Zugzwang is the position between adversaries when one is forcing the other to make the next move, but whatever move he makes will be his defeat.
President Donald Trump (lead image, left) is in it.
The only way out for him is to play for time, disguising his predicament with as much noise, camouflage, and confusion as his supporters can manage.
When this happens to presidents, everyone who can deserts him while throwing up subterfuges, shams, and smokescreens. This is what Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the leading candidates to succeed Trump in two years’ time, are doing.
Those whose corrupt fortunes tie them to Trump and his successor, Eric Trump, have no alternative but to do all they can to damage the Democratic Party alternative. This requires a combination of making war against Iran, Russia and China; making peace to reduce the price of oil, fertilizers, and inflation at home; making the European, British, and Asian allies nervous enough to keeping paying and stay loyal.
Inside the Deep State — where the supply of money depends every budget season on action, not inaction; operations which Congressional committees like to vote for, not those they dislike and vote against — there is a loosening of vertical command and oversight from the White House, an increase in experiments, adventures, trial balloons, faits accomplis, stabs in the back. The Central Command operation on Monday, May 25, for example, was announced as “self-defense strikes in southern Iran today to protect our troops from threats posed by Iranian forces.” It achieved nothing militarily. Politically, however, it drew Trump’s prompt endorsement: “Negotiations with the Islamic Republic of Iran are proceeding nicely! It will only be a Great Deal for all or, no Deal at all — Back to the Battlefront and shooting, but bigger and stronger than ever before.” He then added a reminder of who his real targets are: “The Dumacrats and Media have totally lost their way. They have gone absolutely CRAZY!!!”
Trump also warned his successors and their campaign financiers that he isn’t a lame duck yet. “Just finished my 6 month physical at Walter Reed Military Medical Center. Everything checked out PERFECTLY. Thank you to the great Doctors and Staff! Heading back to the White House.”
Zugzwang is also the position in which Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping find themselves uncomfortably. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, too.
If Russia, China and India each face wars with multiple adversaries led by Trump, what is to be done to conserve their domestic political power and maintain enough escalation control on their battlefields to deter Trump’s adventurism. When a Ukrainian press agency asked for China’s reaction to the escalation of Russian strikes against the Ukrainian leadership in Kiev on Sunday, the spokesman for Foreign Minister Wang Yi responding for President Xi answered: “China’s position on the Ukraine crisis is consistent and clear. Dialogue and negotiation is the only viable way out. We call on parties concerned to work together for deescalation as soon as possible and accumulate conditions for restarting dialogue and negotiation.”
The best way of learning how the men inside the Kremlin think is in the history of the Byzantine Empire which began in the 4th century AD and whose last day, the anniversary of the empire’s last day, we celebrate this week – May 29, 1453.
The Kremlin men, fresh from their trip to the Forbidden City in Bejing, don’t think the American Empire will last for a comparable thousand years. They also don’t believe, like the Chinese, that the American Empire is close to an end which Russians and Chinese should be preparing to celebrate.
In their manuals of tactics and strategy and in the annals of their negotiations, treaties, and wars, the Byzantines, like the Kremlin men, tell themselves that the best way of deterring an enemy’s army from testing the red lines they say they will defend is, first of all, to announce their red lines; and then to bribe the enemy from crossing them. Only if the bribes are paid, the red lines crossed by force, and the bribetakers have reneged, is war inescapable.
At that point, the Byzantines long accepted, the force to be applied to those enemies who have violated the commitments they took bribes to accept must be ruthless, comprehensive, total.
“Do nothing unless you really have to,” advised the Byzantine treatise on strategy, De Re Strategica, composed in the 10th century AD, “but watch the enemy’s moves carefully, so that you can strike effectively if action is unavoidable.”
