Xi-Putin a new Ribbentrop-Molotov pact

Nations have no friends or enemies but only permanent interests to pursue

British foreign minister Lord Palmerston sagely observed that, notwithstanding professions to the contrary, “We have no eternal allies, and we have no eternal enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”

Many are fretting over Chinese President Xi Jinping’s three-day visit to Moscow last week to pal around with Russian President Vladimir Putin. They worry that the twin dictators could forge a formidable alliance to oppose the United States ambition for global supremacy. That ambition may be thwarted by hubris and overreach. But it will not fail because of Russian and Chinese provisional coziness. It carries all the fragility of the 1939 Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact which was shattered by Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, when Hitlerite Germany attacked Stalinist Russia (USSR).

China and Russia have been adversaries for centuries over Manchuria, the Ussuri River, Communist doctrine, or otherwise. They do not share a common language, religion, philosophy, culture, traditions, or values. Chairman Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party broke from the Soviet Union in the 1950s without even a nudge from the United States, a split the CIA only belatedly discerned.

In 1969, the Soviet Union planned surgical nuclear strikes against China, including its nuclear test site at Lop Nor. It refrained only after the United States threatened retaliation.

If the United States ceased to encircle and handcuff both powers, China and Russia would be at loggerheads like Iraq and Iran until we stupidly destroyed the equilibrium in 2003 to reduce the former to a satellite of the latter.

United States foreign policy is earmarked by chronic stupid stuff because we no longer produce Renaissance men or women who see things in their proper perspective and avoid magnifying fleas into elephants. Renaissance thinkers understand, like Lord Byron, that history, with all its volumes vast, hath but one page, that there is nothing new under the sun, and, that an Aristotelian mean is the presumptive optimal approach to any problem. Narrowly trained specialists cannot see the forest for the trees and routinely stumble.

I write these words not in the expectation of influencing the living, who probably are clueless of the Renaissance. But ideas and words are immortal. Those yet to be born may take an interest after the decaying American Empire and Dark Ages pass.