We’ve gone over on this site how idiotic and antagonistic the US has been toward Russia, and how if America wasn’t so greedy and power-mad there never would have been a war in Ukraine.
I came across a phenomenal thread on Twitter that I think does a great job of summarizing just how disastrous America’s foreign policy toward Russia and China has been and will continue to be. This thread focuses on the China angle, and how America has placed itself into a no-win situation:
From here on I’ll just post the text of the thread:
First of all, it most likely isn’t true. It just doesn’t pass the sniff test.
The biggest reason being that Russia itself has gigantic weapon manufacturing capabilities: it exports over 5 times more weapons abroad than China!
Also Russia uses and its soldiers are trained on… Russian military equipment!
And, surprise, China manufactures Chinese military equipment…
The idea that China would start manufacturing Russian equipment or that Russians would start using Chinese ones is a bit bizarre…
Most likely, what China is actually doing to “support Russia” is maintain a normal trade relationship with them: buying what Russia produces and selling what Russia needs (which, again, likely isn’t military equipment given Russia is such a huge powerhouse in that regard).
The best way for China to aid Russia right now, in light of all the sanctions, is economically. Russia doesn’t need military aid. They’ve got Ukraine basically under control. What Russia really needs is both money coming in now, and then a partner with whom it can work with on breaking away from the dollar-backed world monetary system.
Secondly it appears we’re in a classic “Three Kingdoms” type configuration here between the three great powers of Russia, China and the U.S.
Even a small child would understand that it is in the U.S.’s interests to avoid antagonizing the 3rd power while fighting the 2nd.
Yet that’s exactly what the U.S. is doing by, to quote the Biden administration, threatening to “impose costs” on China.
Like @ChenDingding put it well⬇️ “US cannot have a ‘punish China’ mentality in trying to gain China’s support”
Also China can only be disgusted by the double standards at play here.
In grey on the map are the countries which have NOT imposed sanctions on Russia and which, as such, are in the same boat as China.
To state the obvious, it is a large majority of the countries in the world.
Yet the U.S. chose to single out and threaten China in particular.
Granted, China has a far larger economy than any of these other countries and as such disrupting their trade with Russia would have a far greater impact.
But will the U.S. achieve that with unfair threats?
Of course not, if anything it’ll push China even closer to Russia.
The Chinese will invariably be like: “the U.S. wants to punish us for not helping them in a war at the other end of the planet while most other countries don’t either? These guys badly need a reality check!”
There is also the fact that U.S. behavior here is illegal with regards to internal law.
The UN Charter states that you can’t make threats “against the political independence of any state”.
It is China’s legitimate right to refuse to impose U.S.-led sanctions on Russia.
Lastly, China knows full well that the U.S.’s most important objective is to “counter China”, i.e. deny China the right to become bigger and more powerful than they are.
Everyone on the planet knows this, unless you’ve been living under a rock these past few years.
They see stories like this ⬇️ where the U.S. plans to spend $27.4 billion to surround China with missiles along the “first island chain”, which includes Taiwan.
The goal here has been made even more blatantly obvious with the Ukraine war.
It is to provoke China into “reuniting” with Taiwan in order to justify doing to China exactly what they’ve just done to Russia for the Ukraine war, cutting them off from everything.
A great observation, and one I hadn’t made myself. What he’s saying here is that the US wanted Russia to invade Ukraine so the US could justify severing ties with Russia and starting a new Cold War. The US also wants China to invade Taiwan so it can do the same to China.
This would cause an enormous economic shock but after the dust settles the U.S. expects Russia and China to be effectively sealed off from the rest of the world, just like during the first cold war.
It looks like they want a cold war remake, so as to recreate a “unipolar moment”
Yet, incredibly, they’re asking for China’s help – or, rather, seek to bully China into helping – in effectively their own demise.
Because if China applies U.S.-led sanctions, this will considerably weaken Russia and give a free hand to the U.S. to move on to “counter China”.
So essentially the US is asking China to help weaken Russia so that the US can then move on to a Cold War II strategy against China.
Obviously the Chinese see through it. And far from dealing China and Russia off from the rest of the world, what’s actually happened here is the US and its junior partners in Western Europe (UK, Germany, France) are in the minority globally in terms of imposing sanctions on Russia.
As I see it, the U.S. has 2 choices here.
1) Continue to threaten sanctions and deepen China’s impression that they constitute an existential threat.
This is the 3 kingdoms equivalent of 1 kingdom shouting to the 2 others: “I want you to both fight me together!” I.e. Not smart.
2) It can wake up to the hard reality that, as a “kingdom” that’s not in great shape itself, it can ill afford to antagonize the 2 other kingdoms at the same time.
This means it likely has no other choice than to give up some of its aggressive “counter China” initiatives.
In other words instead of resorting to threats towards China, it needs to offer strong and attractive incentives to China.
Wait, shouldn’t it do that with Russia instead of China if they’re the bigger long term threat, as the U.S. sees it?
From a U.S. perspective they certainly should have done so when they could but that window of opportunity has long passed, the war is here, there’s no going back from that.
That’s why this whole thing is bordering on geopolitical misconduct.
Wait again, wouldn’t accommodating China all but ensure that it ultimately becomes the bigger power?
It certainly would increase the likelihood that it does, yes.
But the choice is now between a peaceful displacement of the U.S. as a great power by China and a warring one.
In a peaceful one, the U.S. likely wouldn’t change all that much.
