Going Solo in the New World Order

How Europe squandered China and the Global South

China believes there is an opening for peace negotiations on Ukraine.  On February 24, 2023, President Xi Jinping presented a Twelve-point proposal for a ceasefire and negotiations. It included the lifting of the sanctions against Russia and developing a plan for the reconstruction of Ukraine after the war.

USA and NATO rejected China’s proposal just as quickly as they dismissed Russia’s proposal for a new European security order for Europe put forward on December 2021, a good two months before Russia started its “full-scale war” against Ukraine.

Over the past two years, the United States has strengthened its front against China and has led NATO, under Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, to “go Asia”, thereby shifting NATO’s attention to China and creating alliances in Asia with Japan and South Korea, Australia and the Philippines.

This has led Beijing to smooth over its contradictions with Moscow regarding the war and instead strengthen the alliance against the United States and NATO. This is the backdrop for Lavrov’s statement after the meeting with Rubio in Saudi Arabia that Trump is “the first Western leader” who has publicly recognized that “the cause of the Ukrainian conflict was the efforts (…) to expand NATO.”

Europe invited

“China is willing to continue to play a constructive role in the political resolution of the crisis,” Wang said in Johannesburg. At the annual security conference in Munich, he stressed that Ukraine must have a place at the table, during the negotiations. These statements were viewed upon as Beijing starting a diplomatic offensive, albeit a low-key one, in comparison to the noises from Trump. As was perceived by Andriy Yermak, the head of Zelensky’s office.

– China will play a decisive role, and it will fundamentally change the rules of the game for Europe, the United States and China, the above-mentioned Yermak said after the meeting with Wang in the Bavarian capital on February 16. 2025, amid the uproar caused by US Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech.

There is a danger that the West will look upon China’s move as nothing more than another attempt at driving a wedge between Europe and the United States. A wedge that Trump now has driven in. Because this is the way, that President Xi’s twelve points were received. (“China’s Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis” Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing, February 24. 2023).

In Munich, Wang sang another song than Vance. He invited Europe to peaceful cooperation in “a new multipolar world”. This is an open challenge to the US unipolar worldview that Europe is having ever-greater difficulty abiding to under Trump’s “America First” policy.

The America First policy is punching in all directions at once and will continue to do so as long as a reaction doesn’t develop among Republicans in Congress, Capitol Hill, the Pentagon or the State Department Foggy Bottom – or in the undergrowth of think tanks in Washington that don’t want to be a part of Trump’s shift from being a supporter of, to becoming an ally of Putin, which is Politico’s description.

This includes, among others, Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton, former Vice President Mike Pence (whom the congress stormers wanted to hang on January 6, 2021), Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, Senator John Thune of South Dakota and Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina – and with the veteran hawk Lindsey Graham, Senator from South Carolina, till in the wings. CNN has observed that a certain frustration has spread within the White House, but no one has yet dared to challenge Trump.

Wang used his time in Germany to nurture relations with the coalition in Berlin – where the anti-China Green Annalena Baerbock is foreign minister. Wang emphasized that Beijing “will never try to interfere in other countries’ internal affairs.” This is one of the official pillars of Chinese foreign policy, which was originally presented at the Bandung Conference in West Java, Indonesia, 18. to 24. April 1955. Wang stressed to EU’s Foreign Minister Kaja Kallas that Europe has an important role to play in the negotiations about Ukraine.

The debate is already underway about how deep the contradictions between the US and Europe will become, given that Trump still has three years left before the US is thrown into a new election campaign. The fundamental point, however, is that Trump’s “Make America Great Again” is based on very real, material conditions, as the Indian historian and writer Vijay Prashad points out in his article

“Fantasizing about Way Against China” (the Norwegian daily Klassekampen,18. February). In it, he refers to the study that the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) presented in August last year about its technology tracking system (Critical Technology Tracker).

A quote: “In the five years between 2003 and 2007, the United States led in 60 of 64 technologies, but in the five years between 2019 and 2023, it led in only seven. China led in only three of 64 technologies between 2003 and 2007, but was a leader in 57 of 64 technologies between 2019 and 2023.”

– The trend towards a new multipolar world cannot be reversed and it provides opportunities for expanded cooperation between China and the EU. For example, China can help save Europe’s declining industry, Miao Lu wrote in an e-mail interview with Klassekampen (February 18.) during the Munich Security Conference.

