Author: Daria Novak

Turkey has the fastest growing energy demand among all of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) states during the last two decades. It ranks second in the world only to China in its increase in electricity and natural gas demand. In a surprise move, Putin recently proposed to develop Turkey into an energy hub for Russia so that its gas may be transited to Europe via Turkey. The government in Ankara says that the versatile structure of its energy strategy and its energy import dependency brings international relations into prominence in this field. In 2022 Turkey had to import 74% of its energy needs. In a positive response to the Russian move, the Turkish Minister of Energy and National Resources Fatih Donmez said in a statement that the project should be seriously evaluated. Turkish President Recep Tayyip also reacted well to the unexpected overture saying that the Trakya region was being evaluated as a potential site for the energy distribution center. According to a Jamestown Foundation report “It is quite clear that the project’s realization also depends on the interests and approaches of the European states, a fact that both Russia and Turkey understand well.”

After Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the European Union (EU) vowed to reduce the supply of energy resources (including gas) from Russia and diversify its energy sources. By October, European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen announced a 40 per cent reduction in Europe’s purchase of Russian natural gas cent to 7.5 percent of its previous purchases.  Nuray alekberli, of Jamestown Foundation, says it is unrealistic to expect a positive attitude to emanate from Europe regarding new pipeline projects that involve Russia, given European opposition to the South Stream pipeline in 2014, Putin’s frequent use of energy blackmail vis-à-vis the EU and the adoption of a much tougher stance toward Russia today. The Biden Administration also supports Europe’s diversification of sources away from its dependence on Russian energy sources.

It is likely to take between three to four years to complete construction of new infrastructure between Turkey and Russia, according to Zongqiang Luo, a senior analyst with Rystad Energy. A pipeline would have to be built in the deep waters of the Black Sea with special production pipes delivered from Germany and Japan. It is uncertain if either country would be willing to supply the physical resources needed, according to the publication Indyturk. The total cost, even if Russia was able to supply the pipes remains an unknown factor given Moscow would face enormous transit and economic issues.

Aydin Sezer, former Turkish trade representative to Russia, says it would be “impossible for Turkey to become a hub with Russian energy resources alone, any extensive development of energy infrastructure in the country will need to have access to other suppliers.” An examination of sources indicates that Ankara is acquiring natural gas from multiple locations, including Azerbaijani and Iran. By 2024 Turkey expects to begin production at the offshore Sakarya gas field. The geopolitical implications extend beyond the Turkish border into the Central Asian states that appear to be supporting Turkey in both gas production and sales. Ankara knows it can’t rely solely on Moscow as an energy source and is laying the groundwork for an expanded base. In Novamber Erdogan announced he planned to discuss the creation of a natural gas hub with the leaders of Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan during his visit to Ashgabat in early December 2022. Then, on December 14, Azerbaijan, Turkey and Turkmenistan signed a memorandum of understanding to further develop energy cooperation and infrastructure among the three countries.

Although Europe is disinclined to buy natural gas directly from Russia, it appears EU countries may be willing to make purchases through a third country, such as Turkey, even if the original energy source is Russia. The long-term continuation of the conflict in Ukraine “could serve to aggravate the attitude of Western countries regarding any Russian involvement in the project,” says Alekberli. Finally, financial considerations are likely to play a key role in determining the hub’s overall viability. 

Analysts suggest it is highly likely that other gas suppliers, such as Azerbaijan and the Central Asian states, will support Turkey in this project. Alekberli argues that while political and economic difficulties remain, “the realization of such a project could bring some additional comfort to both buyers and sellers in the region, provided Russian gas does not become the focal point for the proposed hub.” Putin may be counting too heavily on his country’s participation in an energy project that the Central Asian states will likely boycott if Moscow becomes involved.

Daria Novak served in the U.S. State Dept.

