Putin and Xi Meet in Moscow, Rock the World—with Trade and Diplomacy, Not Bombs

Above is yesterday’s video chat with VTForeignPolicy editor Johnny Punish; below is my forthcoming American Free Press article posted here for paid subscribers only.

Putin and Xi Meet in Moscow, Rock the World—with Trade and Diplomacy, Not Bombs

By Kevin Barrett, for American Free Press

On the afternoon of March 20, the leaders of the world’s biggest nuclear power and the world’s biggest economic powerhouse met at the Kremlin. Russian president Putin and Chinese President Xi spent three days hammering out a series of economic agreements—and promoting China’s 12-point plan to end the war in Ukraine.

The Western press took a dim view of the meeting. National Public Radio commented:

“This visit was an especially strong sign of support from China for Russia, coming just days after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin for alleged war crimes. Xi gave no indication he brought up the arrest warrant. Instead, the two men greeted each other warmly as ‘dear friend.’”

In reality, Putin’s ICC arrest warrant was a public relations stunt designed to “skunk” the Moscow summit and to drown out the growing European protests against the Ukraine war. Putin was charged with the alleged crime of authorizing Russian Commissioner for Childrens’ Rights Maria Lvova-Belova to move orphaned children out of war zones to safety. The ICC cited an Associated Press article casting Russia’s humanitarian evacuation of orphans from the ethnically-Russian Donbass region, where the Ukrainian army and associated extremist militias have been shelling civilians since 2014, as “kidnapping.”

Western media tried to portray the Putin-Xi meeting as bad for China (because Putin is a globally-despised war criminal) and bad for Russia (because of its growing dependence on the much larger Chinese economy). But as usual, the Western propagandists were lying.

The meeting facilitated win-win economic deals pushing Chinese-Russian cooperation to new heights. (China already buys more Russian oil than any other nation alongside one-third of Russian exports.)

Alongside increased trade, Xi and Putin agreed to increase their use of “local currency,” beginning with the yuan and the ruble. That will further undercut US sanctions on Russia, which only work when Russia uses US dollars in international trade. More importantly, it will undermine the dollar’s role as de facto international reserve currency. Because most international trade is settled in dollars, especially in the energy sector, the world’s demand for greenbacks lets the US Federal Reserve create virtually unlimited supplies. The Fed’s ability to print money out of thin air and force the world to accept it in exchange for tangible goods and services permits the US to pay for the more than 800 US military bases encircling Russia, China, and most of the rest of the world. And it allows the US to spend more on its military budget than then next nine countries combined. If the world bails out of dollars—as Xi and Putin are proposing—the US will no longer be able to support its gargantuan military, and its days as the self-styled imperial hegemon will be over.

The ongoing hybrid war between the US empire on one hand, and a broad coalition of BRICS nations led by China, Russia, and Iran on the other, boils down to a fight over America’s “exorbitant privilege” of printing free money to build a planet-dominating military. The BRICS nations want to end that system. The neoconservatives and neoliberals who rule the US want to keep it.

Though Western propaganda falsely casts Russia as the aggressor in Ukraine, the truth is that China, Russia, Iran, and the BRICS nations are trying to achieve their goals through trade and diplomacy, while the US props up its dying empire using violence and lies. The Xi-Putin summit was not about military force, it was about win-win deals. The same is true of the Iran-Saudi Arabia entente brokered by China, as well as the re-integration of Syria into the Middle East against the wishes of the Biden Administration.

The success of China’s emphasis on diplomacy and trade, and the failure of the neocon-led US reliance on violence and lies, is growing more evident every day. Despite spending more than $8 trillion on pre-planned Middle Eastern wars triggered by the 9/11 false flag, the US was unable to impose its will on the region through brute force. Today, the Saudis and Emiratis, along with the rest of the region, are jettisoning their subservience to the US and joining diplomatic and trade initiatives led by China and Russia.

Likewise, the neocon attempt to terrorize the world into submission through the construction of hundreds of biological warfare labs in general, and the COVID bio-attack on China and Iran in particular, has fallen flat. Blowback-prone biological warfare, it turns out, is not the “politically useful tool” the neocons openly yearned for in their notorious Rebuilding America’s Defenses manifesto issued in September, 2000.

As in Aesop’s fable about the wind and the sun, it seems that China’s peace-based power is overcoming the neocon war machine.