China is the Weak Link in Europe’s Ukraine Strategy – China plays an increasingly active role in the Kremlin’s hybrid war against Europe. The EU must confront this growing China-Russia cooperation, as it poses grave threats to both European security and economic resilience.

Suppressed EU isn’t using its leverage in trade deals with China to get them to stop supplying and aiding russia.

Implicit in a lot of these recent discussions is this idea that China’s moves are motivated almost entirely by financial or geopolitical considerations, and it slots nicely into the “they think in centuries” meme. But their relationship with Russia during this war brings out the forgotten element, ideology. Specifically, their anti-liberal ideology.

There was a compelling white paper out of China (that nobody read, I’m sure) at the beginning of this war, that basically said that Beijing had an excellent opportunity at the time to use this war to align itself with not just Europe but all of the west. That China’s success since the end of the Cold War had benefited greatly from the international world order, and it was a loser in any kind of realist great power competition that this war is sliding the whole world into. On most metrics, from economics to diplomacy, it would be better off if it’d done that instead of aiding Russia. And as the war has dragged on, that has proven increasingly prescient. With China far surpassing the Russians in relevant defense production, that was the last real thing the Russians had to offer for them other than a kindred anti-liberal spirit in the Kremlin.

Sadly, this unforced error on their part has just been kind of a stumbling block in their relation with the EU instead of the crippling blow it should have been.