From one piece Sarah Paine - Why Putin and Xi can't escape geography 11 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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And if you think about China, it has benefited more than any other country from rejoining the family of nations in this maritime world under Deng Xiaoping.
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Sanctions are like economic chemotherapy. What you're doing is presenting preventing one or two percent growth per annum even with leaky sanctions, right?
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It was a miracle of your lifetimes. It lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. The problem for the likes of Putin is that this wealth producing trade was not happening at his house, but the houses of those vested in the trading order, not in extortion.
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And also, for China, with its geographical setup as it is, uh the seas are going to be open to it only in peacetime. In wartime, this has nothing to do with anyone doing anything to them. It's just facts.
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They're the only uh power in Europe that doesn't need to maintain a large standing army because if Britain could maintain a competent navy, no army's going to reach British shores cuz they're going to be drowned at sea.
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And it turns out that there's been a tendency over the course of China's and Russia's long histories to overextend and this helps account for the implosions of various empires and dynasties.
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One, you're surrounding yourself by failing states. You can look at Russia and China and they're surrounded by some of the most dysfunctional places on the planet and you go, "Gee whiz, are they unlucky or they complicit?"
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You set them up to fail, you destabilize the rising, you ingest the failing, and you set up buffer zones in between, and you await the opportune moment to pounce and absorb. This is Vladimir Putin's game.
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And what's fascinating is today when China claims whatever its historical lands are, they either choose the Mongol Yuan Dynasty or the Manchu Qing Dynasty when the Han were subjugated people.
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And Russia's never had a commerce-driven economy. China much more so under Deng Xiaoping, but recently Xi Jinping has been privileging the crony sector over the private sector and neither one has stable government institutions.
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So, China and Russia certainly have maritime ambitions, but I'm not clear they actually understand what goes into a full maritime paradigm.