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    Ray McGovern: Biden Has a Date With Xi, Putin's "Main Squeeze" Archived Message

    Posted by sashimi on November 11, 2022, 7:44 pm

    11 November 2022

    (quote)
    When China's President XI Jinping meets with President Joe Biden Monday in
    Indonesia, he better bring a whiteboard and some simple handouts. For it is
    beyond the ability, or the intention, of Biden's elitist advisers to give him an
    accurate picture of the extremely close strategic relationship between China and
    Russia - and between XI and Putin personally.

    Can Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake
    Sullivan be so dense? That cannot be ruled out. But perhaps it is more likely
    that they (and the neocons behind U.S. foreign policy) simply do not want to
    give the president any reason to flinch in his Captain Ahab pursuit of weakening
    Russia in Ukraine "for as long as it takes."

    Were they to warn Biden that he could face a two-front war with peer adversaries
    (Russia and China), he might opt for a more sensible policy. Biden might even be
    brought to understand that, for Putin, the conflict in Ukraine poses the same
    kind of existential threat that, say, President John Kennedy faced 60 years ago
    from Soviet nuclear ballistic missiles in Cuba.

    Likewise, Biden might be able to appreciate that China and Russia are each fully
    aware that if one of them goes down, the other is next in the sights of the a US
    military desperate to get back on the winning track after so many misadventures
    over the last 77 years.

    Has Biden been told that, contrary to all expectations, China gave Putin a
    waiver on its bedrock Westphalian policy on sovereignty and noninterference, and
    that XI has made it clear that China supports Russia's "core interests" in
    Europe, just as Russia supports China's core interests vis-à-vis Taiwan.

    When the planned Biden-Xi meeting was announced Wednesday, Biden was asked
    whether the Chinese and the Russians are "putting together a real alliance,"
    Biden said:
    "I don't think there's a lot of respect that China has for Russia or for Putin.
    I don't think they're looking at it as a particular alliance. Matter of fact,
    they've been sort of keeping their distance a little bit."

    Wrong: "Keeping their distance a little bit?" The adolescent-type textual
    analysis adduced for this media "insight" over recent weeks is rubbish. As to
    the far more important question as to whether Russia and China have a formal
    defense alliance or something short of that, well, this became largely moot on
    December 15, 2021 when President XI stated that "this relationship even exceeds
    an alliance in its closeness and effectiveness."

    Administration officials and the media have obediently insisted that "the two
    countries do not have a formal alliance". This is technically correct. It is
    also a distinction without much real difference. Prudent strategic planners
    would take this into account, and advise the president accordingly -
    particularly as the conflict in Ukraine escalates, as do tensions along China's
    Pacific frontier.
    (/quote)
    -- Cont'd at https://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2022/11/10/biden-has-a-date-with-xi-putins-main-squeeze/

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