Two Left Hands to the Right

"for America to survive economically in the coming Sino-Japanese world, an alliance with the Soviet Union is a necessity. After all, the white race is a minority race with many well deserved enemies, and if the two great powers of the Northern Hemisphere don’t band together, we are going to end up as farmers–or, worse, mere entertainment–for the more than one billion grimly efficient Asiatics."

 

Gore Vidal - The Empire Lovers Strike Back (1986)

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*sigh* I hate current events, but this, as cited by Reuters, warrants comment:

"If China wants to be seen as a responsible global actor, they should be doing everything possible to ensure that Russia steps back," [British foreign minister Liz] Truss said. "The world is watching to see whether their actions contribute to peace and stability or to fueling aggression."

Now, either Britain has a foreign minister utterly tone-deaf to geopolitics (sliiiightly unlikely) or the comment was meant to nudge the obvious issue of Sino-Russian collusion into public conversation, and I'll gladly pour my half a drop of available gas onto that particular fire.

I won't claim any specialized knowledge in this field, but you shouldn't need a PoliSci degree to see Russia has zero chances of reconquering its empire. By dint of its own ungovernability, it has always been (like its centuries-running enemy Turkey) a regional power. This is not the end of WW2, the Western powers are not sapped of their resources and Russians lack any Stalingrad martyr status to make others ignore their feudal aspirations toward surrounding peoples... who have hardly stood idle since 1989 and have by and large grown to enjoy their connection to the West. A large-scale conflict can only result in disaster for the belligerent. I won't even bother paying lip-service to the laughable claims of humanitarian motivations. So what factors really motivate their attack on Ukrainians?

- A limited desire for a fully controlled, buffered and supported overland connection to Crimea, thereby increasing domination of overseas shipping? No-one has any interest in this happening, especially as a first step toward further Putinesque delusions of grandeur.

- Tsar Putin's growing psychosis? He's getting on in years and is determined to go down in history as a great dictator even if it costs more dead Russians than Hitler and Stalin combined.

- While Russia might lack the capability for protracted conflicts... China doesn't, so long as Western powers are prevented from reacting to its first few Pacific invasions.

That last seems the real deal here, especially given China's voiced (moral) support for Russian belligerence and the timing of this suspiciously pointless, lose-lose Russian invasion on the heels of China's menace toward Taiwan (and many (any) others besides) in the past few years. Russia's role in the coming Chinese global empire seems to be tying up the opposition, by invasions, credible threats thereof or various criminal actions, while the Chinese enslave and massacre their way across the Western Pacific and Indian Oceans. Chinese bloviating like "The days when global decisions were dictated by a small group of countries are long gone" carries the obvious implication that from now on it only takes one country to dictate global decisions.

 

This was always coming. While critics like Vidal somewhat naively ignored the perennial enemy status between Japan and China (or hell, between China and any of its neighbours, most of whom can quite clearly see the writing on the wall) the basic dictatorial fiat of a billion brainwashed wage-slaves could not fail to indicate the obvious autocratic expansionism. That, of course, is also why China is not only well positioned but in growing need for expansion. The Chinese economy is based on slave labor (however euphemised) and as many more true-bred Chinese rise economically to swell the new old empire's aristocratic and servant castes, it will require an increased influx of poverty-stricken sweatshop labor. Which is where Africa and the Pacific come in.

So apparently we're being set up, in the coming decades, for repeated waves of Russian aggression deflecting attention from Chinese expansion. Which is truly perplexing as even a glance in the direction of the world's oldest empire will reveal turning Quisling is simply not an option, lavishly demonstrated by China's treatment of its minorities, subjects and neighbours. Whether it's Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet, Mongolia, you-name-it, the pattern is always repression, enslavement and gradual extermination. Does anyone imagine that the Han, risen to masterhood of a world empire, will tolerate a competitor along their entire northern border? A competitor which moreover uncomfortably reminds them that half their sociopolitical rhetoric was hastily and sloppily cribbed from Messianic 19th-century promises of the meek inheriting the Earth?