Inacreditável, mas Rússia e China superam diferenças e unem-se.
Ocidente fica aturdido e míope.
Six months ago, the Western media were in unison, laughing off the suggestion that the Bear and Dragon could find an entente – much less a true alliance. The two countries were divided by a difficult history, unbridgeable cultural differences, and divergent economic geostrategic interests. What a difference six months makes! With new deals now announced almost daily – not just in the energy/resources sector but also in finance, technology and agriculture, and China again Russia’s largest source of investment capital, the previous discourse has become simply untenable. China and Russia are stepping up cooperation at the UN, the SCO, while creating new alternatives to the World Bank and IMF, and overtly supporting each other’s domestic and foreign policies – obvious to anyone bothering to read the original sources (e.g. China Daily) rather than the Western renditions of Beijing’s positions.
Something had to be done to rescue the imperilled narrative! A new discourse has thus been trotted out to explain away the egregious own-goal scored by Western diplomacy; after some initial hesitation, the new Party Line is that yes, Russia and China are drawing closer together, but it will be Russia who pays a terrible price by being subsumed into an unequal alliance as a junior partner. Needless to say, these same commentators would never imagine that Russia could (or should) be treated as an equal by Washington – but that is different – American domination is considered to be a healthy thing for Russia (tacit the terrible Yeltsin years). The most hysterical commentators note that a teeming China abuts upon an empty Siberia (demonstrating a comical ignorance of geography - Chinese population is heavily concentrated in the East/South East, with North-Western China almost as sparsely populated as is Siberia) which they would soon overrun. For reasons best known to the authors (or those who pay their salaries) when Europe imports Russian gas, Europe becomes dangerously dependent upon Russia – but when Russia sells its gas instead to China, then it is Russia who becomes dependent…
