China-Russia is a Match Made in Heaven, and That is Scary

 

 

May 22 2014

 

 

Check-mate? China and Russia best frenemies! Folks, we seriously need to wake up.

 

Mr Putin called the deal the biggest in the history of Russia’s gas industry. But it counts, too, for the geopolitics that underpin it. That an agreement should come now, after a decade of haggling, is no accident. The deal will help the Kremlin reduce Russia’s reliance on gas exports to Europe. It is proof that Mr Putin has allies when he seeks to blunt Western sanctions over Ukraine. Both Russia and China want to assert themselves as regional powers. Both have increasingly strained relations with America, which they accuse of holding them back. Just over 40 years ago Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger persuaded China to turn against the Soviet Union and ally with America. Does today’s collaboration between Russia and China amount to a renewal of the alliance against America? Read more

 

For even more on this historical move, click here

 

 

As Russian President Vladimir Putin signed Russia’s historic $400 billion gas-supply agreementwith China, he must have felt the satisfaction of a chess grandmaster revealing the inexorable outcome of a complicated endgame.

In theory, the next phase of the chess match between Russia and the West in Ukraine will only begin with the Ukrainian presidential election on Sunday. But Putin’s positioning of the pieces means the outcome is pre-ordained, no matter who emerges as the next president in Kiev.

No wonder the Russian stock market and ruble have both rebounded — with the MSCI Russia index gaining 20 percent in dollar terms since its low point on March 14.

 

Having secured the territorial windfall of Crimea in March, Putin went on to achieve his main tactical objective in April. This was to destabilize Ukraine to the point where nobody could seriously contemplate the country joining the European Union, much less the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Just as important, from Putin’s standpoint, the combination of internal chaos and improvised plebiscites and Russian military exercises being conducted on the Ukrainian border, distracted Western attention from the Crimean issue. He deflected the threat of additional sanctions from the legality of Russia’s annexation to the feasibility of Ukraine’s presidential election.

Now that analysts are predicting no major violence at Sunday’s election, it is hard to see what arguments the West could offer for tightening sanctions — or how they would find the unity to do it if they tried. The incorporation of Crimea into Russian national territory has, in effect, been accepted by the world as irreversible.

 

 

Given Sevastopol’s priceless strategic significance as a naval base, not to mention the Russian people’s affection for Crimea as a vacation, retirement and cultural destination, the restoration of Crimea would, on its own, likely guarantee Putin’s political popularity for many years to come. But this week the news for Putin got even better. Read more 

 

 

Are you prepared?