Posted on 08/26/2014 4:07:59 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
The Kremlin is counting on acquiescence from the BRICS quintet as it confronts the West, and counting on capital from China to offset the loss of Western money. This is a pipedream. China's Xi Jinping drove a brutal bargain in May on a future Gazprom pipeline, securing a price near $350 per 1,000 cubic metres that is barely above Russia's production costs.
Pieties aside, the two countries are rivals in central Asia, where China is systematically building pipelines that break Russia's stranglehold. China has large territorial claims on Far Eastern Russia, land seized from the Qing Dynasty in the 19th century.
Even if Mr Putin's strategy of a Euro-Asia alliance with China succeeds, it will reduce Russia to a vassal state of China, a supplier of commodities with a development model that dooms it to backwardness. "It is a dangerous illusion. We are witnessing the funeral of Russia,” said Aleksandr Kokh, a former top Kremlin official.
Mr Putin is stuck in a Cold War timewarp, deaf to the shifts in world power. He has been obsessed with an imaginary threat from an ageing, pacifist Europe in slow decline, turning manageable differences into needless conflict.
Yet at the same time he is throwing his country at the feet of a rising power that poses a far greater threat in the end, and that will not hesitate to extract the maximum advantage from Russia's self-inflicted weakness.
Mr Putin has misjudged everything.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
I have long wondered why Russia doesn’t see China as its principal rival and threat. If it did, it wouldn’t have been selling technology and weaponry to China since the Cold War ended.
It is speculated that Putin has used his power to loot Russia of about 70 billion dollars for himself, why isn’t more of his mysterious foreign policy looked at, with his short term personal gains in mind?
Huh? China has no active territorial disputes with Russia. Sure they've had them in the past, but this isn't currently an issue between the two countries - the last disputes were resolved in 1996 or thereabouts. Think the author just made this crap up.
Yep. The Russians now aspire to be China’s milk cow. Way to shoot for the stars, Vlad.
Yep. Popular blowhard, bandwagon propaganda aside, China has far surpassed Russia in production, technologies and military buildup. China tested its first nuclear weapon on October 16, 1964 (Project 596, started in June 1959).
You might want to ask some Chinese people about that. Despite the diplomatic fiction, the Chinese still consider all that territory theirs.
Another tidbit that’s obvious from public but not-so-popular news over a little more than the past decade. Russia is much more friendly in military cooperation with North Korea, Iran, Venezuela and the like.
A very interesting point I had not considered. Thank you.
He doesn’t care. He’ll end up living on the Riviera like Baby Doc Duvalier, and laughing every time he pulls out his AmEx Centurion card.
He probably doesn’t think himself as some kind of baron but as an old fashioned Russian Czar. What is old is new again.
Source?
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