A former senior foreign policy official proposed that the United States threaten China with sanctions to limit its support for Russia. Although sanctions on Russia haven’t worked, China is a different case, he argued, because it is more integrated than Russia into the world economic system.
There is a lot of anti-Russian sentiment in China, he added, and the Chinese people won’t like the idea of accepting hardship to help Russia. Ukraine and China, he added, “have a robust partnership going back decades.”
I am at liberty to report what I told the group. The Ukraine war has set in motion a global realignment, including the China-Iran-Saudi agreement. Looking at America’s blunders in Ukraine, the Saudis have concluded that America won’t put boots on the ground in the Middle East and are looking for other friends.
Turkey has flourished as a trade intermediary between China and Russia, and has patched up relations with the Gulf States as well as Israel. India, supposedly an ally against China, has become Russia’s biggest customer for oil and has vastly expanded its trade with China, which now provides 30% of its non-oil imports.
The United States is losing influence catastrophically by underestimating Russia. It doesn’t have the industrial capacity to provide artillery ammunition to Ukraine. The best policy is an immediate ceasefire, I argued.