China is not finished despite reports that President Xi Jinping is backing off his geopolitical plans to overtake the United States’ economy. Analysts from the IC favoring a softer US stance on the communist regime suggest that this means China is less of a threat now. Dan Blumenthal and Derick Scissors, both senior fellows at AEI writing in Atlantic, say they disagree. They point out that “The United States is in danger of missing a profound change in the economic component of China’s geopolitical strategy.” Although Xi has downgraded the Communist Party’s ambition to overtake the US in economic size, his priority, Blumenthal and Scissors argue, is to minimize China’s dependence on other countries and maximize its ability to coerce them economically. 

In reality it is an indication that China is backing down from its immediate plans, however, that doesn’t lessen the long-term planning coming out of Beijing. It represents a readjustment to Xi’s strategy. The United States was complacent toward the future threat over four decades ago, in 1979, when Washington agreed to open relations with China. President Clinton followed that opening in 2001, by giving China permanent Most Favored Nation (MFN) status, a trade advantage Beijing still holds today despite its lack of progress in opening its economy. Today, the West faces a very different country. It is one capable of, and has used, its economic strength as a strategic weapon to damage other states and coerce countries into supporting the interests of the communist state. The United States, Blumenthal and Scissors says, must “respond to a China bent on long-term economic coercion to secure the interests of the Communist party and the Chinese nation.” 

They suggest Washington must begin in 2023 by gaining a better understanding of Xi Jinping and his long-term goals. Internationally, they add, the US must convince its partners and allies that limiting their reliance on the communist giant is the most prudent path to curtailing China’s aggressive behavior abroad. President Xi, in one of his first speeches hinting at his new approach, said in 2020 that the “powerful gravitational field” of the state-controlled Chinese market can be used to reshape supply chains in Beijing’s favor. Xi views this as the “great struggle” between east and west, between capitalism and communism. His goal is to stop the West from limiting China’s technological advancement. China continues to steal, conduct coercive technology transfer and reverse engineer intellectual property obtained from the West. 

During the last eight years, Xi’s “Made in China 2025” industrial plan has supplied sweeping government assistance to the Chinese semiconductor industry and electric vehicles. President Xi appears in 2023 to be redoubling the communist giant’s efforts to tilt economic leverage in its favor in response to western efforts to hold China and the CCP accountable for their actions. “Xi may see the decoupling of the two countries’ economies as ultimately inevitable—and may now be actively advancing it, on his preferred terms,” according to Blumenthal and Scissors.

At times the intelligence community (IC) in Washington underestimates the domestic political problems inside China.  For Xi, a thriving private sector risks powerful constituencies developing outside party control. The result is increased repression and expanded domestic surveillance programs. China’s politicians don’t like Luan, or chaos. They want order and loyalty to the CCP and its leadership. Blumenthal and Scissors argue that with the party determined to retain control of the economy, potentially productive industries face many barriers to expansion. They say “In their place are sectors that serve the party’s interests first. This is not conducive to innovation and scientific breakthrough and, along with deteriorating demographics and high debt, will continue to limit growth.” Washington is at risk of misreading the signs and assuming China has given up on it geopolitical plans.  What has changed is how it will go about doing it. Xi will use state-shaped technological development and its preeminent position in global supply chains. “China will be neither the world’s low-tech factory nor its leading tech pioneer, but will aim instead to make itself indispensable as a producer of high-value goods upon which even its adversaries depend. This is a perceptive and potentially fruitful alternative to rapid economic growth,” say Blumenthal and Scissors. 

China hopes to kill off foreign competition by absorbing foreign innovation and then eventually drive foreign producers out of business. “The dominant feature of the Sino-American commercial competition will not be a race based on economic growth or on technological advancement, as many anticipate. Rather, through subsidies, coercive technology transfer, and unbalanced market access, inferior Chinese firms will win market share at the expense of more dynamic competitors,” notes Blumenthal and Scissors. Heavy spending on science and technology and a focus on strategic economic leveraging, combined with manufacturing prowess, a very large domestic market, and coercion as a tool, will enable China to insulate itself from Western sanctions and rules.  

