{First, the collapse of Ukraine’s offensive against Russian forces and its commander’s admission that the war is a “stalemate” is a setback for America’s strategic position and a gain for China, which has doubled its exports to Russia since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

 

Second, the US tech war on China has flopped, as Chinese AI firms buy fast Huawei processers in place of chips from Nvidia and other US producers.

 

Third, the Gaza war provoked by Hamas on October 7 gives China a free option to act as the de facto leader of the Global South in opposition to Israel, an American ally. China now exports more to the Muslim world than it does to the United States.

 

And fourth, the US military wants to avoid confrontation with China in the Northwest Pacific region as well as its home waters in the South China Sea, where the PLA’s thousands of surface-to-ship missiles and nearly 1,000 fourth- and fifth-generation warplanes give China an overwhelming home-theater advantage in firepower.}



{Henry Kissinger told the Economist last May: “We’re in the classic pre-World War 1 situation where neither side has much margin of political concession and in which any disturbance of the equilibrium can lead to catastrophic consequences.”

 

A prominent advisor to China’s Communist Party, Renmin University Professor Jin Canrong, told “The Observer” on November 9, “The world today has entered an era of great struggle: the old order dominated by the West. It is disintegrating, but the new order has not yet been established.” Jin compared the world situation to China’s bloody Warring States period (475 BCE to 221 BCE).}



{A foretaste of the Biden-Xi discussions came from the October 25 Beijing visit of California Governor Gavin Newsom, the likeliest 2024 Democratic presidential candidate should Biden withdraw for health reasons or in response to Congressional investigations of his personal and family finances. A widely-circulated scenario for the upcoming presidential race foresees Newsom replacing an ailing Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket.

 

Significantly, Newsom has been quoted as saying that he had “expressed my support for the One-China policy … as well as our desire not to see independence” of Taiwan. Newsome spoke of “renewing our friendship and re-engaging [on] foundational and fundamental issues that will determine our collective faith in the future.”}



{The conventional arm of the PLA Rocket Force “is the largest ground-based missile force in the world, with over 2,200 conventionally armed ballistic and cruise missiles and with enough anti-ship missiles to attack every US surface combatant vessel in the South China Sea with enough firepower to overcome each ship’s missile defense,” Major Christopher J. Mihal wrote in 2021 in a US Army journal.}

 

 

 

{Significantly, Jin included Israel as part of the core of Western countries:

Everyone keeps talking about the West, but what exactly does the West mean? The West refers to three big countries and four small countries. The three big countries are the United States, Europe, and Japan, and the four small countries are Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel. They are a small, closed circle that other countries cannot enter. There is a group of right-wing intellectuals in China who still dream of joining the West. Even if they demolish the Forbidden City and build the White House in its place, they will not be able to get in. If they go in, they will be servants guarding the palace, like Japan and South Korea.}

 

 

 

{Sadly, Jin’s harsh words about the US role in the Ukraine war are justified. Regime change in Russia through a sequence of color revolutions on its border has been an obsessive theme of neo-conservative policy since Washington backed the 2004 “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine.}


 

{China sees an opportunity to push back against the United States and is drawing on its heightened standing in the Global South to undermine American geopolitical influence. Since the cited conversation in 2019, China’s exports to the Global South have roughly doubled.

 

Washington has few cards to play, and Biden is likely to respond to his weakened position by back-pedaling on Taiwan.}