If you’re like me, you read a lot of Zerohedge, but treat any Russian news there with several grains of salt. Such is especially the case for their repeated drumbeats that a Russia-China teamup spells doom for the United States.
Recently Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping announced a “strategic partnership.” Here’s Peter Zeihan explaining exactly what “strategic partnership” means.
Putin used the magic phrase strategic partnership, which, for the uninitiated, sounds really important and like an alliance. But this is the phraseology that the Russians have been using for centuries, where they [want] a partnership with the country that they don’t trust, and they expect the other country to pay for everything, and they expect to stab that other country in the back at the earliest opportunity.
Unless, you know, the other country is just cold and brutal enough to stab them in the back first.
When the Russians see the Chinese making this sort of naked power play to get on the other side of that gap and position themselves politically, economically, maybe militarily with countries that are on the wrong side of that line while the Russians are occupied in Ukraine, the Russian mind immediately falls into kind of this revanchist position where they realize that they are now under assault from all possible angles. And this is like the worst case scenario for the Russians, and there’s not a damn thing they can do about it, because they have completely committed their entire conventional forces to their Western periphery in the war with Ukraine.
It’s no secret that one of the motives behind Xi Jinping’s various actions on Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc., is China reasserting control over “historical lands,” and China lost a lot of land in Outer Mongolia and the Far East/Siberia to Russia in the 19th century that it had previously controlled. (See the treaties of Aigun (1858) and Peking (1860) for details.) And all that land is a lot closer to Beijing than Moscow.
Like Hitler and Stalin, Xi and Putin deserve each other.
Tags: Altai Gap, China, Foreign Policy, Peter Zeihan, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, video, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping
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Putin’s grand adventure has made NATO great again. Putin will go down in history as the Russian neo-Czar who made Russia a satellite state of China.
I’ve been considering that China might do more than make a ‘soft’ push in Russian territory for some time now.
This entry makes me consider the idea that the only way Russian could respond to a hard push (troops) from China would probably a nuclear response.
I’m not wild about considering that. It seems all too likely.
Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia . . . No, wait!
More than likely, it is all going to end very badly for Russia. China, as well.
How it plays out? No damn idea, at all. It’s a lot like the end stages of the Soviet Union; you could see the cracks in the edifice, and you knew it was going to come crashing down, but the actual path that the collapse was going to follow was not at all clear. I fully expected a Gotterdammerung of truly epic proportions, once it became clear that the Soviet Union had lost credibility in the eyes of its participants. Didn’t happen; I have no idea why.
Similarly, you can look at the demography for Russia and China, along with the economic trends, and you can see the clear outlines of severe issues. Everyone likes to project that China is this world-bestriding behemoth, soon to take everything over, but… They have huge issues. The real deal is that they’re treading water, keeping their noses above the rising tide of insolvency and local government financial collapse. There’s no telling where or when the house of cards is going to cave in, but cave in it will.
Not that we’re in much better shape, TBH. Our own leadership has been so mendacious and outright stupid for so long that I marvel that things are going as well as they are. Likewise, there’s no telling when the denouement will come, but come it will.
The world is going to look very, very different by 2050. Possibly by 2030. Hell, maybe even by 2025.
This situation seems so strangely obvious that I wonder how I’m missing it, and I’m not seeing anyone else explain what I’m missing.
My tentative conclusion:
Russian patriots (this may or may not include Putin) who have gamed it out have decided that their strategic situation is already too far gone. The handwriting is on the wall, and they can either look west or look east.
The trouble with trying to cozy up with the west: NATO and US will bring cultural baggage, China, not so much; also, they can’t just wave away the anti-western rhetoric. And, third, NATO and the US are infamous for not sticking by their friends, so Russian leaders might figure the west will do a victory dance in Moscow, but not do much to help Russia against China.
On the other hand, China isn’t interested in imposing new sexual morality and won’t complain about lax democratic standards or human rights violations. Even if China does grab far eastern territory, that’s a long way from the Russian cultural heartland. And, since the Russian leaders know all the talk of NATO conquering Russia is nonsense anyway, this present play is the best they can do. They might just grab off part of Ukraine, and eventually, Germany will buy natural gas again, and…who knows?
When you have dwindling chips and mediocre cards, the options aren’t great.
“Like Hitler and Stalin, Xi and Putin deserve each other.”
And fortunately, they have each other. 🤣🤣🤣
Martin, trust me on this: Sexual “morality” is the furthest thing from being a consideration. They pay a lot of lip service to that line of BS, but the actual reality? They’re like that guy who always talks about going out to do some gay-bashing, that you run into years later only to find that he’s finally come out of his closet.
The Russians are some of the most deviant sick bastards, ever. I spent a bunch of time in Korea talking to all the Russian bar girls that infested the place, due to the fact you were always having to pull what they called “Courtesy Patrol” riding herd on all the little clubs outside the gates. The things the girls described about life inside the former Soviet Union were bizarre; most of them expressed relief that most of the GIs they were servicing were very vanilla in their sexual tastes, and treated them a lot better than they were used to.
