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Right after President Xi’s trip to Moscow, former US Ambassador Michael McFaul claimed that Russia had been turned into a Chinese “vassal”, India’s liberal-globalist intelligentsia imagined that Russia can no longer be relied upon, and Asia Times hinted at impending Chinese expansionism in Russia’s Far East, yet not a single one of these information warfare narratives is true.
Everyone who follows foreign affairs is familiar with Western propaganda warning about Russia’s supposedly “dangerous dependence” on China, which reached a fever pitch following President Xi’s trip to Moscow to solidify the Russo-Sino Entente. Former US Ambassador Michael McFaul claimed that it turned Russia into a Chinese “vassal”, India’s liberal–globalist intelligentsia imagined that Russia can no longer be relied upon, and Asia Times hinted at impending Chinese expansionism in Russia’s Far East.
None of the preceding information warfare narratives is true, which Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov just reaffirmed in a clever riposte during his latest interview with the “Argumenty i Fakti” newspaper on Tuesday when sharing the following insight:
“At the peak of Russian energy supplies to Europe not a single Western analyst was trying to scare Russia about its dependence on the EU. Just the other way round, the US warned Europe against hydrocarbon supplies from our country in a bid to replace them with its own shale oil and gas. Now that we are re-orienting our exports to Asia, they suddenly decided to take care of us and give us a ‘friendly’ reminder about potential dependence on China. Thanks for the advice, but we will use our own judgment and rely solely on national interests and our reliable Chinese friends who are tested by time and real-life actions.”
Everything that he said is true, though it’ll predictably be denied by dishonest observers whose agenda is to drive a wedge in those two multipolar Great Powers’ incipient Entente. It’s indeed the case that the only warnings pushed by those propagandists at the time related to the EU’s “dependence” on Russia.
As the past year proves, however, Moscow never weaponized its energy exports to that bloc despite its unfriendly policies in the context of the NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine. Some might argue in hindsight that the Kremlin should have done so in order to punish the EU, but the fact remains that its policymakers never had any such intentions otherwise this would have obviously happened already. Quite clearly, all those prior Western warnings were nothing but pure propaganda.
So too will it turn out to be the same with respect to their newfound warnings about Russia’s supposedly “dangerous dependence” on China. There’s no credible scenario wherein the People’s Republic would weaponize its growing purchases of those resources to manipulate Moscow since any movement in this direction would bring an immediate end to their mutually beneficial Entente. That would in turn enable the US-led West’s Golden Billion to divide-and-rule them indefinitely.
Moreover, it’s the epitome of hypocrisy for the West to warn about this unrealistic sequence of events considering the EU’s own growing “dependence” on China that President Putin wryly referenced late last month. He said that “dependence of the European economy on China … is growing much faster than that of Russia…trade volume between China and the ‘united Europe’ is increasing at a very high rate…They [the EU] should rather look after themselves.”
Nobody should interpret his words as hinting at any credible chance of China weaponizing its trade ties with the EU since the only point that he was trying to make was that it’s insincere for the bloc warn that China will manipulate its trade ties with Russia when theirs are much more susceptible to that scenario. These objectively existing and easily verifiable observations shared by the Russian President and his Foreign Minister totally debunk false fears about their country’s “dangerous dependence” on China.
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This article was originally published on Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.
