ywing14 wrote:I completely disagree that the cold war has ended. If anything it has just shifted to a different battlefield and added China as a true opponent.
We all knew that China became a potential opponent along with the USSR during the Cold War. The Soviet's transfer of nuclear technology to China greatly complicated the dynamics and undermined deterence just as the development of the British and French nuclear forces. Fortunately; Marxist ideology didn't trump geography and history. The Sino-Soviet split escalated to a border war. President Nixon and Henry Kussinger drove the final nails in the coffin of the Communist monolith. President Bush Sr's free trade agreements effectively transformed China from a Communist country into a State Capitalist society that retained the totalitarian governance and internal policies. No one bothered to contemplate the potential strategic consequences of transforming the most populous country on the planet from a technologically backward peasantry into a modern, manufacturing society.
The current reproachment between China and Russia is driven by the demographic implosion of the Russian people combined with the asinine confrontationalism of the Clinton-Obama-Clinton cabal. The US and NATO allowed their reflexive hostility towards the no longer existant USSR and Warsaw Pact to prejudice them against Slavic peoples in the former Yugoslavia, Kosovo and other SE European states. We were basically assisting the Caliphate in its ongoing conquest of Christians. It was an echo of the Crimean war which needlessly alienated Russia. Then Hillary talked Obama into becoming the pawn of the technocrats at the EU who wanted to expand their economic dominion into Ukraine. Hence the US Department of State incited and supported the coup by Ukrainian nationalists who wanted to purge Crimea and other portions of Ukraine of ethnic Russians and Russified Ukrainians. This of course scares the Hell out of Russia, provoking reasonable fears that US policy towards Russia is nothing short of genocidal.
Not being idiots, Russian leaders recognized that since the Russian population is less than 150 million and declining, the only strategy that can enable them to resist an implacably hostile United States is to once again align themselves with China, but as the junior partner. Because of its billion plus population, China's economy has inevitably grown to dwarf Russia's. Russia's only bargaining chips are its nuclear forces and a willingness to share conventional weapons technology.
While China is no longer interested in imposing communism on the rest of the world, it is a nation with national interests that can and do conflict with the interests of others. Free trade has not trumped that. Since it is not in the United States' national interests to allow China's economy and military to become dominant, it obviously is not in the United States' national interest to continue alienating Russia and compelling Putin to continuing the transformation of Russia into China's subservient ally.
President Trump's reevaluation of the Brenton Woods free trade paradigm is the first and most critical step in constraining the growth of China's economic and military power. Trump's overtures to Putin are obviously intended to implement a strategy of disrupting the evolving alliance between Russia and China. I predict that European heads will explode when Trump mediates a resolution of the Crimean conflict that recognizes that the teritory is rightfully Russian rather than Ukrainian. Once the United States demonstrates some sanity that regains Russia's trust, then Russia will recognize that it is not in Russia's strategic interests to assist China in becoming a military as well as economic super power. Russia shares a continent with China so they don't want to be squashed like a bug.