Lu co-founded the Beijing-based think tank Centre for China and Globalization (CCG). – Our advice to China is to participate actively and send peacekeeping forces to Ukraine, she wrote.

It would be a first time for China, but not “the first time that China starts to creatively and seriously talk about a European security architecture, and about a Chinese role in maintaining it,” Yermak claimed at the Munich press conference.

This seems to be a bigger challenge for the EU and Europe than for Beijing. They are deeply divided when it comes to relations with China. Lithuania would like to establish diplomatic relations with Taiwan, which only eleven of the UN’s 193 member states have. Honduras severed ties with Taiwan in March 2023.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni leader of the far-right fascist-tinged Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d’Italia) withdrew from China’s infrastructure project “One Belt, One Road” Initiative (BRI) in 2023, but has spent the last half of last year improving relations again.

“China is willing to continue to play a constructive role in the political resolution of the crisis,” Wang said in Johannesburg, but out from a far wider perspective than just Ukraine and at “a higher level and with a broader dimension,” according to The Guardian.

Wang picked continued from where he was two years ago, but with two new factors: Trump and the terrain in Ukraine. Trump is still a new player. The battlefield has changed. Two years ago, the US and NATO pumped up arms deliveries to include tanks and fighter jets to fill up the stocks and strengthen expectations of Russian defeat in the upcoming spring offensive, which quickly ended in the “meat grinder” with the battle of Bakhmut.

Everything that the cavalry of uniforms that besieged the editorial offices of NRK, TV2 and the press presented at that time was wrong. And they were not confronted, despite of all the recoils from their twisted and flawed “analyses”, which were loaded with politicized hopes more than analysis of the realities on the ground.

It may therefore be of importance to or back a step or two, to the situation as it was when

China launched its twelve points, to see if they can provide us with some points of reference today in the wake of the Munich Security Conference, and Trump’s raving speech, and Zelensky’s equally tragic response about resigning as president in exchange for Ukraine joining NATO!

Beijing presented its policy as “balanced.” China did not support Russia’s invasion, but at the same time accused the United States and the West of inciting the conflict. The conflict did not start with the invasion. Wang announced at the Munich Security Conference in February 2023 that China’s points were based on the principles of the UN Charter, including territorial integrity, sovereignty and the question of indivisible security.

From the rostrum at the Bayerischer Hof, Wang urged “everyone to start thinking calmly and coolly, especially friends in Europe, about what measures we can take to stop the war.”

“The Chinese side will, as before, adhere to an objective and impartial position and play a constructive role in a political solution to the crisis,” he said.

Total refusal

Instead of waiting for President Xi’s points, NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg (who had, at the end of January, had been on a tour of South Korea and Japan to enlist them into the war in Ukraine through arms deliveries) rolled out his entire arsenal against China, which was loaded with hostile suspicions without any basis in reality.

– We have not seen any deliveries of lethal aid from China to Russia, but we have seen signs that they are considering it and may be planning for it, Stoltenberg claimed to Reuters (February 23, 2023). At the press conference two days earlier, Ukraine’s then Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba appeared to be noticeably more «wait-and-see» than both Stoltenberg and EU’s then Foreign Minister Josep Borrell.

To this day, there is no evidence that China has supplied Russia with arms. Now, instead, the US and NATO are targeting Beijing for supplying Moscow with technology that could have dual use, both civilian and military.

Stoltenberg agreed with the US. Ned Price rejected, saying “China is trying to get it both ways,”

Ned Price was a spokesman for the State Department under President Joe Biden .

«China is trying to broadcast an d disguise itself under a veneer of neutrality, even as Beijing deepens its engagement with Russia on key points: politically, diplomatically, economically and potentially also in the security policy area.»

Beijing was accused of providing Moscow with diplomatic cover and of stepping up trade with Russia, including buying oil and gas at discounted prices. At the same time the fact that the US and European countries continued to buy gas, aluminum and other heavy industrial goods went under the radar.

China has never shared the US and the EU’s sanctions policies in its foreign policy. Accusations that Beijing was only looking to divide the US and Europe remained unfounded, while EU has struggled to hold the front against China and at the same time the EU has seen that it is losing ground to the US due to the sanctions policy against Russia.

