During his high-stakes phone call with Joe Biden yesterday, Xi Jinping insisted that he does not want this war in Ukraine.
Therefore, one must infer that he regards Vladimir Putin as an unruly child he must love and support no matter how damaging the mischief he causes. Which of course means that Xi might be willing to, er, call Biden’s bluff … maybe.
A White House account of the call on Friday said that the US president ‘described the implications and consequences if China provides material support to Russia as it conducts brutal attacks against Ukrainian cities and civilians’.
(The Guardian, March 18, 2022)
The geopolitical truth, though, is that Xi is playing his fence-sitting role with all the diplomatic tact of a bull in a china shop. He wants the world to think of China as a worthy alternative to the United States as a sole superpower.
Yet, as Putin seems hell-bent on triggering WWIII, Xi has China playing for Russia the Axis role Japan played for Germany during WWII. In other words, you’d be forgiven for thinking that, if it were up to Xi’s China, instead of Roosevelt’s America, all of Europe would be under Nazi rule to this day.
But, as I argued in “For China, to Help, or Not to Help Russia: That is the Question,” March 15, after having much of his cake and eating it too, Xi will let go of that cradle. Because he knows as well as anyone that Putin is now fated to fall off his dystopian cliff and into a bottomless pit of doom.
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