WEAK THAT CHANGED THE WORLD
WEST STANDING BY AS PUTIN EMBOLDENS XI
THAT Xi Jinping is on board with Vladimir Putin’s Ukrainian adventure is clear from the fact his government chose to lift its restrictions on the purchase of wheat and barley at the very moment Russia chose to invade.
With hindsight the Chinese strongman’s embrace of his junior partner in Beijing this month will be seen as Putin clearing one of the last impediments to his actions.
Russia’s invasion ends a 30-year era of peace in Europe ushered in by the collapse of the Warsaw Pact.
It marks a return to conventional power politics when we can no longer simply assume that great powers will not seek to settle their arguments by war.
Suddenly the world seems a lot more dangerous a place.
But while there is no doubt China will be enjoying the humiliation that Moscow is meting out to Washington and its NATO allies, we need to be careful about overdoing the analogies and parallels between Xi’s ambitions to reclaim Taiwan and Putin’s desire to reverse Ukraine’s 1991 split from Russia.
Beijing will be watching how things play out in Ukraine and drawing conclusions accordingly, but situations are very different.
Yes, both powers are ruled by autocrats in their late 60s, keen to right what they perceive as historical injustices against their countries.
But the stakes in the – now real – conflict at the western end of the Eurasian land mass are nothing compared to the potential dangers of open conflict at the other.
While the United States and NATO might be supplying weapons to Ukraine and have reinforced NATO’S eastern flank against Russia – even though it is a sovereign independent country – they have made it clear they are not prepared to go to war to defend its independence.
In contrast, even though Taiwan is considered to be a part of China, successive American leaders have made it clear that Beijing would be risking war if it tried to reunite the province by force.
You can argue Putin’s decision to invade is wicked, reckless, unjustified and will cost his country dearly.
You can also argue, as some military experts have, that as big as his invasion force is, it might be enough to conquer the country but it will not be enough to subdue it.
What you cannot argue with is that Putin has divined correctly that the EU – and especially Germany – has no appetite to endure the economic pain it would have to absorb if it adopted sanctions that actually gave him pause.
Indeed some would argue it’s not even a question of appetite: with 41 per cent of its gas coming from Russia, the EU should be more worried about Putin turning off the tap than seeking to inflict pain on Russia.
That the West has ended up here is the result of years of policy miscalculation.
In hindsight, flirting with allowing Ukraine to join
NATO without actually allowing it to join was nuts. Planning on closing its nuclear power plants – as Germany did in the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster – without securing an alternative source of energy to Russian gas was equally nuts.
And as has been pointed out in recent days, Germany also sent the wrong signal to Putin in 2015 when a year after he annexed Crimea, it pushed ahead with the deal with Russia to construct the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
Luckily for us, when it comes to potential conflict in our neighbourhood, China doesn’t hold anything like the trump cards Russia holds.
In addition to its strong hand on energy, Russia is also one of the world’s largest food exporters.
According to the US government, in 2019 it was “the world’s largest producer of barley; the third-largest producer and the largest exporter of wheat; the second-largest producer of sunflower seeds; the third-largest producer of potatoes and milk; and the sixth-largest producer of eggs and chicken meat”.
In contrast, China is not only an energy importer, it is also heavily dependent on food imports.
None of which is to say we should be relaxed.
A supine response to Russia’s invasion might yet still be taken by Beijing – wrongly – as a sign that it can move on Taiwan with impunity.
If Russia’s Ukrainian adventure causes Xi to draw the wrong conclusion about America’s resolve in our region, things could go very badly wrong very quickly.