China and Russia have joined in a joint response to the offensive promoted by the new U.S. government of Democrat Joe Biden, which has taken aggressive action against the two rivals since taking office in January.
In a face-to-face meeting in China, the foreign ministers of the two countries called for a meeting of the members of the United Nations Security Council – them, by the United States, the United Kingdom and France.
“In a time of growing global political turmoil, the meeting is especially needed to establish a direct dialogue on how to resolve common humanity issues,” Wang Yi and Sergei Lavrov said in a statement.
“We note the destructive nature of US intentions, based on Cold War political-military alliances and creating new alliances in the same spirit, to undermine the UN-centric international legal architecture,” Lavrov said in a statement. interview.
Wang has finished. “We must be the guarantors of justice in international affairs,” said the Chinese, defending a “world order based on international law which obeys universal values such as peace, development, justice, democracy, l ‘equanimity and freedom “.
One of those confusions typical of the world today is the representative of a communist dictatorship listing the values associated with the West to criticize the United States.
Since taking office, after having spent the election campaign described as weak and failing by the defeated Donald Trump, Biden has adopted an assertion unprecedented in his predecessor. He had already flexed the military muscles intended for the two rivals.
After a promising start with Vladimir Putin, extending the last nuclear arms limitation agreement, he systematically attacked the Russian president.
First, he imposed sanctions on officials linked to the Kremlin over the arrest of opposition leader Alexei Navalni, whose poisoning last year, according to Biden, is the work of the Russian secret service.
He pledged sanctions for hacker actions against US agencies and, repeating the 2016 accusations, said there was a finger on the Kremlin in the 2020 US election.
Best of all, he committed an unprecedented act and agreed in an interview that the US president would be a murderer.
Despite being a country in economic difficulty, Russia remains a formidable conventional military power, especially in its periphery, and has a nuclear arsenal comparable to that of the United States.
The letters against China were then placed by Biden at the table, as if he had served the Russian case as an aperitif.
The Democrat kept Trump’s ultimate charge in his Cold War 2.0 against Beijing by continuing to call for the dictatorship’s treatment of the Uyghur Muslim minority to be genocide.
Last week, after China clarified its terms of engagement with the United States, Biden and Leader Xi Jinping held a meeting of the U.S. Secretary of State with the Chinese Chancellor in Alaska.
The day before the event, he sanctioned 24 Chinese officials for cracking down on democratic movements in Hong Kong. The Chinese reacted badly, and before a brutal opening by Secretary Antony Blinken of the meeting, they promoted an unusual exchange of public beards with their hosts.
In the days leading up to the meeting, Blinken was in Japan and South Korea, countries that feared Trump’s departure. A week earlier, Biden had held a virtual meeting with his peers at Quad, the alliance of Chinese rivals in the Indo-Pacific.
To top it off, this week the European Union imposed sanctions on Chinese officials for cracking down on Muslims in Xinjiang. The US, Canada and UK followed the Europeans, with verbal support from Australians and New Zealanders.
China retaliated and sanctioned members of European organizations and held a meeting with Lavrov.
The Russian, moreover, also said Tuesday that the relationship between his country and the European Union “is destroyed”, condemned the sanctions against the Chinese as well as those applied to the Kremlin by the bloc in the Navalni affair.
For his part, Biden moved on. Also on Tuesday, Blinken was in Brussels to meet with the command of NATO, the military alliance created in 1949 to contain the Soviet Union.
In the Trump years, the club was relegated to the background and called obsolete by the American. “We want to revitalize the alliance,” Blinken said in an interview, in which a 30-member summit was announced.
Indeed, he placed “China’s military growth” on a par with “Russian attempts to destabilize the West” as threats that NATO must work on.
The adversarial design could be a way to bring the parties to the table, as the United States seeks a position of strength that it realizes it has lost in recent years. So far, this has only had the opposite effect.
But there are limits to Sino-Russian rhetoric. From an economic point of view, the countries already have a reasonable interconnection, with Moscow providing energy products and military equipment, and Beijing, introducing consumer and high-tech products.
More than that would depend on equivalent domestic markets, which do not exist.
Militarily, proximity already exists, but there is no strategic complementarity: Russia does not have a strong naval industry to meet China’s vital needs in the countryside, and it does not need the forces. land of Beijing on its most exposed flanks.
There are other factors, such as instability in Ukraine, in the Russian geopolitical backyard, and in North Korea. The new ambassador of the dictatorship Kim Jong-un in Beijing said on Tuesday that the two countries needed “unity and coordination against hostile forces.”
“Could a Russian-Chinese alliance launch a naval assault in the east and a ground attack in the west? Perhaps. It may fail. If it works, it would trigger existential (nuclear) options or create alliances opposites, “he said in a statement. text from consulting firm Geopolitical Futures Tuesday, George Friedman.
One of the world’s foremost geopolitical experts, the American says it makes more sense for Russia and China to end up seeking a compromise with the West.
“To do this, both have to be convinced and that the United States is not interested. The best read is that the United States knows the market is coming and that is why they are hostile to it,” he said. he writes.
But he warns. “The Chinese have already covered the American bet. The Russians will do it soon. The time has come for insults and threats, before making negotiations which may fail despite everything,” he said.