See what happened when the U.S. displaced the UK as the predominant world power, it wasn’t immensely disruptive. In fact it was rather respectful and friendly.
In a warring one, the U.S. could win, sure.
But it’s game theory and, while if it wins the benefits would ultimately be greatest for the U.S., the odds look poor given the U.S.’s status and the immense challenge of 1 “kingdom” fighting 2 very resolute others at the same time.
And if the U.S. loses the consequences are likely absolutely devastating.
In fact in a warring scenario, given we’re speaking about 3 nuclear powers here we might be looking at the end of all life on earth.
There isn’t really much of a choice, is there?
This is all backfiring on the US. All of it.
The “whole world” has not cut Russia off, in fact, the majority of the world is tacitly siding with Russia here because they simply hate the US more than they hate Russia.
China is not cooperating.
The US is in an increasingly untenable position here, and it seems like nothing it’s doing has been well thought-out or planned. It feels like desperation-driven, seat-of-the-pants foreign policy.
And it’s all so America can cling to its global hegemony.
America is like a person at Thanksgiving dinner that vehemently refuses to allow anyone else at the table to touch even a single scrap of food at all, and then calls the other people unreasonable when they complain that America is hogging all the food.
America’s terms to the other powers of the world are this: we have 100% of the power, the rest of you are all peons with nothing.
America does not distinguish between the powerful countries like Russia and China and the small countries like, says Tajikistan or Eritrea. In America’s eyes, they’re all the same: below America. And they all need to act that way. Or else it’s “aggressions” on their part.
“NOBODY IS ALLOWED TO INVADE OTHER COUNTRIES!!!!” America shrieks.
“But you do it all the time,” the rest of the world responds.
“IT’S OKAY WHEN WE DO IT! SHUT UP OR WE’LL SANCTION YOU TO OBLIVION.”
America’s view is that it is the only country that is allowed to have “interests.”
Russia is not allowed to object to Ukraine being pulled into America’s orbit and used to antagonize and threaten Russia.
Russia is not allowed to assert its influence in its region of the world, because in America’s view, Russia is not entitled to having its own region of the world.
The whole world is property of the USA, and that’s that.
You have to understand it from this perspective. The reason America is so irate about Russia invading Ukraine is that America views Ukraine as America’s property. It’s America’s right to install its own puppet regime in Ukraine and use it to antagonize Russia, damnit!
America’s government literally believes it has the right to do whatever it wants, wherever it wants without any consequences or repercussions.
9-11 was blowback for decades of American meddling and bullying in the Middle East. What was America’s response? More meddling and bullying and massacring in the Middle East. Way more of it.
America is like a person who breaks into your house, robs you, burns the place down, and the punishes you—perhaps even kills you—for daring to object or complain. And then he’ll say he was doing it out of self defense, or to maintain order in the neighborhood.
I hope I’ve adequately conveyed just how evil and unreasonable the American government is. You will not be able to understand the world until you stop looking at things through the US government’s narratives and start looking at things from the other side—the rest of the world’s side.
There is only one aggressor in the world. For the past 30 years, there has only been one aggressor in the world. It’s America.
Everything else—all other ostensible acts of foreign aggression, like 9-11 and now the Russians-Ukrainian war—are responses to American aggression and imperialism.
In theory, Ukraine should have nothing to do with America. In theory, if Russia decides to invade Ukraine, it should not change anything for us here in America. It’s a war on the other side of the world, and it has nothing to do with us at all. We should continue with business as usual.
Nope. Not when you’re running a global empire. As you can plainly see by America’s sanctioning of Russia and significant involvement in the diplomatic negotiations over Ukraine, America is very much involved here and views the invasion of Ukraine as if it’s a violation of America’s own territorial integrity.
The months leading up to the invasion, American officials met with Russian officials numerous times. Over Russia’s imminent invasion of Ukraine. Think about that. We don’t often sit back and think about what that actually means. We’re so used to being involved in everything and being the global hegemony that America negotiating with Russia over the fate of Ukraine does not even cause us to bat an eye. It’s normal to us. Russia has an issue with Ukraine, Russia has to talk to… America about it.
Imagine if we were in Ukraine’s position. Say Canada was really strong and we were much weaker, and Canada was going to invade us. And in the lead up to the war, Canada had to negotiate with China over our fate. Imagine if China was the country that had the power to either prevent or provoke a Canadian invasion of America. The Canadians don’t negotiate with us, they negotiate with China.
Isn’t that kind of insane to think about? It’s what I always thought about anytime I would see headlines about Blinken meeting with Lavrov in the weeks before this war. The first thought that would go through my head was, “Why the fuck are we involved here? Why are we the ones Russia has to talk to regarding Ukraine?”
People go to great lengths to refute the idea that America is a global empire, but how else can you really explain Russia having to air its grievances against Ukraine with America? Don’t even try to claim we’re just the mediator here. Don’t be childish.
No, the reason the Russians have to talk to us about Ukraine is simple: because Ukraine is American vassal state. It’s that simple.
Do Americans like that status quo? Is that something we support? Should the world really work that way?
I don’t think so. I don’t think we should be the ones negotiating with Russia over Ukraine’s fate. I don’t like that at all.
But then again, if we hadn’t toppled Ukraine’s government and absorbed it into our sphere of influence in 2014, there probably wouldn’t even be anything to negotiate over with the Russians regarding Ukraine—the Russians would likely be satisfied with the status quo.