From one piece Sarah Paine - Why Putin and Xi can't escape geography 6 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
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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Their words
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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Their words
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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Their words
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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Their words
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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Their words
So, China and Russia certainly have maritime ambitions, but I'm not clear they actually understand what goes into a full maritime paradigm.