Is this a big strike against America?
China and Russia are set to cement their energy alliance next week with an expected agreement to build a natural gas pipeline between the two nations that would secure a huge new market for the world's largest energy producer and provide a guaranteed energy supply for China's growing economy as both nations face confrontations with the West.
The deal, which the two countries negotiated over the last decade, is expected to be signed when Russian President Vladimir Putin visits Beijing next week. ...
Current geopolitical conditions resulting from Russia’s ongoing crisis in Ukraine appear to have aligned the two super powers in such a manner favorable to finally concluding the deal.
Have a ball, Russia. Anything that gets China to look inland to Asia for their energy imports rather than to the sea where China has to prepare to fight our Navy for control of sea lines of supply is welcome, as far as I'm concerned.
Although as I note in that post, I think Russia would have been wiser to ink a deal with Japan rather than China. If Russia thinks holding the spigot gives them power over China the way it gives them power over Ukraine, Moscow is gravely mistaken.
Recall that in the aftermath of the OPEC oil embargo against the West following the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War, we began contemplating the possible need to capture the oil fields of Saudi Arabia to prevent the economies of the West from tanking in a future cut off. Remember, during the Cold War, that economic crisis could have been a catastrophic temptation to the Soviet Union to strike NATO.
So if the increasingly powerful China worries that Russia might cut off energy exports, China could start pondering how they'd seize the energy resources of a weakly held Russian Far East.
The Silk Pipeline entwines Russia with China, but does it make them allies? Not if this article is right about Russia's real motive for taking Crimea and hammering Ukraine:
[There] is an aspect of Ukraine’s international relations prior to the annexation that may well have motivated Putin to take action – Ukraine’s growing economic relations with China.
By 2013 Ukrainian-Chinese bilateral trade reached $10 billion, with China becoming Ukraine’s second largest trade partner after Russia, and Beijing had already provided Ukraine $10 billion in loans.
In September 2013 Chinese President Xi Jinping unveiled his “Silk Road Economic Zone” project, first during a speech at Nazarbayev University in Astana, and later at a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization heads of state in Bishkek. With Putin in attendance, Xi outlined his vision that the project would consist of a new transport corridor envisaged to reduce the cost of shipping goods from China to Europe, involving the Central Asia and Caucasus post-Soviet nations along with Ukraine – with no mention of Russia.
Three months later, on December 3 Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych flew to Beijing at Xi’s invitation for a four-day state visit. Yanukovych attended the Ukraine-China business forum and made a statement that Ukraine supported the Silk Road Economic Zone initiative.
The article discusses a number of projects China was working on with Ukraine. I'd read about most of those before. Which is why I thought reports of China's nuclear guarantee to Ukraine (before it was revealed as a translation issue that made the statement banal rather than a big effing deal) were plausible.
The article also says that by nailing down the end of the Silk Road in Crimea, Russia has blocked China's plan, and so makes Central Asia more likely to work with Russia than China.
I don't know about that. Central Asian states have reason to be worried about similar "rescues" by Moscow of ethnic Russians. I think the Ukraine crisis gives the "stans" more reason to bring China in to balance Russia.
If the Russian conquest of Crimea really is a Russian strike against China, doesn't China have more incentive to make inroads in Central Asia at Russia's expense?
Surely, China could find other routes for their Silk Road project that bypasses Crimea and keeps Russia out of the project.
And shouldn't Russia be wary of becoming a source of needed Chinese energy when economic growth is a main pillar of Chinese Communist Party monopoly hold on political power while xenophobic nationalism is the other pillar?
When China increasingly sees domestic and foreign problems as a continuum of threats all related to defending that monopoly?
We'll see how Putin likes them apples.
