moscow freight train service from Mafang railway station bound for Moscow (a journey of approximately 9,000 km scheduled to take 18 days), to the Xi-Putin summit occurring in Moscow now, a quick succession of steps amounted to a great leap forward in China’s geopolitical heft occurred in a month. American policy elites are so ideologically blinded by the chimera of American unipolar hegemony they can only come up with an unhinged Air Force general predicting war by 2025 and hysterical calls from Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wisconsin, chair of the newly formed China Select Committee) warning of “an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century” with “the most fundamental freedoms at stake.”
Prisoners of the Beltway Bubble and members of the American MICIMATT (Ray McGovern’s conceptual model of the “military industrial Congressional intelligence media academia think tank complex”), however, continue to aggressively and obstinately misunderstand China’s straight-forward and oft-stated contemporary geopolitical and commercial goals. This professional myopia prevents them from reacting prudently to (or even noticing) what is patently obvious to the rest of the world. They are already in check mate in the new Great Game. The Pax Americana is over, a new multipolar world has arrived, and China is leading it. No amount of American flailing can prevent it from continuing to unfold.
Besides Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow now, other Chinese-led summits later this year will include a meeting of the foreign ministers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in Goa on May 4-5, 2023, a conference between Iran, the Gulf Cooperation Council, and China in Beijing later this year, and the 15th BRICS summit in Durban South Africa in late August. I am inclined to believe the BRICS meeting will welcome one or more new members and preliminary steps towards a commodity- and gold-backed reserve currency based on a basket of BRICS sovereign currencies.
The jolly jokers of the Beltway Bubble thought they were reaching the pinnacle of acerbic wit by claiming sanctions, booting Russia off of SWIFT, and stealing $300 billion of Russian foreign currency reserves and gold would turn the “ruble into rubble.” Instead, the ruble was the best performing currency of 2022. The sanctions completely backfired, accelerated dedollarization, and helped bring the United States to the precipice of a financial crisis far bigger than 2008. We will likely witness a barrage of bank collapses, 30% crashes in the price of equities and commercial and residential real estate, and continued increases in inflation (even though inflation is already being significantly undercounted because of how they cooked the consumer price index in 1980).
No matter how impressively credentialed American policy elites may be, replete with advanced degrees from the most prestigious schools in the country, they remain highly insular, profoundly incompetent, and dangerously simple-minded. At this point their default tendencies are almost invariably the ones most catastrophically detrimental to international stability and the rudimentary survival of the American republic, let alone empire. In the case of American monetary policy these mavens are likely to choose the worst possible scenario, very well illustrated by this classic old meme:
Then no one will want t-bills and the Treasury will need to offer ever higher short term interest rates to keep people coming to their auctions. Treasury Direct already offers 6.89% for Series I Saving Bonds. When it goes completely FUBAR (fucked up beyond all recognition) TPTB (the powers that be) will take advantage of the all-pervasive economic chaos to introduce a programmable central bank digital currency, a biosecurity regime perfected under a new pandemic, and ongoing narrative management brought about by collusion between the federal alphabet agencies, Big Media, and Big Tech.
While America teeters on the brink of a dystopian hellscape with a deindustrialized Europe, economically contracting UK, remilitarizing Japan, and Australia primed for war in tow, China moves from strength to strength with Russia as the crucial junior partner.