What’s in Russian alliance for Chinese?

In time, one can get used to anything, logical or not, yet the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its apparent alliance with China continue to confound me, nearly four months onwards from the meteoric arrival of our new world order.

At least, this last week, we were able to get beyond the brain spaghetti of Russia claiming the invasion was because the Ukrainian government is drug-taking Nazis.

In a similar vein, I had a friend at university who would lead every political debate to a declaration that anyone disagreeing with him was parroting the politics of Nazi Germany.

For those who are a bit limited, citing the values of the most reviled regime in Europe is often used as a short cut to winning hearts and minds, where normal case-building won’t get there.

Thus, Ukrainians are Nazis, and, therefore, their country must be taken over — no need to get into what are the characteristics of Ukraine’s Jewish President and Jewish Kyiv Mayor that made them into concentration-camp-filling mass murderers.

The label was the rationale and never made any sense, with the invading force, if anything, displaying more features of a neo-Nazi regime than any other European country since Hitler’s Germany.

But, now, happily, as Russia’s President Putin beat his own chest about how he is the new Peter the Great reclaiming Russian lands, we are back to plain-speaking territorial conquest.

Obviously, Putin’s war was always about rebuilding the Soviet Union, but, somehow, it took four months to say that: but he has got there, and now in multiple ways, although the Peter Putin the Great is his clearest claim yet around rebuilding his nation, larger, from other people’s nations.

But what did he discuss with the Chinese? For, China is built on its economy, which is built on exports to the world. And take a look at its export buyers: Russia is a lowly twelfth. Of its 11 top export buyers, Hong Kong falls within its own sphere of influence. But of the other 10, all bar one, India, are aligned in censuring Russia.

Indeed, exports to the US amount to more than eight times China’s exports to Russia. Altogether the Russia-censoring nations it trades with that are larger than Russia account for 22 times its exports to Russia. The UK buys more than Russia, so does the Netherlands, Germany, and Japan.

If that were not enough of an agenda of self-harm, even smaller export-buying partners count seriously. Poland, currently being threatened by Russia, buys around half the volume of goods from China that Russia does. Australia buys almost as much as Russia. And so on.

If China genuinely waded into Western sanctions, it would be commercial suicide.

So, what’s in the Russian alliance for China? Commentators say that it’s so China can also move on its long-claimed target of making Taiwan its own. And in this crazy 2022, it has been making new, aggressive noises about reclaiming Taiwan.

And that’s where I still cannot yet adjust. All this is moderately likely to trigger nuclear war. If that happens, it’s like the ‘destroy all’ card my son long-ago showed me in one of his card games: all the Chinese will be dead, and the Russians will be dead, and we all will be dead, but at least Ukrainians won’t have Ukraine and the Taiwanese won’t have Taiwan.

If that is the level of madness we have let our world get to, even as we secretly buy stolen Ukrainian grain from Russia to help fund this lunacy, then maybe we, as a race, really deserve to be obliterated.

It’s been said that our technology race simply flew ahead of our psychological and emotional sophistication. So, it seems, the Chinese may no longer mind losing nearly all their sales and nearly all their income, if only they can ensure the Taiwanese stop running and enjoying Taiwan.

So, now I just pray that some sense may prevail in this darkest of geopolitical years. Let people wonder if life is worth more than leaving others in peace. Let us all make some sense now.