America’s overreach and Russia’s overreaction make possible a diplomatic revolution
https://asiatimes.com/-by David Goldman
Russian troops training on Ukraine’s border in a file photo. Image: Russian Defense Ministry Press Service
A three-way video call March 8 with China’s President Xi Jinping and European leaders Francois Macron and Olaf Scholz raises the prospect of a diplomatic initiative that would have been unthinkable only weeks ago: China might mediate the Ukraine crisis, seizing the diplomatic high ground as a peacemaker. For the past decade, China’s territorial ambitions in the South China Sea, intervention in Hong Kong and border skirmishes with India have left it in relative diplomatic isolation. But the Ukraine crisis opens an opportunity for a diplomatic revolution that could position China as a peacemaker.
The tragic combination of American overreach and Russian overreaction has left the world in a diplomatic vacuum. By seeking to extend NATO to the Russian border, Washington persuaded Moscow that its objective was the strategic encirclement of Russia. By abandoning the Minsk II framework, Kyiv convinced the Russians that Ukraine had become an American cat’s paw. France and Germany, who backed the Minsk compromise, failed to stand on their principles against American opposition. The outcome, as I wrote March 4, recalls the blunders of the European powers in the advent of the First World War.
That opens an opportunity for China to mediate, because it is not compromised by the mistakes that led to the crisis, and because it has good relations with the antagonists and a working dialogue with Europe. The odd man out, of course, would be the United States.
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba in a March 1 phone conversation asked his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi to mediate the crisis, stating (according to the official Chinese version) that “China has played a constructive role on this issue and Ukraine is ready to step up communication with the Chinese side. He looked forward to China’s mediation efforts for the ceasefire.” The idea of Chinese mediation is getting traction in Europe.
As a “strategic partner” of Russia and a key trading partner of Ukraine, China is the only world power with strong relationships on both sides of the conflict, as European commentators note pointedly. “When will China stop Putin?,” wrote Eduard Steiner in Germany’s center-right newspaper Die Welt March 8. China has “astonishingly close relations with Ukraine,” the Die Welt analysis notes.
American diplomacy is backed into a corner. Washington is committed to defeating the Russians in Ukraine and breaking the Russian economy, through the provision of high-tech weaponry to the Ukraine Armed Forces, and the imposition of “nuclear” sanctions including the seizure of more than half of Russia’s $630 billion in foreign exchange reserves. That exceeds any economic measures taken by the United States against the Soviet Union during the Cold War and has no peacetime precedent. Washington’s stance leaves it nowhere to go: If the punitive sanctions and weapons provisions fail to break Russia’s will, the only possible outcome will be a permanent standoff.
From Europe’s point of view, the American response was a case of overreach. Chancellor Scholz as well as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson March 7 declared that they would not place sanctions on the sale of Russian hydrocarbons to Europe—in contrast to President Biden, who announced a halt to US purchases of Russian oil on March 8. The price of oil in US trading rose by $9 a barrel, or 8 percent, on Biden’s action. Europeans already are paying about ten times the Feb. 2021 price for natural gas, and the potential economic harm to Europe is dire.
In the video meeting with Macron and Scholz, Xi Jinping said that “China appreciates the efforts of France and Germany to mediate the situation in Ukraine, and is willing to maintain communication and coordination with France, Germany, and the EU, and play an active role with the international community according to the needs of all parties concerned,” according to a report in the Chinese website guancha.cn.