XI AND PUTIN PREPARE FOR WORLD WAR III

Those close to the Lord Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, would like him to emerge as the second UK Prime Minister from the subcontinent after Rishi Sunak, should the Conservative Party lose to Labour in the next parliamentary poll. The present leader of the Labour Party, Keir Starmer, is seen by many within his party as unexciting, especially when contrasted with Jeremy Corbyn. The deposed Labour leader has an open door policy for any malcontent, provided the target of their anger is not the UK but some other country. Small wonder that Corbyn is the favourite of the Pakistan High Commission and the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China. The Xi-putin meeting just days before showed the falsity of western claims that the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party could be relied upon to put the brakes on Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine adventure. However, there is a country whose establishment is even closer to the PRC than Russia, and that is Pakistan. Wherever the two have their diplomatic missions, interaction between them is substantial. In capitals such as Washington, should a US official wish to meet his or her Chinese counterpart, such meetings could take place in the Pakistan mission, where the US visitor will “accidentally” come across his PRC counterpart, who just happened to be visiting the Pakistan mission at the same time. Tens of billions of US dollars have been spent by China in Pakistan, but it is not as though such a traffic has only been one way. Asymmetric attacks on targets such as India are safer to carry out by using the Pakistanis for such dirty work, and given the umbilical cord that binds GHQ Rawalpindi with the PLA, the smaller country is ever ready and willing to take a not even covert swipe at the world’s most populous democracy.

Small wonder that all too many policymakers in the US and across the Atlantic swallow such treasures of fakery such as that China under Xi is eager to end the Russia-ukraine war, when in reality that conflict has benefitted Ccp-ruled China substantially. Pollyannas who sing hosannas to the “moderate friend of the West, Xi Jinping,” will not allow themselves to fall silent even after the love feast just witnessed between Xi and Putin. After all, they believed that Putin kept word of the impending invasion of Ukraine secret from Xi when they met a few days before the “Special Military Operation” launched by the Russian leader on 24 February 2022. They continue to believe that it was not the Wuhan Institute of Virology but a bat—sorry raccoon—that was the incubator of Covid-19, no matter the evidence proving the opposite. Xi regarded it as risk free to embrace Putin and Putinism so publicly just days after the US and the EU had managed to get the International Criminal Court to declare Putin a war criminal. What events such as the Saudi Arabiairan rapprochement in of all places Beijing, or the Xiputin partnership in drawing up an alternative global architecture show that in Beijing, the US in particular is a power whose influence is declining at an accelerating pace. When in the columns of The Sunday Guardian there was emphasis on the new Cold War, Cold War 2.0, there was scepticism, even scorn, within the Atlantic Alliance, so fixated were these worthies in believing that the world was still in the slipstream of Cold War 1.0 between the US and the USSR. President Joe Biden and several in his team are reluctant to acknowledge that there is a new Cold War, something publicly and often denied by the White House itself. Sadly for those who act as though they are living in a world that no longer exists, each day the march of events is proving them wrong. In the past century, a similar axis of two powerful countries in Europe and Asia plunged the world into war. This time around, rather than the Sino-russian alliance, what is bringing another global conflict closer to fruition is the Atlanticist Cold War 1.0 style fixation on Russia. Someday, a red line may be crossed in the battlefields of Ukraine and its environs that triggers a much wider war. It is precisely to take stock of what needs to be done jointly by Russia and China in that contingency that Xi and Putin just met in Moscow.