Joe Biden took over a real mess in our State Department. Donald Trump only wanted loyalists to hold offices in his administration. Experience, knowledge and skills were not valued by forty-five, unless those attributes were accompanied with heavy doses of loyalty to whatever Trump wanted for whatever reasons.
In one year, Joe Biden has got our State Department functioning back close to the way it used to be – and just in time for the biggest challenge the world has seen since WW2. We have another madman in charge of a large war machine and he’s attacking a sovereign democracy and threatening nukes. Not one person on earth in their right mind likes being this situation. And yet it persists.
Biden quickly put heavy financial sanctions on Russia and their top oligarchs, including Putin. He also got NATO countries to join him in these sanctions. So far, Putin is not blinking.
Biden spoke with Xi of China this week, and Chi does not seem to want to help Russia, but so far, he is still buying Russian oil and is not sanctioning Putin. ‘Assertions that China knew about, acquiesced to, or tacitly supported this war are pure disinformation,’ wrote Qin Gang, China’s ambassador to the United States in the Washington Post. ‘Had China known about the imminent crisis, we would have tried our best to prevent it.’
If Joe Biden could convince Xi to take a hard stance vs Putin, my sense is that would quickly be too much for Putin to survive. But I do think Xi has good reasons to take a hard stance vs Putin. Let me unwind this a bit.
There are only really two superpowers on planet Earth today – the USA and China. While the U.S. ranks as the world’s largest economy with a GDP of $23 trillion, Russia’s GDP comes in at $1.48 trillion. Russia takes up the most space, but its entire economy is about the same size as Texas’s. And there are logical reasons for that clear underperformance. Russia has become an incompetent uncaring oligarchy over the last 20 years of Vladimir Putin’s reign. Just imagine what would have happened to America had Trump stayed on as president for twenty years. Installing loyal cronies while ousting objective educated experts would take a heavy toll on any administration.
Now let’s analyze the performance of Xi of China. The Chinese presidency is officially regarded as an institution of the state rather than an administrative post; Under the Chinese constitution, the president serves at the pleasure of the National People’s Congress (NPC), the highest organ of state power and the legislature, and is not legally vested to take executive action on his own prerogative. But Xi Jinping has been the president of the only party in China with any real power for about 10 years now. In that position, whatever Xi says goes, if he really wants it that way.
But China has done a remarkable job with its economy under Xi Jinping – especially when compared with Russia. China’s economy totaled about $18 trillion in 2021 on export manufacturing growth and capital for new projects. China is the world’s 2nd largest economy now – and its basically a one-party capitalistic communist government.
Can Joe Biden ask Xi Jinping to not only castigate Putin with words from his Ambassador, but also get China to sanction Russia? I think so. The first argument I would use ( privately) is Vladimir Putin gives autocracy a bad name. After all, Xi Jinping is the top dog in the supreme powerful National People’s Congress of China. What he says goes. And yet, Xi’s governance has done so well over the last 10 years it’s hard to fault the Chinese for their system of governing over one billion people. Xi Jinping wants the world to know that one party rule can work out if the people at the top have the best interest of the country at heart. (It’s always all about the hearts of our “rulers”. )
The second argument to end Putin’s Folly is for the safety of all the people on the world. A wounded maniac with nukes can ruin Xi’s plans for the economic growth of China too. It’s not that far of a stretch to imagine human civilization being destroyed in a few days of nuclear exchanges. Some scholars think there is a 10% chance of a hot nuclear war this year.
Putin Has Created a Teaching Moment We Should Not Ignore
And that brings me to another reason to forge an alliance with Xi Jinping and China. Suppose we try pull a magic rabbit out of the hat this madman in Russia has us staring at? Ideally, it should. I think Putin’s Folly has created a global teaching moment large enough for a smart US president to request an alliance with Xi Jinping not only to sanction Russia, but to begin to disarm ourselves of all nuclear and biological weapons.
I am not going to pretend to know exactly how many nukes every nuclear country has and how to arrange and schedule their terminations and verify all are in compliance with this theoretical disarmament proposal . But a quick Google search shows about 1550 nukes for the USA, 1650 for Russia, 350 for China, 300 for France and 250 for the UK. I’d like to see those weapons dismantled at a rate of about 10% per year.
That gets the world to a survivable space in eight to ten years in the event of even an accidental nuclear war. If Joe Biden can forge an alliance with China using Putin’s irrational Ukrainian war of choice as the initiative, his madmen with a nuke status as the pressing need, Xi’s personal goals for Chinese GDP growth as the sugar – I think he’d soon be regarded as the greatest presidential diplomat of all time.
And it seems to be in Joe Biden to be that international diplomat. He’s done so well the European NATO country leaders. If he can do that with China, it will mark the end of Vladimir Putin’s presidency. This is the win win the entire world really needs right now. We need to get past this moment, then work ensure that there are not more moments like this in the near future and then use these new alliances to address the real problems on earth for its 7 billion people: climate change and the degradations in the standards of living for the majority of people everywhere.
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