Pubshed December 26, 2023
Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy knows how to end the greatest threat to American national security.
That threat would be the combination of the world’s two most dangerous states: China and Russia.
“I would freeze the current lines of control,” the candidate told Fox News’s Jesse Watters during his prime time show, referring to the battlefields in Ukraine.
“I would further make a hard commitment that NATO will not admit Ukraine to NATO. That’s enough to get Putin to do the deal.”
“But I would require something even greater in return, Jesse,” Ramaswamy said. “Russia has to exit its military alliance with China.”
Putin will take the deal, the charismatic candidate assured Watters:
“He’s gonna say, ‘Ok’ because I’m going to say, ‘We’ll reopen our economic relations with Russia and further, we’ll end the Ukraine war and also make sure NATO never admits Ukraine.’ ”
The interview occurred in late August, but these themes are often heard, in America and elsewhere. Is Ramaswamy on the right track?
In theory, it should be possible to separate Moscow from Beijing. After all, China and Russia have for centuries been competitors, adversaries, and even enemies. Take something as fundamental as their common border. After border skirmishes, they finally settled the boundary only in 2008, when Moscow formally transferred various parcels to China.
Vladimir Putin knows, however, that no border is ever finally fixed, and Chinese migrants are pouring into the sparsely populated Russian Far East. There, many of them hope to “retake” lands ceded by the Qing dynasty to Moscow in the 1850s and 1860s in what Chinese officials now call “unequal treaties.” Beijing has made no formal claim to Vladivostok and surrounding areas, but it has been continually pushing the idea nonetheless.
In short, China poses the greatest threat to Russia, at least over the long term.
The Ramaswamy proposal, however, ignores the reality that as long as Putin and Xi Jinping rule, there is no realistic possibility of breaking up the two states. Both dictators view the world in similar terms; believe that their short-term interests coincide; and identify the same adversary, the United States of America. As Xi said on December 20 as he welcomed Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin to Beijing, “Maintaining and developing China-Russia relations well is a strategic choice made by both sides based on the fundamental interests of the two peoples.”
The two regimes, Xi’s words reveal, have been on the same page for some time. They declared their closeness with the 5,300-word joint statement issued after Putin met Xi in Beijing on February 4 of last year, just 20 days before Russia’s attack on Ukraine. That is when they declared their “no-limits” partnership.
China and Russia are more than just working together. They are forming the core of a new axis. Around this core are proxies and proxies of proxies, such as Iran, North Korea, Algeria, and a host of terrorist groups.
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SOURCE: www.zerohedge.com
RELATED:Russia and China are on the brink of a military alliance that could overwhelm the US
Pubshed December 25, 2023
For decades, the US has been the world’s main military superpower.
But the US faces formidable new threats, and rising global conflict.
In the wake of the Ukraine war, Russia and China have been growing closer.
For decades, the military might of the US was unchallenged.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the US was the world’s only military superpower, with its forces deployed all over the world to defend allies and deter aggression.
But as 2023 draws to a close, conflicts are flaring across the world, and Russia and China are growing increasingly aggressive in their shared ambition to topple the US as the world’s biggest power.
Their authoritarian leaders, Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia, are seeking to exploit global instability to damage the US and its allies, say analysts, and are drawing closer to forming a military alliance that poses the biggest threat the US has faced in decades.
“It is clear that the two states see themselves as military partners, and that this partnership is growing deeper and more experienced, even if it is not a formal alliance in the Western sense,” Jonathan Ward, CEO of the Atlas Group, told Business Insider.
Xi and Putin draw closer to formidable military alliance
In conflicts across the world, the rivalry between the US and the Russian and Chinese partnership is playing out.
China has provided Russia with vital economic and diplomatic support in its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, while the US has provided billions in aid to Kyiv.
In the Middle East, Russia and China have aligned themselves with Iran and criticized Israel’s attacks on Gaza to destroy the Tehran-backed terror group Hamas. The US, meanwhile, has provided military aid and diplomatic support for Israel.
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SOURCE: www.businessinsider.com
RELATED: Could China, Russia’s “no-limits” friend, help rebuild Ukraine?
How big a role might it play in post-war reconstruction?
Pubshed December 23, 2023
Many residents of Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, have grown so used to air-raid warnings that they pay little heed. They prefer to think, or pray, that the common pattern will prevail: that the city’s air-defence systems will work, more or less, or that the alerts will prove merely precautionary. But for those who do take shelter, the tunnels of the underground railway network are an obvious choice. Thanks to Chinese equipment, there is some relief to be found there during what can be a long and tedious wait for the all-clear.
Less than a year before Russia mounted its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, work was completed on kitting out the metro with a high-speed 4g mobile network. It uses hardware from Huawei, a Chinese telecoms firm of which Western countries are suspicious—several now ban the use of Huawei’s (even faster) 5g technology because of fears that it may enable China to harvest users’ secrets. As they sit on foldable stools or snooze on mats, while commuters rush by, the bomb-wary may well be using the 4g system on Chinese-branded handsets. Phones made by Xiaomi are among the most popular in Ukraine.
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SOURCE: www.economist.com