Bribery was a strategic method for achieving political objectives by postponing war. It was more predictable in outcome and cost less to carry out. But the Byzantine emperors and their advisers and commanders also understood that bribery is temporary because it’s always personal, psychological. One way they employed it to extend its effectiveness was to lull the bribe receivers into false confidence in their power, kill them, and replace them with newcomers whose lack of confidence increased their dependence on fresh bribes and thus delayed their readiness to go to war.
Buying time with a combination of bribes and regime decapitation has been the strategy of President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in their war against Iran in June of last year and since February 28 of this year. But this has been a failure; time is now running against them both.
They have also failed on one of the Byzantine strategist’s pieces of psychological advice – never hate your enemy so much that you don’t understand him, can’t anticipate him, or you end up underestimating his capacity to deceive you and succeed in his counterattack.
President Vladimir Putin doesn’t play chess like the Byzantines and he hasn’t studied their strategy history, especially the annals where they explain how and why they defeated the Russians. Putin and his associates have also failed to follow another of the Byzantine strategist’s pieces of psychology – never love your enemy, or want to be loved by him so much that you end up underestimating his capacity to deceive and counterattack.
In the Kremlin department of loving the Americans and wanting to be loved by them too much, the vizier in charge is Kirill Dimitriev, Putin’s special representative for arranging bribes to Trump, his sons, and friends.
“The sad reality”, concludes a modern Greek historian of Byzantium, “that the emperors in Constantinople had to face was that the limited resources in money and manpower constituted the waging of war in more than one theatre an almost inconceivable prospect, especially since the maintaining of an active army posed a heavy burden”. Their solution “was to praise the use of diplomacy, the paying of subsidies, and the employment of stratagems, craft, wiles, bribery and ‘other means’ to deceive the enemy and bring back the army with as few casualties as possible; a strategy of non-engagement that made perfect sense in military terms.”
A Jewish historian of Byzantium in his manual for the Israeli leadership has warned that the “strategic advantage that was neither diplomatic nor military [is] instead psychological”. It’s a warning they haven’t comprehended. “Subversion is the best path to victory. It is so cheap compared to the costs and risk of battle that it must always be attempted, even with the most unpromising targets infused with hostility ior religious ardour…the Byzantines had certainly discovered that religious fanatics can also be bribed, and indeed often more easily – they are creative in inventing religious justifications for taking bribes…”
In the new Capitals Uncovered podcast with Pelle Neroth Taylor (Sweden) and Martin Sieff (US), we focus on how to interpret the Russian General Staff’s Oreshnik strikes on command bunkers in Kiev and Bela Tserkva, and what to expect next if, as the Russians believe, Trump has signalled a green light to the escalation of their military operations.
The Russian missile attack on central Kiev and on the airbase bunker at Bela Tserkva, 75 kilometres south of Kiev, over Saturday evening and Sunday morning, was a calibrated retaliation for the Ukrainian attack on the children’s dormitory at Starobelsk, Lugansk region, on Friday.
Measured tit for tat against neo-Nazi terrorism — that is how the Kremlin believes it will deter Ukrainian escalation of the war against Russia.
The official Russian Defense Ministry announcement, issued late on Sunday afternoon (May 24), identified the missiles used as Oreshnik, Kinzhal, Iskander, and Zircon.
The targets were “objects of the Ukrainian military-industrial complex, military infrastructure, as well as the control points of the Main Command of the Army, the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense and other control points of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.”
This is regime decapitation for Ukrainian military commanders, not for the civilian leadership of Vladimir Zelensky.
Russian sources in a position to know also say that President Vladimir Putin now believes his campaign of bribes for President Donald Trump, his family, his negotiators and their business associates has achieved a new level of freedom to act against the Zelensky regime by military means because negotiations for a peace settlement have failed and ended.
“They were not fruitful, unfortunately,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged at a NATO meeting in Sweden on Friday (May 22). “Despite leaks that are not true, despite stories out there about us forcing the Ukrainians to take this position or that position, which are not true, we – if we see an opportunity to pull together talks that are productive, not counterproductive, and that have the chance to be fruitful, we’re prepared to play that role. There are – there are no such talks occurring at this time, but we hope that will change because that war can only end with a negotiated settlement. It will not end with a military victory by one side or the other, at least from a traditional standpoint of how military victories are defined.”
