The Geopolitics of the Ukraine War.

To grasp the import of this development, let's freeze frame two key moments in world history -- Communist Chinese leader Mao Zedong's Moscow meeting with the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin in December 1949 and Vladimir Putin's summit in Beijing with Xi Jinping just last month. As it happens, though, given a Sino-Russian alliance so heavily based on the trade in fossil fuels, even if Vladimir Putin doesn't himself go down thanks to his potentially disastrous invasion of Ukraine, both Beijing and Moscow may find themselves whipsawed in the years to come by a troubled energy transition and climate change. Although China has been Ukraine's main trading partner since 2019, Beijing set aside those ties and its own advocacy of inviolable sovereignty to avoid calling Putin's intervention an "invasion." Just as the relentless grinding of the earth's tectonic plates produces earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, so the endless superpower struggle for dominance over Eurasia is fraught with tensions and armed conflict. [Extracted from the article]