As Russia gets tunnel vision trying to take and hold scraps of territory that apparently is being held by Satanists now, Russia ignores the looming threat of China to the lands Russia stole from China in the 19th century.
Well this Forbes article got my attention:
Even though Party delegates baked new anti-Taiwanese language into the Communist Party’s constitution, the real territorial temptation for China might be to the North, in the Russian Far East, where hundreds of thousands of ethnically Chinese Russian citizens, trapped in a substantially weakened and hollow dictatorship, could potentially be enticed to reconsider their options.
While there’s no way to know what Xi is thinking, China’s long-established pattern of behavior suggests that, as Russia redirects border security units to a grinding conflict in Ukraine, it is worth considering if China might be mulling expansionist contingencies to the north, along the sprawling and sparsely held 2,615 mile Russian frontier.
Huh.
China needs Russia to occupy America in Europe to open up Chinese opportunities
in Asia. That objective is dying in Ukraine, which is exposing Russia's military as a Potemkin asset. Without even weakening
America. Will China salvage this problem by considering its vassal Russia more of a target than a useful frenemy?
Not long after Putin invaded Ukraine and faced difficulties, I wondered, "Is Putin really sure Xi is his best friend? Or has Putin's war allowed
China to see different opportunities or at least different timelines in
its rise to power?" That opportunity is liberating its Far Eastern territories.
Russia is helping China make this decision in another way, as separatism in distant Russian regions treated as colonial sources of wealth by Moscow. That friction may be exacerbated by Putin's increasing demands to fight his war against Ukraine.
A decade ago I wrote, "If China wants to signal their rise to great power status (and quiet domestic unrest) by launching a short and glorious war, Russia would be a safer target than America."
Russia's conventional military weakness against China was evident before Putin decimated his military in Ukraine. And China has reason to change their underwear watching Russia fight as they realize the PLA may be a mirror image of the Russian military dying in Ukraine:
Xi Jinping and his senior military Chinese leaders are watching the Russian and Ukrainian military performance during the current war with great interest and growing alarm. That’s because current Chinese armed forces are closer to what Russia is using than to the Ukraine’s, which China would like to emulate. That would be difficult because of China’s politics and endemic corruption.
And China's GDP may be overstated by 60%.
China may really want an easier target than America and our western Pacific allies.
Russia did establish the precedent that China has territorial claims on Russia that Russia should concede. What will stop China from openly considering that just a down payment and that more is due?
Still, as the Forbes article speculates, China might find it more prudent to limit territorial goals and instead accelerate a creeping annexation by extending Chinese influence into Russia's Far East:
If China moves on Taiwan in the near term, widespread conflict is inevitable. But if China raises border tensions, making a successful play for Russian territorial concessions to the North, it gets access to new resources, new protein stocks, and can, in turn, nourish the aggrieved country’s sense of “Manifest Destiny” for very, very little. Xi might even earn some grudging international respect for helping to remove a rogue Russian leader from the board.
Or China might pursue a lesser goal that doesn't test Russian doctrine to protect its territories with nukes. China might target Central Asia for dominance.
Which would weaken Russia further, making it vulnerable to future pressure for concessions.
Russia thought they'd bought time with a policy of appeasement to rebuild its military after the USSR collapsed. I think Putin believed a short and glorious war against Ukraine would cap his western strategy and allow him to pivot to the east after demonstrating his new military strength.
Instead Putin has paraded his military weakness for all to see. And destroyed what power he actually had in combat.
Bravo.
Will Russia take the dramatic step of portraying the war against Ukraine as a wake-up call to the West to join up to hold off China's rise? Russia lies to its people. It can do this with a straight face. And enough will be relieved enough to be out of the disastrous war war of conquest in Ukraine to go along even if they harbor doubts about the truth.
Indeed, in my article on using the Army for its reason for existence--large-scale conventional combat operations--in the Indo-Pacific, one potential scenario would be to fight at Russia's side against Chinese aggression. It is easy to overlook that in an article mostly focused on complicating China's calculations for aggression.
Is Putin committed to defeat on two fronts? And significant Russian shrinkage? Will China take advantage of this unexpected opportunity?
NOTE: War updates continue here.