Instead of dismissing China’s twelve points without further due and instead exploring why Russia’s invasion came as a surprise to Beijing, which had just declared “borderless partnership”, they demanded that China must stand in line with the US and NATO.

– China, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, is obliged to use its influence to ensure world peace, Baerbock trumpeted after the meeting with Wang in Munich in 2023.

The message was loud and clear: If Beijing is not entirely with us, China is against us. It fitted in well with the policy that NATO had embarked on, going as far as declaring China a strategic rival, which the United States had done several years earlier. During his visit to Japan in January, Stoltenberg was preparing to open a NATO office in Tokyo – something France up until then had opposed.

Twelve Points

President Xi’s Twelve Points were condemned for not explicitly condemning Russia’s invasion, and for pointing to the responsibility of the United States and NATO had for there not being a discussion concerning a European security order. The lack of such

an order was brought up by, among others, President Putin at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, a «dostatochno, dostatochno» – “enough is enough”, after two eastward expansions of NATO in 1999 in connection with NATO writing the right to wage war outside its Article 5 area (out-of-area) into its Charter, in time for the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia (then Serbia with Kosovo and Montenegro) – and in 2004 when the Baltic states, bordering Russia, were incorporated.

NATO’s response to Putin was to comply with the demand from US President George W. Bush at the Bucharest summit by opening up NATO for membership for the “border country” Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova.

In Beijing, veteran diplomat Li Hui, former ambassador to Russia and the person responsible for Eurasian affairs from 2019, was appointed as the special envoy to Russia and Ukraine on April 26, 2023.

“China wants to at least have a voice in post-conflict Ukraine in rebuilding the post-conflict state, to prevent Ukraine’s complete turn to the West,” said Yu Jie, senior fellow in the Asia/Pacific Program at the conservative think tank Chatham House in London. His starting point was that “Russia may not win this war.”

At that time, the EU was in the middle of presenting its new China policy at the end of June 2023. Beijing therefore understood that it would have to work hard to convince Brussels, both the European Commission and NATO headquarters, that President Xi’s 12 points were sincere, in order to get negotiations underway.

Li will engage in “in-depth communication with all parties for a political settlement of the Ukraine crisis,” was a part of Li’s job description (according to the Foreign Ministry in Beijing) states. China used the terms “the conflict” and “the crisis,” never Moscow’s “special military operation.”

President Xi’s twelve points “significantly refute the rumours that China is pro-Russia and profits from the conflict.” “China is a peacemaker, not a troublemaker,” Wang Wen, dean of the Chongyang Institute of Financial Studies at Renmin University in Beijing, told the Financial Times (April 28, 2023).

The statement by China’s ambassador to Paris, Lu Shaye, who questioned the sovereignty of the fifteen former Soviet republics, was quickly buried as the insignificant parenthesis that it was. China was instead seeking to find its own position on the conflict or crisis – or the war – and not simply align itself with the ultimate position of the US, NATO and the EU, said Cui Hongjian, dean of European studies at the think tank China Institute of International Studies (Zhongguo Guojì Wenti Yanjiusuo).

The think tank was established in Beijing in 1956, at the same time as the “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom” campaign (Bai Hua Qifang, Bai Jia Zhengming) and two years before the Great Leap Forward. It is under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which opened the Research Center for Xi Jinping Thought at CIIS in July 2020.

China’s starting point towards the West was – and is – that “China wants its own autonomy; we will not just follow you,” Cui pointed out. China sought to capitalize on its long academic ties with Ukraine. Some recalled that Kyiv sold the hull of the Kuznetsov aircraft carrier “Riga” to China’s first aircraft carrier, “Liaoning 16” (“Liaoning Jian”) in 1998 and that China did not deviate from its military neutrality.

At the same time, Kyiv had adhered to its established policy of NATO membership through statements such as that Ukraine was fighting NATO’s – and civilization’s – war against Russia: “We are carrying out NATO’s mission: They are not shedding their blood. We are shedding ours. Therefore, they are obliged to supply us with weapons,” according to the then Defense Minister Sergeant Oleksiy Reznikov.

This has in itself become a warmongering line on Kyiv’s part.