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had already acknowledged that the negotiating framework Putin and President Donald Trump had agreed on last August – the Anchorage Formula – has come to nothing, and that the Russian army will bring the war to an end on its terms. “Many good words are being said about the enormous potential for mutually beneficial, modern, technological, energy-related, and other projects between Russia and the United States. However, nothing is happening in real life…we will achieve the goals of the special military operation under any circumstances. Preferably through diplomatic means, but if not, we will continue to do so within the framework of the special military operation.”
Putin believes he is being clear in his public statements.
In his address after the Starobelsk attack, he said “it is clear to us, and it is once again made evident, whom we are dealing with, whom we are fighting against, and what we are fighting for. This constitutes a manifestation of neo-Nazism. It once again serves to confirm the terrorist nature of the Kiev regime.”
“What makes things even worse for the ruling elite is the all-consuming corruption that is rotting society from within – corruption the regime’s leaders are covering for. In reality, they are participants in these corrupt schemes themselves. That is why they then help each other flee the country, seeking refuge in Israel and elsewhere abroad. Everyone – in Ukraine and around the world – knows that the Ukrainian government is corrupt through and through. Embezzlement everywhere. It has got to the point where they are stealing military equipment and personal protective gear meant for those being driven to the front like cattle, sent to die for the very people who are plundering Ukraine and its foreign aid.”
“The Kiev regime clearly needs crimes like this. They need them to distract attention from what is happening at the front and inside the country, to provoke a reaction from Russia – and then, we know this, we have seen it many times before – to blame everything on us. On Russia. On our country. All the escalation, all the consequences of such crimes. I repeat, we have been here many times before.”
This was the first time that Putin has identified Israel on the side of Russia’s enemies in the war, and as a safe haven for the Jewish members of the Zelensky regime on the civilian side, not the military command.
Was Putin signalling that he is now lifting his restriction on the General Staff plans targeting Zelensky and his civilians because they are “neo-Nazi terrorists”?
A Russian source in a position to know says yes. “The Anchorage formula looked like Putin’s agreement with Trump that he would push Zelensky into agreeing terms in diplomatic negotiations. In fact, it was agreement on the bribes to be paid to Trump in return for Russian freedom of action if Zelensky wouldn’t agree. Now the deal is – you [Trump] don’t have to deliver Zelensky. We [Russia] can take him out.”
Another source confirms the confidence of Kremlin officials that the Trump “fix is in – the war will end in three more months.”
Listen or view the discussion with Dimitri Lascaris in the Reason2Resist podcast, recorded on Sunday morning, Moscow time.
“The mutual respect the Chinese side asks us to show towards them when they respond with a theory of their supremacy over time over our dead bodies – that is offensive. For this to come from the Politburo of the Communist Party of China is more than strange. It’s a fundamental historical mistake. It doesn’t seem quite like the Communist Party of China feels that comrades are comrades.”
Click to view or listen to the podcast which was first aired on Friday afternoon, Europe time; morning US time.
“We are not fighting anyone”, President Vladimir Putin announced in Beijing this week to the reassurance of his host, President Xi Jinping. “We are ready to cooperate with everyone, with all our global partners, including the United States.”
Xi replied privately, also with reassurance for the US. The US first, Russia second.
Publicly, this has been expressed by his Politburo colleague Wang Yi as “win-win cooperation”, and by Xi as “constructive strategic stability” and “win-win” with the US.
