Beware of Taiwan

The spotlight of international politics have been falling upon the Ukraine war and the possible resolutions of a conflict that has been going on for over three years, but it is behind the scenes, where an always silent and prudent Chinese diplomacy operates that the international system is actually reordering.

Prior to that, it is important to address Ukraine and the prospects for eventual peace. Putin’s quixotic dream, whose mental picture allowed him to idealize Kiev’s taking into a matter of days, became a friction war that cost hundreds of thousands of people. The impasse was created and, among advances and setbacks, the point of situation of course: Russia now dominates approximately 1/5 of the Ukrainian territory and none of the belligerents will be able to reach a total victory. If it is true that Putin controls a range of territory in the East Ukrainian and the Crimea Peninsula, it is also true that it is difficult to recognize that Kremlin, even in the event of a peace agreement that predicts the assignment of these busy areas, is victorious of this dispute. The Russian economy is decrepit, the number of casualties is large and Kiev is far from falling.

On the other hand, the Ukrainian bravery, personified by Zelensky, whose phrase “I Need Ammonition, Not a Ride” at the beginning of the war will certainly echo in history, is admirable. No one has doubts that a return to pre-2014 borders would be the ideal result, meaning a fatal defeat for Kremlin, but few people doubt that this is not realized. Always useful, the story presents us with two possible paths to Ukraine when the bullets stop flying, just as Niall Ferguson pointed out in a throbbing way: the way of Seoul or that of Saigão. In the first case, even amputated after a conflict that divided the Korea Peninsula, South Korea, forced by then-President Eisenhower to accept the ceasefire and adopting a western matrix system, led to economic development-the miracle of the Han-admirable river. In the second, after the removal of US troops in 1972 and following the fragile peace agreement of Paris 1973, promptly broken, Saigão, the capital of the then Vietname do Sul, eventually fell in 1975 to the hands of the northern communists. Hopefully Kiev will follow the example of Seoul.

Returning to the Superior Chess Game Locked between Washington and Beijing, it seems important to me not to reduce recent approximations-some excessive, of course-from Trump to Moscow to mere appeasement. To the disgust of the Republicans who have controlled the Gop in the last 2 or 3 decades, Trump is more nixon than Reagan. By agreeing or not, that’s what it is. The attempt to revive triangular diplomacy – driving Russia away from China – of course, but this time with the inverted papers, and China supplanted the Soviet Union as great power in this Cold War II. But not only in the exchange of positions in the hierarchy of world power lies the difference between 1970 and 2025. In 1970, China and the USSR digladiaded in two borders-in physics and ideological-and both economies were relatively unramented. Today, neither ideological strings nor border disputes exist and economic interdependence is incomparably higher. Therefore, exploring the differences between communist regimes at Nixon’s time was a relatively simpler task.

But it is above all the question of Taiwan that worries. Predictions indicate that, around 2027, China will advance through the territory that it considers its own. And not as Putin did in Ukraine, but in a more subjective way and whose response should not be easy to orchestrate. Losing Taipei, in whole or in part, the United States will clearly be disadvantaged in the Cold War. So be careful with Taiwan.