The Generals’ Secretary

In this context, one cannot ignore NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and his “Made in the US” drive against China.

Not many weeks after Russia’s invasion, he took aim at Beijing. Immediately after the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting in April 2022, Stoltenberg stated, “Beijing is doing the same as Moscow by questioning the right of nations to choose their own path. This is a serious challenge to all of us,” he wrote in Aftenposten (April 11. 2022).

“China’s growing influence and use of coercive measures against other countries will affect our security,” Stoltenberg argued in his now familiar warmongering style.

Beijing had already been warned, among other things through the fact that Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand had become regular guests at NATO meetings.

“NATO must change course from its manic hanging on to China,” the party organ Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily) wrote in its editorial, echoing the official view in Zhongnanhai (the Chinese party leadership’s residential area in West Beijing) that NATO is a Cold War relic that should have been put in a mausoleum long ago.

Stoltenberg was described as “foolish” and “a tool” of the US and got this salvo from the English-language newspaper Global Times, which is considered the Communist Party’s foreign and security policy mouthpiece: “Stoltenberg pretends not to have heard China’s constant announcements that the country is not taking sides in the NATO-provoked Ukraine conflict.” (April 10, 2022). The Global Times made no secret of the fact that it was China that the US and the NATO chief had in mind.

“China is deeply concerned that the Ukraine conflict is continuing to escalate or could even get out of control,” warned then-Foreign Minister Qin Gang at a foreign policy forum in Beijing, according to Reuters (February 21. 2023).

“We urge certain countries to immediately stop fanning the flames. [They must] stop hyping up “today Ukraine, tomorrow Taiwan. We firmly oppose any form of hegemony, any form of foreign interference in China’s internal affairs,” Qin said.

At the same time, China launched its Global Security Initiative (GSI), President Xi’s security policy flagship, a good ten years after he launched the “One Belt, One Road” (Yi dai, yi lu) comprehensive infrastructure project.

The Global Security Initiative upholds the principle of “indivisible security”. A principle the US and NATO have utterly smothered since the fall of the Wall, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. The Kremlin had continuously assumed that the West stood by the agreement on “indivisible security”, even though the US and Britain interrupted a meeting with UN weapons inspectors in December 1998 in order to begin the bombing of Iraq and then went to war against Yugoslavia in April 1999, without any resolution in the UN Security Council. This, in turn, opened the door for Russia to start its second war against Chechnya. An ominous spiral was evident even before NATO expansion and the war in Iraq.

The warnings that China issued in 2023 against entrenching a postulate of “today Ukraine, tomorrow Taiwan” now have a European parallel in “today Ukraine, tomorrow other countries in Europe”. There is also another possible and more dangerous parallel that could suddenly appear on the table in the White House Oval Office; The intensified accusations last year from the United States, with the Wall Street Journal as its mouthpiece; that China is establishing radar bases against the United States in Cuba. This is something that Florida Senator Marco Rubio, today Trump’s Secretary of State, subscribed to.

Stoltenberg joined then Secretary of State Antony Blinken in spreading loudly the speculation about China’s potential “lethal assistance” to Russia.

“There are various forms of lethal assistance that they are, at least, considering obtaining or including weapons,” Blinken told NBC News (February 18, 2023). Without further details, but still enough for then-EU Foreign Affairs Chief Josep Borrell to draw a “red line.”

Thus, the West saw the above as China becoming involved in the war in Ukraine, but stubbornly claimed that NATO and the EU, who were increasingly delivering heavy arms, were not involved in the war, as Moscow claimed.

Lula and the Global South

The message and the narrative from USA and NATO, that the Red Party swallowed with hook, line and sinker, when they adopted the national congress resolution on April 23. 2023, was aimed at China alone. This message applies to everyone who is against the US and EU war and sanctions policy and all countries that helped remove the word “condemns” from the resolution on Ukraine in the UN General Assembly in order to preserve the nuances of an anti-imperialist, geopolitical analysis. Two years ago, everything was directed at shooting down all peace initiatives, whether they came from Asia (China and India), Africa (South Africa) or Latin America (Brazil). Instead, they pushed the war policy to final victory.