More precisely, this is “comprehensive strategic stalemate”, according to a newly released report from the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations. “Deep intertwining interests and complex interdependence are another major reason and feature of the new phase of the strategic stalemate between China and the U.S. Unlike the nearly parallel US-Soviet relationship during the Cold War, China and the US are increasingly forming an economic and trade relationship that is both complementary and mutually beneficial but also “easily manipulated and disrupted by the other…Under the strong leadership of the Party Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core, China has united as one, daring and combative, and with firm determination, ample confidence, and steady steps to containment and suppression by the United States, it has openly safeguarded its legitimate rights and interests and achieved a phased stabilization of China-U.S. relations. The China-U.S. rivalry has shifted from the initial stalemate during Trump’s term to a new stage of comprehensive stalemate.”
The China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (中国现代国际关系研究院) are the research and analysis establishment of China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS); the report has been published by chinadiplomacy.org.cn, which is jointly run by CIIS, the research institute of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In the assessment of Arnaud Bertrand, the document’s composers include “the CIA and the FBI all wrapped in one. You can hardly get closer to the horse’s mouth – short of sitting in on a Politburo briefing.”
From the Russian point of view, this is a Chinese advertisement of a two-horse race which the Chinese side is confident they will win because they are already winning — so long as they don’t have to go to war, like Russia, like Iran.
The suspicion in Moscow of Xi’s ambition to become G2 with Trump was aired publicly before Putin before left for Beijing. It has been muffled since his return home without the agreement on the Power of Siberia-2 gas pipeline which was a priority on the Russian agenda.
The Russian state media editorialized on the Russia-China-US “triangle” – the G3. “The United States and China are strategic rivals, and that rivalry isn’t temporary… relations between Washington and Beijing are defined by uncertainty and suspicion Moscow and Beijing have constructed something far steadier: a relationship whose trajectory no longer depends on atmospherics or temporary political moods… Russia and China don’t fundamentally view each other as adversaries so while practical disputes may cause irritation, delays or bargaining, but they don’t threaten the relationship itself. Both sides may occasionally exercise restraint in directly supporting the other if circumstances become too risky or complicated. But neither Moscow nor Beijing is prepared to undermine the broader partnership for the sake of tactical advantage elsewhere because the relationship is seen as strategically valuable in its own right.”
In this podcast with Vanessa Beeley, the discussion picks through the evidence to find the meaning of the two Beijing summits for the Iran war, the Ukraine war, and the Taiwan war, for the permanent war to follow the successions of both President Trump and President Putin; President Xi too. Click to view or listen: https://beeley.substack.com/p/the-beijing-summits-world-governance
There’s a children’s playground called Multipolarity (aka Polycentricity). It’s large enough for children to play games of hide and seek*.
That’s a game as ancient as the Greeks of the time of Thucydides. He’s famous in China because President Xi Jinping quotes him to American presidents – last week to Donald Trump – as an invitation not to cheat when playing the game.
Let’s play hide and seek with Xi and his visitor this week, President Vladimir Putin. They are the hiders. We are It – the ones who must cover our eyes, count to ten, while the hiders do their best to conceal themselves from us. If we find them out, we win. They win if we don’t – at least that’s what they think.
Wait a minute! that’s not the rule of the Multipolarity Game.
Putin and Xi have just spent a night and a day together and concluded by announcing they and their allies and partners should be It. The enemies – they are the other players, the hiders in the game with names which Putin and Xi use like “hegemon”, “unilateralist”, “fascist”, “jungle man” instead of their legal names, Americans, their European and Asian allies, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia. In this variant of the Multipolarity Game, these players should hide from It finding them out, then doing to them what they have been threatening or doing to It already.
“Our meeting today,” Putin said at one of his Beijing meetings, “falls on a momentous date, but our friendship with China is not directed against anyone. We are not fighting anyone. We are simply pursuing our own interests and following our own development path. What is more, we are ready to cooperate with everyone, with all our global partners, including the United States.”
