Putin and Xi are well beyond the Rubicon

When Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping first met declared After their no-holds-barred relationship in February 2022, and then remaining lifelong friends after the invasion of Ukraine, they have crossed the Rubicon in their confrontation with what they see as the hostile US-led world order. United.

Their summit The past week, which deepened relations on economic and military fronts, set the 21st century Tsar and Red Emperor on a path to a new era beyond the liberal world order they had plotted while having tea at Zhongnanhai, the walled leadership compound. in the center of Beijing. Analogously, they are now halfway to Rome where Julius Caesar, in historical reference, provoked civil war and established a dictatorship upon his return from conquest of the peoples of Gaul.

The meeting came as Russia gains battlefield ground against NATO-backed Ukraine, largely thanks to Beijing's economic lifeline, while US President Joe Biden imposed 100% tariffs on electric vehicles made in China doubled the 25% tariff on solar cells, initially imposed by Donald Trump, to 50%, and tripled taxes on lithium-ion batteries from Chinese electric vehicles.

It appears that China's strategy of straddling both support for Russia and maintaining economic ties with the West is becoming as untenable as the West's wishful thinking that it could drive a wedge between Putin and Xi. The powerful engine of their proclaimed solidarity is to favor it is precisely the bloc system and Cold War mentality that is decried by their rhetoric, even if they are not entirely misplaced in blaming the West, which in many ways is co-responsible for the intensification of the conflict which I have already spoken about in this space.

As is always the case in escalation patterns, one is a condition of the other. Pushing involves pushing back, then pushing back against pushing back and so on.

In short, we already have a clear idea of ​​what the coming new era will look like. As conflict overwhelms the waning ballast of integration forged during the period of globalization, strong geocultural, geopolitical, and geoeconomic blocs are hardening so much that they will not be easily dismantled once firmly in place.

Break up for a common interest

This fortification of a multipolar world relegates hopes for constructive global cooperation on climate change to other impossibilities like a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians. In historical terms, this may be the most significant loss of the direction we are heading.

It's ironic that Biden's new tariffs on Chinese green technology are justified by the claim that fair competition has been stifled by industrial policies of the very type that the United States itself is now implementing through the Inflation Reduction Act, which, in turn, shook the Americas. their own allies in Asia and Europe under the same claim. And this adds to an even richer irony: the global imperative to combat global warming has become the domain of renewed nationalism.

One can imagine Biden's logic: if I don't project a decisive image of protecting American jobs and industry from Chinese exports, all the votes in the next election from the beleaguered working middle class in America's swing states will go to Trump, who not only denies the climate. total change, but is essentially committed to disrupting American democratic norms.

As the climate clock ticks forward, will Biden be able to remove protectionist barriers if re-elected, especially if Europe follows suit and China responds in a way that blocks the influx of exports on whom the NATO allies defending Ukraine, notably Germany, depend so largely?

Past pre-war experiences have taught us that protectionism is a trumped-up racket. But it’s a particularly dangerous gamble to politically use green technologies as a weapon when Earth’s habitat is on the brink of an irreversible cascade toward calamity. Time will tell where this will take us.

As things stand, the best hope for the future depends on global localism's ability to circumvent block geopolitics through subnational cooperation of voluntary networks between cities and regions across the world, although this will be also inevitably limited to the extent that the free circulation of green technologies are.

Bidding farewell to Putin at the gates of the Kremlin during a state visit to Moscow in March 2023, Xi starting words were: Right now there are changes the likes of which we haven't seen in 100 years and we are the ones driving these changes together.

China and Russia have not only charted, but repeatedly reaffirmed, this divergent path, which will now be followed by the West. The long period of post-Cold War purgatory is definitely over, and another era that divides the world again is only beginning.