If American policy makers and the private sector want to avoid this fate, it must be willing to challenge China’s bid on supply chains. With a challenge, there will be a further shift patterns of production and trade in its favor. The nature of the economic challenge has changed. Now American must respond while it can offset China’s attempts to remake the world economic order.

Daria Novak served in the U.S. State Dept.

President Vladimir Putin is running low on soldiers to conduct his war in Ukraine. Despite adding soldiers once assigned to the Arctic, others recruited from the country’s prisons, and older civilians from among the general population, there is an overall lack of willingness to replace frontline soldiers. Reports coming in from various Western media organizations say that new are not receiving the minimal amount of training normally required to conduct military operations. Training videos snuck out of Russia depict women teaching soldiers how to use feminine products as bandages. Others show soldiers training without guns, equipment, or meals. Russian soldiers are left to fend for their own food while on the battlefield. The dearth of money and human capital has forced Putin to move his effort to dragoon more men into service from Russia to the countries in Central Asia.

In November, the Russian president signed a decree allowing foreign citizens to serve in the Russian Army as contractors and conscripts. It was depicted as an opportunity for Central Asian citizens residing in Russia. Nurbek Bekmurzaev, of the Jamestown Foundation, notes that the Russian publication Vzglyad is reporting that the Deputy Chairman of the Russian State Duma Defense Committee Andrey Krasov expressed his firm belief that “a comparable number [of Central Asians] will want to come to Russia to serve—with an eye on the potential acquisition of Russian citizenship and career advancement.”   It has, he adds, stirred discussions about the extent of the conscription of those from former Soviet satellite states, with many Russians concluding that it is a sign that the Kremlin is desperate to locate new soldiers. 

As early as last February, at the start of the war in Ukraine, videos emerged of Kyrgyzstani, Tajikistani and Uzbek men driving Russian military vehicles. By March videos emerged of Central Asians dying and being buried in Ukraine. In September, Bekmurzaev says the first evidence of Uzbekistani citizens fighting in the war appeared on the internet, when a Ukrainian journalist released a video of two young Uzbekistani men in military captivity. The motivation for these young recruits is the result of Russian trickery and coercion. In some cases, they are threatened with the stripping of potential citizenship if they refuse to join the Russian armed forces and fight.

According to CabarAsia, several human rights defenders who work with labor migrants have reported hundreds of cases in which Central Asians with Russian passports received summons to arrive at military enlistment centers or risk being stripped of their citizenship. Putin’s policy goes further. “For those without Russian passports, the authorities in Moscow have legalized organizational arrangements conducive to recruitment. On September 20, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin announced the launch of a recruitment center at the Sakharovo Migration Center, where virtually all labor migrants have to visit to undergo mandatory fingerprint scanning and physical examinations, as well as receive work permits,” according to Bekmurzaev. The Duma recently simplified the pathway to citizenship  by reducing the five-year wait to one in exchange for military service.

Despite all of Putin’s recruiting attempts, the Russian Armed Forces continue to fall short of recruiting goals this January. Central Asians are not stronger patriotic toward Moscow. Their citizenship, notes Bekmurzaev, is only a means to better cope with the discrimination and bureaucracy they face daily in Russia. The colossal losses on the Russian battlefield continue to suppress the number of able-bodied men willing to go fight in Ukraine. Add to this, that Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan have issued stern warnings to their citizens not to fight in Ukraine. The potential soldiers now face lengthy prison sentences for participating in armed conflicts abroad as mercenaries. Most Central Asian migrants plan to return home after their time in Russia and do not want to risk ending up with a long prison sentence upon their return.

