End of friendship? Xi Jinping is fed up with Putin’s mistakes

Xi Jinping, who shares a hatred of freedom, human rights and democracy with Vladimir Putin, made an alliance with Moscow primarily because he wanted to sell the war against Ukraine to the Chinese people as a war against the United States of America.

His message was: today Washington attacks Russia, tomorrow the People’s Republic. However, Xi assumed that the Kremlin would subjugate Ukraine in the blink of an eye. Then he could stand on the winning side and shine.

Then he could better motivate his compatriots to go to war with a democratic country – neighboring Taiwan – because in Chinese rhetoric, Taipei has become a US vassal. A war against Taiwan would therefore be a war against the United States.

One of Xi’s strengths was the influence of his diplomats in the countries of the so-called “Global South”. From Africa to South Asia, the People’s Republic of China maintains economic and political ties there, which has helped set the tone for the Kremlin’s war narrative.

Kiev maintains only ten embassies in Africa, and thus was inferior to the strength of Chinese communications. But that’s all in the past.

Straightening up lies

The meeting of President Volodymyr Zelensky with representatives of India at the G7 summit was just one of many in the last few weeks that tipped the scales in favor of Kiev. Before his trip to Japan, the Ukrainian president also spoke with representatives of the Gulf states to convince them to support Ukraine, not Russia.

This is how Zelensky and his diplomats want to clear up the lies that Moscow and Beijing have been feeding to the countries of the Global South, which, apart from what is actually happening, rely mainly on information from third parties.

For example, Kiev must explain that during the annexation of Crimea in 2014, it wanted to take a neutral position and not join NATO. The Kremlin and Beijing argue that the “special military operation” became necessary only because NATO wanted to aggressively proliferate at Russia’s doorstep.

This view is also shared by Brazilian President Lula da Silva, who was re-elected to office. He did not find time to meet the Ukrainian president during the G7 summit.

Meeting the expectations of the Global South

Nevertheless, the presence of the Brazilian, Indian and Indonesian delegations at the G7 summit was a response to a need that the countries of the Global South have been formulating for some time: they want to be properly represented in the bodies that are ultimately responsible for running the world.

The rest of the text is below the video.

The distance that India and Brazil have shown towards the West regarding Russian aggression is ultimately also due to the lack of representation.

As emerging nations, their economies – and thus their countries’ political stability – are in danger of a major catastrophe if they openly side with one side or the other. Beijing is the largest lender and economic partner from Brasilia to New Delhi, although it is closely followed by the US, Japan and the EU.

Reasonable view of self-interest

Multipolarity, then, does not imply moral ambiguity or even indifference, but rather a legitimate, self-serving view of one’s own national interests, which in a difficult situation would not be sufficiently taken into account by any superpower, neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China.

Polls show that people in the Global South have more positive views of the People’s Republic of China than those in the West. However, they are far from euphoric. The US portrayal of the war in Ukraine as a quasi-cosmic struggle between democracy and dictatorship is viewed critically there.

-

As long as Washington allows the sale of arms to the world’s worst despots, the US is not a credible defender of human rights and the rule of law. In the countries of the Global South, the crimes of the colonial era committed by European countries have not been forgotten either.

End of neutrality?

Therefore, the G7 Summit did the only right thing: it invited representatives of these important new actors on the international stage to talk to them in a partnership and convince them with arguments.

The fact that President Zelensky pursued this personal dialogue will ultimately serve the cause of the Ukrainians. Their president quite rightly drew attention to the crimes against humanity that the Kremlin dictator Putin allows to be committed in Ukraine – because when it comes to war crimes, there is no neutrality, there is no doubt about it.

That is why, sooner or later, Beijing will find itself without those allies who, thanks to neutrality, have so far helped to protect Putin’s wartime Russia from the phalanx of compassion.

Attempt to minimize the damage

The Central Asian Summit, convened by Xi Jinping at the same time as the G7 meeting, has shown that Beijing must now significantly reduce the damage it has suffered as a result of its alliance with Vladimir Putin.

The Chinese ambassador to France recently said that all nation-states that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union have no legitimacy. This was to reinforce Putin’s claim that Ukraine is not a state at all. However, this met with reluctance not only in Ukraine – as expected – but also in the Baltic and Central Asian countries: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, which Xi tried to reassure during the specially convened summit.

Xi Jinping’s “wolf warrior” tactics of anti-Western diplomacy have failed miserably. NATO is stronger than ever today – the challenge Putin and Xi pose to world peace has been recognized around the world, from Washington to Berlin, and the military has begun to modernize accordingly.

Diplomacy failure

The fact that Moscow is in danger of losing the war in Ukraine gives hope that Taiwan can also fend off a Chinese invasion. This is not all. The Kremlin’s aggression is a demonstration of how the free world could come to the aid of an island democracy in the event of war, without having to send troops.

At the same time, Xi can say goodbye to his desire to annex the entire Western Pacific without a fight. Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and India reaffirmed their alliance with the US and increased military spending. After the end of the G7 summit, The People’s Daily, a propaganda paper of the Chinese Communist Party, sneered that the US goal was to create a new NATO in the Pacific region.

Ultimately, it will be a matter of persuading Beijing to abandon Moscow’s support. This will have to be done with the same willingness to talk as is currently the case with India and Brazil and the other 40 countries that have not yet given Ukraine their full support at the UN.

Unlike India and Brazil, the People’s Republic of China is represented in the UN Security Council. At the same time, Beijing is trying to join the decision-making bodies of the current world order. If Beijing can be integrated, it could give impetus to those forces in China that no longer agree with Xi Jinping’s confrontational course.