"These are not dual-use capabilities," U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell told reporters in Brussels on September 10, describing China's aid to Russia for use against Ukraine. "These are component pieces of a very substantial effort on the part of China to help sustain, build, and diversify various elements of the Russian war machine."
The Beijing-Moscow cooperation, Campbell argued, is "not a tactical alliance." It is, instead, "a fundamental alignment." The Chinese-Russian hook-up was "orchestrated at the highest levels" in the two capitals, he said.
With Campbell's words, the Biden administration for the first time accused China of providing Moscow with direct support for its war. At the same time, U.S. officials detailed Russia's technical assistance to China's submarine and missile programs.
The world's two most dangerous states, Xi Jinping's People's Republic of China and Vladimir Putin's Russian Federation, have been growing closer in part, it seems, because they see there is no cost to ignoring the warnings of the Biden administration.
President Joe Biden drew his red line on March 18, 2022 during a video call with Xi, warning China not to provide "material support" for the Russian war.
The Chinese state had been behind the Russian war effort even before Putin's February 24, 2022 invasion. Beijing apparently approved the attack, as evident from the 5,300-word joint statement issued when the Russian leader met Xi in Beijing just 20 days before the start of hostilities. That is when the two states declared their "no-limits" partnership.
In practice, "no limits" means China's support for Russia has been extensive, including the provision of location data for targeting purposes and the sale of attack drones and ammunition. Russia's most advanced tanks have Chinese circuit boards.
In late April, Secretary of State Antony Blinken admitted that Xi was not heeding America's words. China, he charged, was Russia's primary supplier.
"Whatever Mr. Biden chooses to do next will be momentous for global security and stability," Matthew Pottinger, a deputy national security advisor in the Trump administration, wrote in the Wall Street Journal in late April.
"Mr. Biden can either enforce his red line through sanctions or other means, or he can signal a collapse of American resolve by applying merely symbolic penalties," Pottinger pointed out. "Beijing and its strategic partners in Moscow, Tehran, Pyongyang, and Caracas would surely interpret half-hearted enforcement as a green light to deepen their campaign of global chaos. Mr. Xi sees a historic opportunity here to undermine the West."
Since then, the Biden administration has done little but impose meaningless sanctions on Chinese parties, such as the ones announced on October 17 on two companies.
"Biden's warnings to the People's Republic of China about providing 'lethal aid' to Russia for use in Ukraine were lost in the noise, largely because they were soft and ineffectual," Gregory Copley, president of the International Strategic Studies Association, told Gatestone last week. "They are like the bells on the ice-cream trucks that ply the suburbs of Americans cities: They just excite the children but spur ice-cream sales not a jot."
The American inaction today brings to mind President Barack Obama's infamous red-line failure in Syria in 2013. We should not be surprised: Biden, then vice president, was Obama's foreign policy advisor.
Washington has, during the Biden administration and its predecessors, taught the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, and North Koreans to ignore warnings. For the consequences of Biden's hollow words, the second half of the 1930s in Europe is instructive.
Then, Britain and France issued a series of threatening words to Berlin. German leaders, from the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 to the eve of the invasion of Poland in late summer 1939, ignored them. "Warnings were crafted in such a way so they could not be enforced and understood as not intended to be enforced," Arthur Waldron, the retired Lauder Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania, told this site.
Because London and Paris had failed to act when they had the opportunity to do so, the German leadership did not pay particular attention to their threats about Poland.
Who can blame Berlin for failing to understand the import of British and French statements about their willingness to declare war? "If you fail to act when action was conceivable, how does one hope to have credibility when action is almost impossible?" Waldron asks.
"The U.K. and French governments did not worry sufficiently, prepare sufficiently, or deter their eventual enemy at all," says Copley, also editor-in-chief of Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy. "This is largely because the U.S. and Western governments today, like the French and German governments then, still have not awakened to the nature of the dilemma, and choose to believe that all will always be well."
All is not well now. China's aggressive leader apparently believes he can with impunity do just about anything.
There is no mystery where Xi Jinping got that idea. The fecklessness of the Biden administration has paved the way for history's next great conflict.
Hollow warnings lead to war.
Gordon G. Chang is the author of Plan Red: China's Project to Destroy America and The Coming Collapse of China, a Gatestone Institute Distinguished Senior Fellow, and a member of its Advisory Board.
Edward C. Stengel