This is not a Putin joke. Russia is at war, fighting on several fronts “including the United States”. Scores of Russians are being killed every day on the Ukraine battlefield and in the hinterland of the country; their ships, cargoes and money seized or destroyed far away from the homeland. About them, Putin is announcing to the hiders that he’s the seeker; that he’s put on his blindfold and is about to count to ten (one hundred, one thousand more like) while he has sent a special friend called Kirill Dmitriev to join the Americans in their hiding places.
Wait a minute, another minute! In the game Putin and Dmitriev are playing with the Americans with whom they have been friends since their meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, last August, who is hider, who is seeker, who is It, who Isn’t?
The game, Xi told Putin before they had their Wednesday tea party, “remains far from tranquil. The damage caused by unilateral actions and hegemony is unprecedented, and the threat of regression to the law of the jungle looms large. In this regard, I have put forward the concept of a community.” This is Xi’s way of saying we are all children together so let’s play the game and stay the best of friends, win or lose.
“In the 21st century,” the game — they have just solemnly signed (May 20) — is “evolving towards a long-term state of polycentricity and the formation of international relations of a new type.” The game’s up, they say, for those “states to single-handedly manage world affairs, impose their interests on the entire world and restrict the sovereign development opportunities of other countries in the spirit of the colonial era.”
“I have agreed with President Trump,” Xi had announced the week before, “on a new vision of building a constructive China-U.S. relationship of strategic stability. “Constructive strategic stability means positive stability with cooperation as the mainstay, healthy stability with competition within proper limits, constant stability with manageable differences, and lasting stability with expectable peace.” This is Chinese for adults, not children – no playing hide and seek because everything will be in its proper place.
Does Xi really mean that, or are he and Putin kidding, just like adults do with children?
Doubling down is what the alliance of Russia’s enemies should do now, editorializes the Financial Times, the Japanese propaganda platform in London, pointing at the summit meeting in Beijing between President Vladimir Putin and President Xi Jinping. The alliance “should take confidence in their strategy — even if it will be a long haul — and double down on supporting Ukraine with the weapons, intelligence and cash needed to see it through.”
One Anglo-Japanese stone, two Sino-Russian birds – “even if Moscow is ever more the junior partner in the relationship, this will be an opportunity for the Russian president to project strength beside a fellow strongman leader”.
A long time ago, when the Prime Minister of Greece Andreas Papandreou understood that the enemy of his country and of himself was the American Empire, and I was a member of his private office, he gave me a copy of Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War to read – study carefully he said – over my August holiday in Crete.
Papandreou knew the lessons of overweaning US power and demonstrated how to defeat it – until he was defeated. His successors, starting with his senior son, proved their ignorance of the lessons and their state is now among the poorest, weakest, most scorned colonial possessions of the American Empire.
President Vladimir Putin and President Xi Jinping lack Papandreou’s education and skill at empire fighting; they think they will escape his downfall.
The test of the latter (downfall) is time – Putin, 73, thinks he has about two years in which to prepare for the succession of 2030. Xi, 72, is president without limitation of term, for life; his father died at 88 so he may calculate he has another twelve years, ten to be on the safe side.
The test of the former (skill at empire fighting) remains what they have read and learned from Thucydides. Putin has prayed to the Greek gods on Mount Athos (twice) and in Athens, but those gods were Orthodox ones, not classic ones. He has never said he has read Thucydides, nor has he ever publicly quoted Thucydides.
Aloud, Xi has been mentioning Thucydides since 2014. According to Wang Zichen’s encyclopedia of the Thucy-Xi combination, there were four references through 2024, always to Americans.
Last week during his meeting in Beijing with President Donald Trump, Xi mentioned Thucydides again. With the Americans, Xi has referred to the same line from Thucydides; or to be more precise, to the same American interpretation of one line. There’s no evidence that Xi has read the original History, or even the 32 sections, 3,000 words of Book V, Chapter 17, where the one line appears in the story of the ancient genocide, the Athenian empire’s slaughter of the Melians.