At the 2023 Munich Security Conference, Western leaders failed to convince the global South that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine posed a threat not just to Europe, but also to the world. “There is little sign that this message is getting through,” the Financial Times observed (February 20. 2023). “No nation is safe” in a world where “one country can violate the sovereignty and territorial integrity of another,” argued then-US Vice President Kamala Harris, as if she were presenting the reality of US policy. French President Emmanuel Macron referred to Russia as “neocolonialist” and “imperialist,” without even thinking that African countries would be reminded of the French forces’ operations in West Africa.

Brazil’s then Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira recalled that the war had lasted a year and urged that “we must try to raise the possibility of a solution. We cannot just talk about war.”

Namibian Prime Minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila called on countries to focus on “solving the problem, not apportioning blame,” adding: “The bottom line is that money that is spent on buying weapons would be better spent on promoting development in Ukraine, in Africa, in Asia, in the EU, where many are struggling.”

China’s position weighed heavily in Munich, Amrita Narlikar, president and professor at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies in Hamburg, pointed out. She struck an optimistic tone: – If China was allowed to present its vision as a peace dialogue between Russia and Ukraine, and to emphasize the global economic costs of a prolonged war, this would receive considerable support in large parts of the global South.

China was not allowed. Instead, Financial Times’ Cold War correspondent Gideon Rachman in his commentary posed the question polemically in this way on May 2, 2023: “Will the Ukraine impasse be broken in Bakhmut or in Beijing?”.

It’s no spoiler to point out that the impasse was not broken. The answer to the polemical question was the bloodbath in Bakhmut. Here President Zelenskyj and the military leadership in Kyiv threw Ukraine into a bath of molten steel, where they could, rightly, be suspected of sacrificing as many soldiers and not least using as much ammunition that this would bind Ukraine stronger to the NATO mast. And this despite warnings from several leading NATO officers that this form of warfare was pointless. Among those voices was Britain’s then Defence Minister Sir Robert Ben Wallace, a graduate of the Sandhurst Military Academy and with military service time from Germany, Cyprus, Belize and against the IRA in Northern Ireland from 1991 to 1998.

However, the policy was heavily supported by the Norwegian “media cavalry”, first and foremost by Lieutenant Colonel Palle Ydstebø, head of the land power section at the War College, lieutenant colonel in the army, Geir Hågen Carlsen, politician for the Progress Party and since last year in Geelmuyden Kiese, Tom Røseth, head teacher at FHS/Stabsskolen and chief researcher Tor Bukvoll at the Defence Research Institute.

The contradictions became clear when Brazilian President Luíz Inácio Lula da Silva visited Portugal and Spain in April 2023 in his first attempt to restore relations with the  EU after President Jaïr Bolsonaro.

The visit to the Iberian Peninsula came shortly after the offensive by the Biden administration and several EU countries, including French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, to get more Latin American countries to provide political support and weapons to the US and the EU in Ukraine.

The US offered Colombia access to newer US weapons if Colombia, traditionally one of the US’s closest allies in South America, sent its more obsolete, but more easily usable, weapons to Ukraine.

The answer was a flat no from President Gustavo Petro: That would make Colombia part of the war in Ukraine, he and other Latin American leaders stated.

In Lisbon, Lula, the re-elected president emphasized in the meeting with President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa on April 22.2023 “Russia does not want to stop, and Ukraine does not want to stop, and if you do not talk about peace, you are contributing to war. We are not for war. We want peace,” Reported by the Financial Times.

“Brazil does not want to participate in the war; Brazil wants to find a group that is willing to spend some time talking to all of those who are willing to create peace,” Lula said in Lisbon.

The United States condemned Lula for “parroting Russian and Chinese propaganda,” despite Brazil clearly distancing itself at the UN from Russia’s violation of Ukraine’s territorial integrity, but not joining the sanctions regime against Russia or supplying weapons to Ukraine.

“The global response to the war in Ukraine has been a startling wake-up call for EU diplomats who have failed to convince major countries in Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia to oppose Russia’s invasion,” the Financial Times noted (April 24, 2023).

However, the EU’s response in the corridors of Brussels, was to disavow Lula and write him off as someone who tailored his rhetoric to his audience in order to gain geopolitical advantage.

The US and EU removed Lula, Petro, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and all leaders from the global south from the equation before Lavrov and Rubio suddenly appeared with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh.

