With Xi's visit to Putin in Moscow we see the two allies coming closer to finalizing a deal that will see a significant part of the balance of power in the world shift from the West to the East. China's economy is in something like freefall right now but its military power is peaking as it hasn't for almost a thousand years. So, while some in the West can see that the neocon strategy viz Russia is to arm Ukrainians to fight Russians to the last dead Ukrainian and continue to shovel weapons, money and resources into the fight to drag it out and weaken Russia, China can see that the longer the West subsidizes Ukraine in a meaningless and ultimately useless fight with Russia, the West is itself drained of weapons, ammunition and money even as its banking systems teeter on the brink of insolvency and the economies never recovered from the triple whammy of killing Nordstream, Covid self-destruction and the peace dividend and the green nude eel.
As with Germany after the Anschluss, China doesn't actually have to wage or physically go to war. With the massive might of a fully militarized state and an economy that can support full rate production of all weapons and munitions it can continue as it has for the last 30 years and simply snip off bits and pieces of the areas around it. So it's fleets of fishing trawlers and ships can strip every fish from the Vietnamese EEZ and do the same in Thailand and Australia and Micronesia and the Philippines and nobody will lift a finger. It can collapse markets anywhere in Asia and it will face no reprisals. Who would go to war over fish? Who is to say what crashed the market for that particular good or this item over here?
We used to have a concern about the norKs. Our concern was that the Kim's were pretty addled and pretty adamant that they were not going to pursue a separate peace with the rest of the world as the Soviet Union and the PRC did. Nope, our concern was that before they finally went down to utter collapse in the cold and dark they would use that giant military machine they spent the last 70 years creating. There are thousands of norK artillery and missiles that can easily range on the Greater Seoul Metropolitan Area from the Chorwon hills and all along the river and DMZ. We wondered if they would start with chemical weapons or high explosives only and then start to throw in the gas shells when the rubble started to bounce so they could get the ones in the vast underground subway and tunnel systems that lie under the GSMA.
I don't see China as that addled and as I said, they can get everything they want or need without resorting to violence. Everyone knows that's the prerogative of the most dangerous critter. China is now the most dangerous to its neighbors. It doesn't help us much that at some point the Powers that Be in China concluded that their nuclear arsenal was not really all that scary and decided to quadruple it overnight. Kind of makes one wonder how many nukes the ROKs have and how many the Japanese currently have.
In the meantime, China gets to watch as we divest ourselves of warships, send our ammunition to Ukraine and have at least one nuclear attack submarine that hasn't left port in over 5 years as it "waits for maintenance" at one of our dwindling number of shipyards.
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