When Xi began his references in 2014, he made sure his audience understood he was sinofying them. “One needs to read ten thousand books and journey ten thousand miles to gain understanding”, Xi said. “Since China is an ancient civilization with over five thousand years of history, sometimes we ourselves don’t even know where to start. There is a famous poem about Lushan Mountain that says when you view it from different directions you get a different impression. And maybe my own perspective has limitations. As the poem also says, you won’t have the whole picture of the mountain when you yourself are on it.”
The ethnocentric fatuousness of this escapes those China analysts who haven’t read English detective stories, seen the Rashomon movie, or recognized the countless variations of the same idea stretching across all cultures. As Greek mountains go, however, Xi got closer to Thucydides than Putin on Mt Athos by visiting the Acropolis in 2019. But Putin had beaten Xi to the same spot in 2001. Xi has not climbed Mt Athos.
Because the American Empire has dominated Xi’s reading of Thucydides, there are some lines of Thucydides which it’s possible for Putin to hint at with Xi when they meet this week (May 19-20), at least privately when Americans aren’t listening, at least not directly.
Which of Thucydides’s lines Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov omitted to say as he announced the obvious: “The [Beijing] agenda is clear: bilateral relations come first, including our special privileged partnership and impressive trade and economic cooperation, with its annual value consistently above $200 billion. Of course, active discussions of international affairs will also be on the agenda. [On President Donald Trump’s visit to Beijing] we are closely following reports in the media, and we also expect to get information straight from the horse’s mouth [sic] once we are in China.”
There are seven Thucydides lines for this Sino-Russian summit (in the Rex Warner translation of 1954):
“So we are not to speak before the people, no doubt in case the mass of the people should hear once and for all, and without interruption an argument from us which is both persuasive and incontrovertible , and so should be led away” (section 85).
“When these matters are discussed by practical people, the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel” (89).
“If we were on friendly terms with you, our subjects would regard that as a sign of weakness, whereas your hatred is evidence of our power” (95).
“Hope, that comforter in danger!…hope is by nature an expensive commodity, and those who are risking all on one cast find out only what it means when they are already ruined” (103).
“Our opinion of the gods and our knowledge of men lead us to conclude that it is a general and necessary law to rule whatever one can”(105).
“If one follows one’s self-interest one wants to be safe whereas the path of justice and honour involves one in danger” (107).
“Goodwill shown by the party that is asking for help does not mean security for the prospective ally. What is looked for is a positive preponderance of power in action” (109).
Each of these lines was what Thucydides put into the mouths of the Athenians. The Melians didn’t get the best lines — not those most remembered after two thousand years. Instead, it’s their fate which is remembered.
In Thucydides’s conclusion, speaking on the evidence he had gathered from those who had been present, he wrote: “[Athenian] siege operations were now carried on vigorously and, as there was also some treachery from inside, the Melians surrendered unconditionally to the Athenians who put to death all the men of military age whom they took, and sold the women and children as slaves” (116).
The usual footnote added in modern translations of the History of the Peloponnesian War is that the Athenians won the battle against Melos in 416-15 BC but lost the war against Sparta in 405 BC. Melos was then recovered by the Spartans and repopulated after twelve years. The island (Μήλος, Mílos) has been a part of the Greek state until it was taken by the Germans in the war of 1940-45, and then Athens by the Americans, so it is again a colony.
There is no footnote on the operational and strategic lessons for today. These are being learned at this moment: for example, sieges (by ground, sea, air) do not defeat targets without the betrayal of a Fifth Column; and on the strategic lesson that genocides end up badly for the killers because supremacists have life expectancies too. Winning wars against empires is surviving the submission and suppression.
“I hope I am not revealing any great secret,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (lead image, left) said at his press conference following the BRICS ministerial meeting in Delhi on Friday (May 15).
