As a US official aptly told reporters in a background briefing yesterday: “This is Potemkin politics. President Putin is accelerating the very conflict that he’s created.”
China’s Xi Jinping has done it. The international tribunal in The Hague ruled in 2016 that Beijing had “no legal basis” under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea to the maritime territories it seized from the Philippines.
Xi simply ignored the ruling and continues his ever-expanding encroachments on the territories claimed by China’s neighbours. Xi may be less showmanlike than Putin, but he is more ambitious. Since 2020, he has applied new energy to pressuring Japan, India, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei as well as Taiwan. With impunity.
Law and order do not apply and the US and its allies are no less guilty than Russia and China. So this is not about morality. There are no morals in the jungle. The shock here is that the US and its allies find themselves no less vulnerable, either.
The US now faces a peer competitor. As Rush Doshi, China director of US President Joe Biden’s National Security Council, wrote last year before he went to work in the White House: “The US cannot compete with China symmetrically – that is, dollar for dollar, ship for ship or loan for loan – in part because of China’s sheer relative size.”
Russia, a smaller and declining power, is not in China’s league, but they are in league with each other. Putin and Xi signed their so-called “no limits” cooperation agreement two weeks ago. They will aid and abet each other’s pursuit of power at the West’s expense. Beijing, you’ll note, refrained from any criticism of Putin’s latest aggression.
In the jungle, the only law is the law of survival. Putin has shattered any last pretence that some “rules-based order” or system of restraint will protect countries and peoples from domination by foreign powers. We have all been warned.
Our Breaking News Alert will notify you of significant breaking news when it happens. Get it here.
Loading
Putin shatters any last pretence that ‘rules-based order’ will protect us
Source: Philippines Alive
