Below is a clip from my newsletter’s “Saturday News Summary Report (with commentary)” and I’m thinking of elaborating on it for a rant next week, but wanted to bounce it off y’all here at DK for a reality check. Thoughts on this?
— Did Chinese President Xi punk Russia’s President Putin? Taiwan has been a thorn in the side of China ever since Chiang Kai-shek led his revolt to the island we call Taiwan today and established what is now one of the world’s most robust and successful democracies.
President Xi has repeatedly asserted that Taiwan is still part of China and will one day reunite with that nation, so it would be quite useful for him to know how the western world will react when a large nuclear power tries to seize and occupy a democratic nation under the rubric of that nation being illegitimate.
But how to find out how America, Europe and the democracies of Asia and Australia/New Zealand would react — and what weapons and tools we may employ as punishment — if he were to simply roll into Taiwan with a huge military?
How about, I’m speculating Xi and his advisors may have thought, encouraging Russia to do the same thing with Ukraine? That would be on a par with China taking Taiwan, and would quickly reveal how reactive the West would be to such a move.
Putin obviously was already planning something like this, but almost certainly ran it past Xi, and if China said said they would oppose an invasion of Ukraine Putin may have hesitated, or limited his actions to the eastern breakaway regions.
Other than the fact that just a week or two ago Putin traveled to China for the Olympics and hung out with Xi, and that China has offered weak support to Russia in taking Ukraine (refused to vote against them in the UN Security Council, for example), I have no evidence for this theory (and welcome your comments below), but I can guarantee that if China didn’t set Putin up (even if it was just weak encouragement), if it was just a happy coincidence from their POV, China is watching very, very carefully to see how we and the rest of the democracies of the world react.