But he did just that:
By hint towards China on its voting to approve loans for the Ukraine at the International Monetary Fund (IMF); and towards India for its failure to allow a collective BRICS statement in support of Iran’s defence in the US-Israel war; and by explicitness towards the US, particularly towards negotiator Steven Witkoff for his duplicity in the Anchorage Formula negotiations.
Two empires, one system – that’s the idea which President Xi Jinping has asked President Donald Trump to accept.
In the official Chinese version of the talks between Xi and Trump in Beijing this week, Xi declared: “I have agreed with President Trump on a new vision of building a constructive China-U.S. relationship of strategic stability. This will provide strategic guidance for China-U.S. relations over the next three years and beyond.”
The reference to “three years” was Xi’s way of reminding the world that Trump’s term is coming to an end. Trump’s reply was his introduction to Xi of Eric Trump, his second son, as his successor in November 2028. Until then Eric Tump is in charge of bribe receipts.
“Constructive strategic stability,” Xi went on, according to the text of the Chinese Foreign Ministry readout, “means positive stability with cooperation as the mainstay, healthy stability with competition within proper limits, constant stability with manageable differences, and lasting stability with expectable peace.”
This is the standard peaceful coexistence formula which Xi, Wang Yi, Politburo influencer and Foreign Minister, and other Chinese officials have been repeating regularly. Wang had told Secretary of State Marco Rubio by telephone on April 30 the same thing “so as to achieve mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation”.
But Xi added a point he has been recording for American audiences since 2015. “Can China and the United States overcome the Thucydides Trap,” Xi told Trump, “and create a new paradigm of major-country relations? Can we meet global challenges together and provide greater stability for the world? Can we build a bright future together for our bilateral relations in the interest of the well-being of the two peoples and the future of humanity? These are the questions vital to history, to the world, and to the people. They are the questions of our times that the leaders of major countries need to answer together.”
Xi was opening the Thucydides Trap for Trump as if Xi believes both of them believe it.
But he had closed the trap in the US in 2015. “There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides Trap in the world,” Xi had said in a Seattle speech on September 23, 2015. “But should major countries time and again make the mistakes of strategic miscalculation, they might create such traps for themselves.”
“We must read each other’s strategic intentions correctly. Building a new model of major country relationship with the United States that features non-conflict, non-confrontation, mutual respect and win-win cooperation is the priority of China’s foreign policy.”
Xi has used this combination of the classic Greek text and idea of the inevitability of clash of empires from a Harvard academic backer of US empire for the purpose of appearing more conciliatory towards Trump than he appeared to be with President Barack Obama in 2015. In 2021, to an Australian prime minister, Xi also referred to Thucydides, but not to the Harvard professor’s interpretation. Xi spoke of the Melian Dialogue; that was the warning Athens gave the Melians, allies of Sparta, and then implemented when they refused to submit to the Athenian terms of surrender. Genocidal slaughter of the Melians followed; but after eleven years, Athens was defeated, and the Melians recovered.
Xi has not referred publicly to the Melian genocide during the US-Israeli wars against Gaza and the Palestinians, Lebanon, and Iran.
He did, however, repeat for Trump the warning Wang gave Rubio a fortnight ago. “President Xi stressed that the Taiwan question is the most important issue in China-U.S. relations. If it is handled properly, the bilateral relationship will enjoy overall stability. Otherwise, the two countries will have clashes and even conflicts, putting the entire relationship in great jeopardy. ‘Taiwan independence’and cross-Strait peace are as irreconcilable as fire and water. Safeguarding peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait is the biggest common denominator between China and the US. The US side must exercise extra caution in handling the Taiwan question.”
In the White House readout – published in a White House handout in Beijing but not on the White House website – there is no mention of Taiwan. Instead, Trump said he had discussed “expanding market access for American businesses into China and increasing Chinese investment into our industries”; “ending the flow of fentanyl precursors into the US”; and “increasing Chinese purchases of American agricultural products”. These are three of Trump’s forms of Chinese tribute payment to the US.
