How President Biden took China away from Putin
President Biden has spent the past month keeping China from joining Putin’s war, and it appears Biden has now found the leverage to turn China almost fully against Putin. This would be a Mount Rushmore level accomplishment . Biden may have saved us all from world war.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping is always going to continue to play both sides, in proportion to which side he thinks is more likely to win. So don’t be shocked if he throws Putin a minor verbal bone in all this. But if Xi’s rhetoric is 95% anti-Putin and 5% pro-Putin, it means Xi thinks our side has won, and China knows it.
There will still be people in the cheap seats yelling things like “I don’t trust Xi.” But that’s gibberish. Of course you can trust Xi – to opportunistically do whatever he thinks is best for himself. From the start, Biden has figured out how to position things such that Xi was better off siding with the U.S. than siding with Putin. Xi simply ended up acting accordingly.
