If, reflecting the new East-West confrontation, a chess duel of the historical dimension of the one they played in 1972 was repeated Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky in Reykjavíkthe place occupied by the great Soviet chess player would be occupied by a Chinese.
It is no longer the Slavic bear but the Asian dragon that confronts the American eagle on the international board. But as he explained Henry Kissinger in that lucid book that he titled “China”, while the United States it tries to impose the logic of chess on the dispute for world leadership, seeking to eliminate the eastern giant as it had eliminated the Soviet rival, with a withering checkmate; Chinese leadership is managed with the logic of Wei Qi, an ancient “game of the surrounding pieces” better known as “Go”. And in the nineteen line by nineteen line grid of the Wei Qi, what gravitates over each player is the idea of strategic encirclement.
China advances in the Middle East promoting the recent agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia; also in Africa, where his influence is multiplying rapidly, and in Latin America, where he already weighs heavily on Argentina and Bolivia, among other countries, as he goes down the jewel of the region: Brazil. To this geopolitical advance is added the immense Eurasian jewel that completes the strategic fence that tends around the Western powers: Russia.
“We must support everything our enemy fights, and fight everything our enemy supports,” he wrote. Mao Tse-tung. Following that logic, Xi Jinping it had already helped regimes besieged by Washington such as the Cuban, Venezuelan and Nicaraguan regimes. For the same reason he decided to support Russia, also seeking to make it one of his “surrounding pieces” on the international chessboard.
The crossroads where Vladimir Putin put Russiaweakened it and left it in the hands of the eastern neighbor whom it had always despised.
Visiting him in Moscow was an immense favor that he did Xi Jinping to the Russian president. But the overriding intention of the powerful Chinese leader was not to favor the head of the Kremlinbut to finish imposing the control of the Asian giant on Russia.
In the trade agreements with which it has been supported since the Russian economy began to feel the impact of the loss of Western markets caused by sanctions, the ruble weakens in the shadow of the yuan because Russia agreed to trade in yuan with Asian countries. In addition, the assets of companies that they left Russia because of the invasion of Ukraine they were offered at a bargain price to Chinese companies.
As if that were not enough, the Russian Federation He promised to open the doors to a wave of Chinese investments under advantageous conditions, without China going to favor Russian investments in the same way. A sample of the lack of reciprocity between Moscow and Beijing.
The gap in favor of China is also seen in the excessive praise of Putin a Xi, who replied with wary expressions. The Kremlin chief strove to make his powerful visitor tell him that Russia and China They are “allies”, but the Chinese leader limited himself to using the imprecise term “strategic partners” to describe the link between the two countries.
Ally is a category above what the strategic partnership implies. NATO members are allies, while other countries are strategic partners of the Atlantic alliance, which calls them “global partners.”
The main objective of Xi in Moscow was to show himself as the new decisive player on the international board. Posing as a great mediator, taking his proposal to end the war in Ukraine to the heart of the Slavic world.
His first move as a conflict-solving statesman was mediating between the Islamic Republic of Iran and his archenemy from the other coast of the Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabiareaching an agreement to restore diplomatic relations, broken since 2016.
Tehran and Riyadh had closed their respective embassies due to the crisis that led to the execution of the ayatola Al Nimr, sheikh of the Shiite community in the majority Sunni Arab country. But at that point they had already been representing the opposite poles of Islam for decades, each expressing the parties that were definitively at odds after the death of the grandson of Muhammad in Karbala in the year 680, assassinated by order of the Umayyad caliphs who were facing the Chía.
For this reason, in addition to appearing to be playing strong on the complex tableau of the Middle East, reaching a first understanding between the maximum power of Shiism and the Arab power of Sunni Islam, allowed China to get a postcard like the ones the United States achieved with the Egyptian-Israeli agreement they signed in Camp David Menahem Beguin and Anuar el Sadat, and with the agreement for the “peace of the two states” signed by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat in Washington.
But Vladimir Putin he doesn’t care that China is taking over the Russian economy, reversing the terms of a relationship in which Moscow always ranked above Beijing. What matters to the Russian president is to show up in the halls of the Kremlin with such a powerful visitor, because that presence counteracts the isolation that has grown over him since he launched the invasion of Ukraine.
Xi Jinping did Putin the favor of visiting him shortly after the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant against the Russian president. Since then, Putin has been unable to visit any of the 123 countries that have signed and ratified the 1998 Rome Statute without serious problems.
Surely he will not end up in prison in The Hague, as former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic ended his days for the mass deportation of Albanians from Kosovo and for having promoted and financed the ethnic cleansing of Muslims from Bosnia led by Radován Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, also tried and convicted in that court. But the ICC decision makes the Kremlin chief the first president of a power member of the UN Security Council to be denounced by that criminal court. That puts him on a list where there are despicable dictators and other criminals, like the Sudanese Omar al Bashir, for the massacres committed in Darfur.
Trying not to be isolated and showing weaknesses in a war where his forces were unable to take Bakhmut and began to receive T-54 tanks, which are from World War II, Putin has no choice but to rise from Boris Spassky’s chair and become a token that Xi Jinping moves on his Go board.