Trump had two more for Xi: China should reverse its support of Iran in defending against the US war, Trump’s readout says, and should buy US oil instead of Iranian.
“The two sides agreed that the Strait of Hormuz must remain open to support the free flow of energy. President Xi also made clear China’s opposition to the militarization of the Strait and any effort to charge a toll for its use and he expressed interest in purchasing more American oil to reduce China’s dependence on the Strait in the future. Both countries agreed that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon.”
For Xi to mean to agree to the Trump tributary system, in opposition to Iran’s position as oil supplier to China, Iran’s scheme for control of the Hormuz Strait and for strategic deterrence from US and Israeli attack, contradicts the understandings Wang gave Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on April 29.
For Xi the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party to have proposed the formulation of the Thucydides Trap as the foundation for China and the US to accept peaceful coexistence (aka “constructive peaceful stability”) is exceptional. The last senior Communist Party figure to have proclaimed as much was Mikhail Gorbachev. His overthrow followed in six years — planned, promoted and financed by successive US governments.
This has been a lesson which successive Russian governments and presidents have found it slow and difficult to learn, acknowledge, and defend themselves from. In the latest statement of Russian lesson-learning, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov – less influential with Putin than Wang with Xi – declared in an interview on May 13: “We appreciate the fact that President Trump initiated dialogue with us and with President Putin. We have communicated at the levels of heads of the US State Department and our Foreign Ministry, and the Aide [sic] to the President of Russia holds meetings with President Trump’s special representative. Many good words are being said about the enormous potential for mutually beneficial, modern, technological, energy-related, and other projects between Russia and the United States.”
“However, nothing is happening in real life. Aside from this regular dialogue – which is normal in relations between people and countries – everything else follows the pattern initiated by President Biden. The sanctions imposed under him have remained in force. Moreover, the Trump administration has adopted its own initiatives in order to punish Russia’s economy…their goal is entirely clear: they want to bring every significant energy supply route under their control…Pressing everyone into not buying Russian oil is a dirty tactic. You can describe it in different ways – colonial or neocolonial – but these are methods of exploitation. Deep down, they are designed to strong arm everyone into buying expensive US oil and liquefied natural gas rather than cheap Russian oil. In this way, they seek to rule the world through controlling global energy supplies.”
About the Hormuz control regime, Lavrov added: “Now the Americans are demanding that the Strait of Hormuz be reopened. But it was never closed. It is always important to look at what lies beneath.”
Xi and Wang think that beneath the Hormuz Strait, there is Taiwan (and Japanese remilitarization) and China’s priority to maintain “stability” in its relationship with the US over the time the Chinese calculate to themselves that they expect to defeat and subjugate the US empire — without firing a shot.
Lavrov met Araghchi the day after his press interview. His communiqué says: “In a detailed and trustworthy manner, the ministers discussed the course of the negotiations to settle the armed conflict unleashed by the United States and Israel in the Middle East. The Russian side emphasised the importance of preserving the ceasefire regime and the fragile armistice as well as preventing disruption of the political and diplomatic efforts to achieve a comprehensive Iranian-US understanding which opens the way to a lasting and stable normalisation in the region.”
Araghchi has not issued a readout of their discussion. He said in public at their BRICS conference in Delhi the next day: “To virtually everyone in this room, our resistance against US bullying is not an unfamiliar battle. So many of us encounter slight variations of the same repugnant coercion. It is high time for us to jointly step up and work towards making clear that those practices belong in the dustbin of history. Today, our nations are closer to one another than ever before, and we cannot ignore the common and dangerous challenge we all face. History has shown that empires in decline will stop at nothing to arrest their inevitable fates. A wounded animal will desperately claw and roar on its way down.”
In the new podcast with Jamarl Thomas, broadcast live on May 14, the discussion focuses on the meaning of the Trump-Xi summit for the war against Iran; click to view or listen. In the second part of the discussion, we discuss Russian strategizing on the Ukraine war.
