THE GREAT BETRAYAL: IT’S ALL ABOUT CHINA

I was just reading through some notes I made on Henry Kissinger’s biography. One of his greatest quotes, possibly his most important, is this:

“It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.“

What he meant by that is that America has a habit of dumping its friends and allies as and when it suits its geopolitical needs. If you want a prime example of that just look at the history of South Vietnam, or Iraq.

Kissinger is vital in understanding what’s going on, because his secret trip to China in 1971 paved the way for China as it is today. But his intentions were to peel away China from the Soviet Union so completely they would never again find common cause – which they had been until around 1964. In 1969 fighting actually broke out between them on the Amur River border in Manchuria. Nixon’s subsequent visit to China paved the way for the opening up of relations with Washington, eventually leading to the Communists taking the UN Security Council seat from what we now call Taiwan.

There are several key aspect to this that cannot be overlooked and must be remembered. The first is that back in 1971, Russia and China were the polar opposite of what they are today. They had idealogical differences over communism and Marxist-Leninism versus Maoism. They had fought an open and unpleasant border war for several months that got neither side anywhere. In the 1970’s, things were so bad Leonid Brezhnev, asked President Nixon to look aside if Russia launched a nuclear attack on China.

Both of them were miles apart from where they are now. China was a willing and responsive accomplice to Kissinger’s attempt to peel it completely away from Russia and use it as a counter balance to Soviet power. They knew what was being done, and they didn’t much care, it suited them as much as it did the Americans.

Fifty odd years later, Russia and China are so in bed with each other it’s almost impossible to find daylight between them. They have intelligence sharing, they have sympathetic government ideologies, not the same but close enough and neither wants to force the other to behave as it does. Authoritarianism in general; binds them.

They loathe the United States as a modern hegemon, they hate the fact it has so much power over institutional international finance, and they don’t see why they should play the geopolitical game the way America has for decades, insisting it’s the only way. They are aiding each other militarily and while the Chinese know that Ukraine is draining Russian resources to the bottom of the barrel, it maintains a steady flow of industrial and technology products to keep Russia running. In payment it buys huge amounts of Russian oil. China has become Russia’s biggest trading partner by far, although that’s not even slightly true for Russia in terms of China. China is about 40% of Russian international trade, but Russia is under 1.5% of China’s.

Chinese companies have been buying up Russian automotive businesses and factories and buying as much raw material resource as it can. These an opportunity and they are seizing it.

However the point is Russia, while it may not like being second fiddle to China, knows which side its bread is buttered and China is a far better ally and infinitely more reliable than America will ever be. Once Trump is gone the next president could undo everything he’s done, even if rebuilding what he’s destroying will never be quite the same again. Everyone will know its just a shallow replica of what went before.

Yet this is what Trumpian foreign policy is all about; a ridiculously naive and dangerous effort to pull Russia away from China, only this time neither of them are actually interested – in fact they double down on their relationship almost every quarter year.

So far, Trump has offered Putin Ukrainian land, a refusal to allow it into NATO, the almost certain relaxation of sanctions (this has actually started with Bloomberg reporting with others that sanctions enforcement efforts have already begun winding down and agencies have been told to back off), he’s cut out American participation in NATO exercises. It’s widely understood that he has in effect offered the withdrawal of US forces from all of post-1994 European NATO, including Poland and the Baltic states, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia. He shut down USAID programs supporting democratic causes and the advance of liberty – something both the Chinese and Russians despised.

And what has he got for all of this in return? So far absolutely nothing. He’s given away almost every card he has in an effort to persuade Putin to change tack and move westward, in the geopolitical sense. Putin is happy to do that, but he really wants to bring his army along for the ride too – certainly as far as Ukraine is concerned as a minimum, but he has no intention of giving up his alliance with China.

Trump is an amateur – and not even a well informed one, Putin is running circles around him, laughing all the way to the VT Bank. Trump could reverse what he has done by saying, OK I tried, it didn’t work, so everything I’ve done taking away, is all being put back. But he won’t because it will in his mind make him look weak. He has thrown Ukraine under the proverbial bus for nothing.

Trump has taken the leaf out of Kissinger’s book and read the top line before he got bored. he has failed to comprehend anything about Russia. It’s fundamentally embarrassing.

Whoever his successor is, they’re going to have a massive mountain to climb to resuscitate what Trump has done for nothing. The worst thing is that he has done all this giving away, without realisng that neither Ukraine, or its European allies, are going to put up with it. And as his ridiculously unnecessary trade war bites on April 2nd, his friends are now increasingly alienated, and increasingly determined to defy him and anything he does.

Even the British, who need America more than most after 63 years of being joined at the hip, are announcing ways to use Russian frozen assets to finance the war for Ukraine – some $400 billion in private Russian money in the UK, such as mansions and investments, art works etc will be sold off to make it happen.

This war isn’t over and Trump is not going to get peace unless Putin sees an outright advantage to it. Right now he doesn’t. So the fight goes on. And Trump? Looks more of a fool with every passing day, as do the amateurs obeying his instructions.

The Analyst

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