The vast numbers of dead men from WWII did a lot of damage to Russian culture; in terms of sex roles, the surviving males were in the driver’s seat, and women had to learn to put up with anything and everything. Secondary effects from that were that sons were automatically enthroned by fathers and mothers alike as being unable to “do any wrong”, with their sisters being second-class citizens. This had an effect on the women, as well, because they got used to putting up with a hell of a lot more abuse than would have been tolerated here in the West. I had my eyes opened about the supposed “sexual equality” under Communism; women were automatically expected to subordinate everything to the men, and do whatever they wanted. It extended into the workplace, as well; one of the girls we had was some sort of distinguished laureate linguistics student at a university in St. Petersburg that fed into the diplomatic corps and other agencies needing translators. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, all the job prospects dried up, and what she found out was that she basically had only a couple of options–What amounted to becoming a high-class prostitute for her professors, or hooking up with a Western businessman. She chose to marry a fellow student who abused the hell out of her, and her decision to work in Korea as a bar girl flowed out from that. Her description of the academic life in St. Petersburg was enough to make you think that even the most internecine conflicts in American universities were child’s play by comparison. Interesting woman; I believe she wound up married to an American officer and emigrated to the US.
The Russians like to talk smack about their family values, but precisely who is behind most of the rings selling Russian girls into those prostitution rings? Other Russians. It’s just like the goddamn Koreans and their constant whinging about “Comfort Women”, which is hypocritical as hell because most of those women were actually victimized by fellow Koreans who were working for the Imperial Japanese government as subcontractors that made (relatively…) big money selling farm girls to the IJA.
My experience has been that whenever someone starts talking about this crap, you should probably start looking at them closely, because it’s like smoke and fire: You see the smoke of someone throwing out “sexual morality”, then they’re probably the biggest pervs out there. It’s like with North Korea; they rail constantly about the vices and perversions of the West, yet who has battalions of pretty young things whose duties are servicing whichever Kim is in power…? Same-same with Putin; this is a guy with how many young dancers and athletes on tap as his paramours, that he’s set up in dachas around Moscow? Where’s his actual wife, in all this?
Hypocrites, all of them.
As for the Russia/China thing? Look for a de-facto alliance and/or confederation, with Russia being the parasitized victim of the Chinese. They’re both demographic dead men walking, so we’ll see how all of this goes. Russia isn’t going to get fixed by China, and if China tries…? LOL… It’ll look about like what happened when the West Germans got into East Germany and tried bringing them into the late 20th Century. Cost Germany billions, and arguably the former East German bits of Germany are still woefully behind the times.
Kirk, my guess is that the Soviet Union didn’t end in a “Gotterdammerung” because that requires hordes of true believers who are willing to fight to the death to either destroy the system or to preserve it. But in a stagnant, decaying polity where the oppressors and the oppressed both know that everything is a sham and that the other side knows it too, there just isn’t that kind of energy. It generates more cynicism than fanaticism.
I just stopped reading Zero Hedge altogether, he was exhausting and so predictable.
i find Zeihan to be spot on and deeply discerning on what is really happening.
I mean geez zhedge, pick your spot not everything needs more cowbell all the time!
I’ll see myself out
AndrewZ, that’s pretty much the way I see it. The inherent contradictions and lies caught up to them, and the fervent belief that carried them through WWII and after just died down. Putin is trying to fan that belief system back to life, but I think he’s going to fail.
The demographic problem is going to be what undoes all of this. None of these socialist or socialist-adjacent societies can keep going in the long run; socialism amounts to a huge Ponzi scheme, and once you get everyone in a society into it, then they stop breeding because everything is so thoroughly parceled out that there’s no way for them to form families. There’s no hope for the future, no point to doing anything besides trying to eke out a little joy in life. That’s why this crap is so deadly to civilization; you go into socialism, but like a roach motel, you don’t come out of it as anything other than a dried-up dead husk.
Russia and China are both doomed because of this. It’s only a question of how far ahead of us on the curve they are, because with the idiots we keep electing, we’re doing the exact same thing they did.
Sh*t don’t work, yo…
” China reasserting control over “historical lands,””
let’s see … no, wait … that’s the explanation Russia is giving.
The phenomena on the right of taking Putin’s assertions at face value seems to me to be a reaction to the whole Russia Hoax debacle. Crazy, but what can you do? The enemy of your enemy is not always your friend… and Vlad’s happy hackers are very busy in certain areas of the net, spreading the good word (of Vlad).
The show of friendship and cooperation between Russia and China seems to be having the desired effect of rattling the US, but it is hard to believe there will be much substance or staying power there. Even when both countries shared a Communist idealogy there was little common ground between the two nations and cultures. Alliances of convenience rarely end well.
Furthermore, China, whose resources and capabilities are less substantial than they would like the world to believe, is unlikely to get too deeply involved with a regime which has failed in its objectives and is at real risk of imploding.China may show Russia some modest support just to tweak the West, but in the end they are unlikely to throw full support behind a regime which really has very little else to offer them, and which could draw them into a quagmire they can ill afford.
Sometimes two problems can be made, or allowed, to solve one another. Doubtless the Junta in DC will do everything it can to ensure that this strategic partnership is both fruitful and enduring. After all, that would be a worst-case scenario for the U.S., and that seems to be its preferred criteria for any policy.