Quo vadis, Ukraine?

Two years ago, it was still possible to ask whether President Xi Jinping would lose patience with Putin even if Beijing and Moscow stood together in the face of the declared hostility that accompanied President Barack Obama’s 2012 US pivot to Asia. There are still questions risen about whether an extended war will become a “strategic burden” for Beijing, as Rachman did in his Financial Times commentary. This is because “China has spent decades trying to build its influence in Europe” at the same time as Beijing has maintained its “boundless partnership” with Russia.

The US has not only tried to drive a wedge between Beijing and Moscow, which has been its foreign policy since World War II, thereby keeping Germany (and eventually the EU) at bay. The United States has also worked painstakingly, albeit in different ways, over the past decade to keep Berlin and Brussels at a distance from Beijing. This has cost Europe dearly, while the US economy is profiting from the war in Ukraine. In recent years, EU has been busy discussing “de-risking” its relationship with China.

The EU is China’s largest export market and has increased its strategic importance; see for example the Advanced Shipping Package Information technology tracking system described above. The EU has instead forged stronger military ties with the US and joined the journey to Asia and the Pacific. This includes rolling out twelve US bases in Norway and even more in the new NATO countries Sweden and Finland and in Denmark.

Neither Berlin, London, Paris nor Brussels were able to accept that Beijing had had some success in emerging more visibly in the global diplomatic arena. Beijing was the one that had created the breakthrough for an emerging normalization of relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

China has now entered markets that the US has led exclusively, by advocating that the Palestine issue should be returned to the UN through a major political conference. This undermines the US monopoly. China has also had fourteen Palestinian factions hold consultations in China. These consultations led to the signing of the Beijing Declaration on 23 July 2024, and included Fatah and Hamas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Beijing_Declaration

This initiative was taken in the context of South Africa having filed a case against Israel in the International Criminal Court (ICJ) in The Hague and in the context of the topics that are discussed at the looser Bric+ meetings that do not end in concrete joint declarations. These activities nevertheless strengthen the voices of the global south and undermine the US and NATO-EU narrative and fiction about their “rules-based world order”.

NATO seems to want to continue with, its imaginary goal which is that “the Ukrainians’ goal is to win such a decisive victory that the Putin era will end”, or alternatively, that the fight is between “Russia and civilization” constantly repeated by Zelensky. Over the past two years, after Bakhmut (August 1. 2022 – May 20. 2023),  Avdiivka (February 24. 2022 – February 17. 2024) and a series of other minor losses, Russia today occupies nearly 19 percent of Ukraine’s territory, waiting for spring to return to the battlefield.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Bakhmut

The spring flood is arriving with Trump’s moves and blackmail that have so far pushed the EU and NATO-Europe far up the riverbank. Europe is trying to get its head above water.

– In Beijing, the breakneck turn of events raises questions about how the American peace operation will affect Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s carefully crafted partnership with Russian President Vladimir Putin – and China’s precarious relationship with the Trump administration. Just weeks ago, China appeared poised to play a key role in Trump’s peace efforts in Ukraine. The US leader had repeatedly suggested that he could work with Xi, using China’s economic influence over Russia to help end the conflict, a key advantage for Beijing as it seeks to avert a trade war with the world’s largest economy.

Trump’s behaviour has put Beijing in a squeeze between on the one hand being accused of being a Russian ally or being a global gravitas, a centre of gravity playing a global role.

The Trump administration has also created another perceived challenge, often called “a reverse Nixon,” in reference to then-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s alleged success in driving a wedge between Moscow and China by getting President Richard Nixon to meet with Mao Zedong.

In Riyadh, Rubio spoke of the possibility of future “geopolitical and economic cooperation” between Washington and Moscow, one of four main points discussed in the Saudi capital with Lavrov. This was not on Wang’s agenda in Munich and neither in Beijing. The view in Beijing is that this is mere speculation that Europe may have to deal with. It is a completely wrong reading of Beijing when Yun Sun, director of the China program at the Stimson Center think tank in Washington, claims to CNN that “[T]his will make Xi Jinping question the strategic alignment that (he has spent) the last twelve years building with Russia (whether) it may not be so reliable, may not be so solid.”

Translated by Johan Petter Andresen