For Vladimir Putin, things are not going well. He can still tame the Ukrainians with cannon fire, blackmail Europe with the atomic bomb, ignore Pope Francis – he has the precedent of Iosif Vissarionovic (Stalin). That is as long as he can count on the board with Beijing. Didn’t the two Presidents swear “friendship without limits” while one prepared to enjoy the Winter Olympics, the other the invasion of Ukraine? After less than a month, these limits are put to the test. Putin’s unleashed war is toxic for Xi Jinping because it causes a worldwide upheaval that is not in China’s interests. Beijing finds itself between the anvil of the international equilibrium it holds and the hammer of its alliance with Moscow.
Xi Jingping has to decide between support for his Russian friend and intervention as a mediator that would inevitably distance him from Putin. For the first, it is enough to continue to close in celestial silence, the second requires diplomatic and political initiative, including pressure on Moscow. So far, China has gotten along with the two abstentions at the UN, in the Security Council and in the General Assembly, which will have disappointed Russia, however, allowing Beijing to remain in the rear of the crisis. In general, the Chinese position has a driving effect on the large numbers of Onusians, Africans, Asians. Not this time. Abstentions remained a minority.
The prospects for a political solution to the Ukrainian war may depend on how China decides to get out of this bottleneck; certainly the international role of Beijing, until now the second world power but not a global leader on an equal footing with the United States. To exercise leadership in the world, as Americans are well aware, one must pay full share in risk and exposure. The Chinese have limited themselves to a progressive, seemingly unstoppable, economic and military rise. Something is missing. The Ukrainian war is an opportunity to make the international qualitative leap.
There are many capitals to urge Beijing. Last but not least Kiev – Ukraine has good relations with China, yellow-blue flags fly high in the Winter Paralympics. As Michele Valensise effectively headlined yesterday in the Huffington Post, “Xi Jingping’s phone rings, but for now he prefers not to answer.” The Chinese President weighs the pros and cons. In his view, there are excellent reasons to let the Ukrainian crisis continue its course. First of all, it weakens the West, increasingly a systemic rival if not an enemy. He distracts the United States from the Pacific to plunge them back into European squabbles. A militarily tried, economically impoverished and politically isolated Russia will be even more tributary to China, pouring out gas and oil rejected by Europe, further unbalancing an alliance without mutual love in favor of Beijing. Xi Jinping has a lot to gain from Putin’s war. No need to lift a finger, as Sun Tzu recommends.
Xi is a disciple of the great military strategist. Therefore, he knows that other considerations must also be made. At least three push it in the opposite direction. The first is the potentially disruptive consequences of the Ukrainian war on the economy and world stability. China is the biggest beneficiary of globalization. It needs it to continue, or at least survive. He already feels cracks in it, caused by the pandemic and by the shocks of a West that wants to loosen the bonds of industrial and technological dependence. The Ukrainian war threatens to push the international economy into recession again and to deliver the final blow to globalization.
China has a physiological interest in international stability. The greatest risk, at this moment, is represented by his “limitless” friend, Vladimir Putin. We do not know, perhaps we will never know, what the two Presidents said to each other when they signed the joint declaration a month ago. Did Xi have asked to wait for the end of the Olympics to invade Ukraine, as reported by American intelligence? Did Putin tell him what he was going to do? He may be. Let’s not underestimate the cynicism of two autocrats. Even if Europe were Kantian (it never was except in books), the world is Darwinian.
An explicit green light to the invasion is little in character with Chinese language and prudence. Understanding perhaps, always on the basis of the assumption that Vladimir Putin credited until it failed miserably in the frozen plains of Ukraine and in the suburbs of Kiev and Mariupol: blitzkrieg, surrender of Volodymyr Zelensky, pro-Russian government, liberated Ukraine, embrace between the two peoples, Europe and the West spectators. Xi Jinping could have accepted it from Putin, a cold chess player. He is very unlikely to be comfortable with Vlad the Fool threatening World War III and dusting off the nuclear spectrum – the only ground on which China is inferior to Russia. The nuclear alarm must not have earned the Kremlin many friends in the Forbidden City. The American rival turned out to be much more reasonable than the Russian friend. Perhaps some limit to friendship is the case to put it.
The third reason that pushes China towards a role in putting an end to the Ukrainian tragedy with a political solution, which stops the military one desired by Putin, lies in the reaction of the West. The Chinese did not expect it, especially not from Europe. The ability to take on costs and sacrifices, the difficult decision to arm the Ukrainians, the extraordinary harmony between the United States, the EU and NATO, the sudden rapprochement between London and Brussels, deserve respect in the world of realpolitik that Xi Jinping practices. They enter the calculation and offset the immediate gains of mere solidarity with Moscow. Western firmness, Ukrainian backbone and Putinian recklessness lead Beijing to be a diligent part of a political solution. Let’s hope.
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