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What would you offer Putin? Other than "nothing, the trap is shut and it's not coming open until you die and whoever replaces you crawls back to grovel".
The PLA is small for a country the size of China, because China, like the USSR before it, is afraid of its own army even with commissars and the CMC.
If Russia ends up in the American sphere of influence, China will have a 4000 km long border it will have to adequately man, drawing both funds and manpower away from its other military endeavors. It will also end up locked out of Central Asia. Outbidding Russian interests is one thing, outbidding Russian interests backed by American interests is another.
Direct, immediate, quid pro quo total sanctions relief (codified, in a treaty) in exchange for a withdrawal from all occupied territory (except Crimea), with the withdrawal happening first. Once a withdrawal occurs, sanctions are lifted and the US helps build a fortified defensive line in Eastern Ukraine, the risk of future invasion is minimal.
Putin's not going to go for that. It's defeat.
It's a better deal than the one the West is offering him now. If he doesn't want to take it, the flow of arms to Ukraine can continue indefinitely at only a tiny percentage of US/Western European GDP.
Actually, it is a substantially worse deal. He's currently winning in Ukraine - why does he want to withdraw? If he accepts the deal he ends up in a worse situation than he is now. Russia and China have both been working on a replacement to the USD as global reserve currency for some time, and the sanctions have directly contributed to the growth of their alternative to western financial systems. They no longer trust the dollar or western financial bodies because they understand that the sanctions can just get turned on and their assets stolen. They'd obviously enjoy being able to get back all the wealth that just got confiscated and stolen, but there's no level of compromise that would get them to stop building and using their alternative systems. What does he have to gain from giving up territory in this deal? The trust relationship between the BRICS and the Western Financial system has been completely broken, and de-dollarisation is picking up pace around the globe because everyone else is correctly realising that the dollar is now a weapon.
Furthermore, what sort of assurances would the US be able to provide that he could actually trust? I don't think there's any deal which both the US and Russia would accept. Do you remember the Minsk accords? Because Russia sure does, and they also remember the following prank call to Francois Hollande.
https://tass.com/world/1600325 (I know this is a Russian news source, but you can just go listen to the phonecall if you want)
For core structural reasons related to the underlying nature of China’s economy, this is impossible. To become a true reserve currency, they’d have to reverse the balance of trade, which is the one thing they’re desperate not to do.
I’ve heard a lot about the dangers of a non-western reserve currency but you’re saying it’s not viable? For China at least.
Would you mind explaining in a bit more detail? I don’t have a good grounding in macro finance.
Right now the yuan is like 3% of global currency reserves, nowhere near enough to really challenge the dollar’s ~60% share.
This is partially because China still has fairly strict capital controls, but also investors are apparently wary of the currency’s trustworthiness in general; the yuan doesn’t have a floating rate determined by the market, it has a fixed rate subject to the same issues of transparency and mismanagement that the rest of the Chinese government has. If other countries did start buying up yuan-dominated bonds way more it would presumably also raise the value of their currency and hurt exports, which they don’t want.
I’m one of those people who doesn’t think it matters too much who has the reserve currency anyway though.
I see, thank you for explaining. I didn’t realise non-floating currencies were still used.
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