As the article correctly points out, there is no political solution to a spiritual problem, which is why such things as an “Article V” movement will never succeed. It’s too little, too late.
The types of headlines that would have seemed strange 50 or 15 or even five years ago have now become commonplace: “Time to Take the Russia-China Axis Seriously” (Diplomat, November 4), “Putin Accelerates Turn to China” (Courcy’s Intelligence, November 7), “Why Chinese-Russian Friendship Is Here to Stay” (Foreign Affairs, October 29).
We’ve been looking for this seismic geopolitical event for half a century. And now, somewhat suddenly, it has arrived.
Deals of the Century
In May, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping inked a gargantuan gas supply agreement worth $400 billion. Less than six months later, they did it again. On November 9, they signed another tentative agreement worth a sum of similar immensity.
It is hard to comprehend the size and significance of these deals. To start with, they are the two largest business transactions in human history.
Kang Wu of FG Energy said the China-Russia energy deals “will really cement their relationship in a big way, and the political implications are huge.”
One of the most immediate huge implications is that, with this second deal, China will eclipse Europe to become Russia’s largest and most strategic natural gas consumer. Thus, Moscow will be able to punish the European Union by cutting off its gas flows at less cost to the Russian economy. Europe’s already weak economy would then be certain to see energy costs skyrocket, forcing Europeans to scramble for pricey alternatives in the middle of what forecasters expect to be an unusually cold winter.
In addition to those two mega energy deals, Putin and Xi signed 17 other “major bilateral business agreements” at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Beijing that ended on November 12. This followed 38 other major deals in October worth tens of billions of dollars.
These colossal business agreements are only the latest indications of a Russia-China axis that is forging fast. This axis is reorienting 21st century geopolitics—and tilting the advantage away from the West.
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Washington’s Role
Rewind to the 1990s. The U.S. helped persuade Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons—the same weapons that might have made Vladimir Putin think twice before rolling tanks, troops and antiaircraft missiles across the border. But now Ukraine is nuclear weaponless—and Putin is not.
For a long time, America has also led nato into unwittingly provoking Russia. Most U.S. leaders viewed attempts to expand nato into Ukraine from a liberal worldview, seeing it as a benign promotion of democracy. But the Russians saw it quite differently. “Russians have continued to view it through the prism of geopolitics where balance-of-power calculations drive threat assessments,” wrote James Kitfield, a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress. And they consider Ukraine to be a driveway straight into the heart of Russia.
John Meersheimer, a political science expert at the University of Chicago, said: “Western leaders thought geopolitics was something that was killed and buried at the end of the Cold War, which allowed them to ignore what the Russians were saying. But if you look at the issue from Russia’s realpolitik or realist point of view, this crisis was foreseeable.”
Putin responded to nato’s encroachment (and what he saw as U.S. meddling to topple Ukraine’s democratically elected leader) by annexing Crimea, and destabilizing eastern Ukraine.
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Is the Axis Dangerous?
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With China firmly behind him, Putin threatened in August to use nuclear weapons to take control of Ukraine. In September, he sent a naval convoy to reopen a military base in the Arctic to back his claims to the energy riches under the ice cap. In November, he sent warships to Australia’s northern maritime border and issued plans to send long-range bombers to patrol the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, very near America’s territorial waters. He has also taken opportunities to disown the dollar in international transactions, undermining its status as the world’s reserve currency. And a new Russian military doctrine to be published in December openly designates the U.S. as a “threat” and an “adversary.”
The Russia-China axis is no longer merely a forecast. It is here, and it is changing the world. The world now faces the most serious crisis since World War ii, and it is thanks in part to America’s broken will and mismanaged power.
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Such a rebirth won’t come about by something as meaningless as “getting the gop back in the White House.” The nation’s illnesses are too numerous and too deep-rooted to be remedied by a topical balm of that kind. But there is a solution for America’s crisis in leadership, and for the increasing power, cooperation and belligerence of the Russia-China axis. To understand it, read Russia and China in Prophecy.
Full article: The Russia-China Axis Is Here and It’s Changing the World (The Trumpet)
Global Geopolitics 