China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi reportedly told the EU's top diplomat Kaja Kallas on July 3 that the country cannot afford for Russia to lose the war in Ukraine amid fears the U.S. would shift focus towards Beijing, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported, citing sources familiar with the conversation.
  • Gsus4@mander.xyzOPEnglish
    3·
    13 days ago

    This sentence makes no sense:

    Unfortunately the US, and the EU, haven’t explained why they don’t want to be part of a multipolar world.

    Is a multipolar world what russia is doing in Ukraine? If you’re going to have a world of trade blocks: NAmerica, SAmerica, EU, Africa, ME, russia?, China, India, Pacific. Europe is perfectly prepared to enter a multilateral or multipolar world order…but not the way russia announced it.

    You can’t simply invade one of the members whenever they try to leave your block. Otherwise you’ll have constant wars in the borders between the blocks. I can tell you already why I would not want to regress to the kind of chaos and constant wars of multipolar unstable alliances of the 17th century, now with nukes and proliferation. Fun! Who wouldn’t want that?

    A multipolar world can work, but you need stronger international institutions and law, not the mockery that russia, the US and israel turned the UN into.

      • Gsus4@mander.xyzOPEnglish
        2·
        13 days ago

        It also means that russia can’t unilaterally claim all of Ukraine, other countries can say no…it works for everyone. Welcome to the multipolar world too, russia.

        And let me repeat: if the only thing other countries can do to stop anyone’s actions is war and countries just ignore borders, then it will be an extremely unstable system, like in the 17th century. Bipolar is more stable, like in the cold war. Unipolar is relatively stable, but there is no accountability, like in a 1-party system.

    • plyth@feddit.orgEnglish
      0·
      13 days ago

      Ukraine seems to be more of a unipolar project than a multipolar project. The important part is the last part of the last sentence.

      David C. Hendrickson, in his article in Foreign Affairs on November 1, 1997, saw the core of the book as the ambitious strategy of NATO to move eastward to Ukraine’s Russian border and vigorously support the newly independent republics of Central Asia and the Caucasus, which is an integral part of what Hendrickson said could be called a “tough love” strategy for the Russians. Hendrickson considers “this great project” to be problematic for two reasons: the “excessive expansion of Western institutions” could well introduce centrifugal forces into it; moreover, Brzezinski’s “test of what legitimate Russian interests are” seems to be so strict that even a democratic Russia would probably “fail”.

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Chessboard

      Of course there can also be wars in the multipolar world. But there are enough started by the US that peace seems to be secondary.

      • Gsus4@mander.xyzOPEnglish
        1·
        13 days ago

        Ukraine is as multipolar as it gets: they don’t want to be russia’s bitch, so they asked everyone else for help, some helped.