This leaves Putin needing to locate addition manpower on the frontline to compensate for growing losses as the war approaches the one-year mark. News of the deaths of foreign recruits is suppressed by the Russian media in an attempt to fill the ranks with those faraway people who will go largely unnoticed from Russian cities if killed in the war. Bekmurzaev points out that the mass participation of Central Asian migrants in the war spells a whole new set of troubles for the region and not just Putin. “Besides a significant decrease in remittances, which comprise one-third of the GDPs of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, the region faces a threat of welcoming back numerous war veterans, which could lead to a subsequent increase in alcohol and drug abuse, suicide, domestic violence and crime.” Returning compatriots are now trying to discourage migrants from fighting in Ukraine are in direct competition with the Russian government. Despite things not going well for Putin he is not backing down and there is no end in sight to the war in Ukraine.   

Daria Novak served in the U.S. State Dept.

Illustration: Pixabay

Are there more than two sexes? Can releasing criminals from jail result in safer streets? Will homes be heated and goods shipped if 80% of our energy supply is cut off? Is it safe to ignore very real threats from abroad?

Those issues are vital, but they do not dominate much of our national conversation. Instead, a panoply of false claims and artificial disputes grab the headlines and the lion’s share of the news. The reason for that absurdity is to distract from the clear and manifest failure of leftist policies on the true challenges of our current time.  

The philosophy espoused by the Left has, for a century, resulted in dire economic misery, mass deaths, and an almost total loss of freedom.  That is why its proponents have chosen the path of illogic, dissembling, and pretending that past conflicts still exist.

That strategy works well when most of the media and academia are on your side. Those pointing out the obvious are ridiculed, labelled with insulting terms, denied opportunities, and censored.

There is abundant evidence of leftist failure.

 Do you recall life in America two years ago? Gasoline averaged $2.60 a gallon. Inflation was 1.23%. The Russians had been kept within their borders for four years. The North Koreans had pulled back from nuclear and missile testing. The Middle East was experiencing a rare moment of significantly improved relations, thanks to U.S. diplomacy. The U.S. military was focusing on protecting the nation, not engaging in “woke” politics.  The Army had met its recruiting goals. Illegal crossings at the U.S. southern border had declined by 53% over 2019. Total crossings were the lowest since 2017.

After just under two years of leftist domination of American politics, gasoline is $3.86 a gallon. Inflation is 7.7%. The Russians have invaded Ukraine.  The Taliban now has $7.7 billion worth of U.S. military equipment. The North Koreans are vigorously firing off missiles and appear to be ready to restart nuclear testing. The U.S. Army came 15,000 soldiers short of meeting its 2022 recruiting goals, making the year the worst on record since the services switched to an all-volunteer force nearly 50 years ago The Biden White House has restarted discredited attempts to censor free speech. Under that Administration, illegal immigration has reached historic highs. Its media allies urgently downplay extraordinary scenes of large numbers of military-age males waving flags charging across the border and assaulting border patrol personnel.

Not all issues revolve around Washington. Two areas that were and continue to be dominated by the left, education and city management, highlight the disastrous impact of its failed policies.

“Bail Reform” has unleashed a massive crime wave. Taking just one jurisdiction as an example, New York City, crime increased an average of 20.05%.

Leftist domination of America’s public education has produced failure on an epic level. The United States invests more in K-12 public education than almost all other developed countries, yet U.S. students remain poorly prepared to compete with global peers.

This litany of deteriorating statistics in key areas should have resulted in a national conversation on the failure of the Left, but this has not occurred. Instead, those raising wholly reasonable objections to the drive to end fossil fuel use are dismissed as “Climate deniers.”  Outraged parents complaining about failing schools are labelled “domestic terrorists.” Those presenting statistics about bail reform’s overt failure, and Russia’s largest-in-the world nuclear arsenal or China’s largest-in-the world Navy, are ignored.

False narratives are created and highlighted. Absurd political claims are madw that voting for anyone other than a leftist is a threat to democracy. Ideologically corrupt officials seek to turn the population against itself, pitting blacks against whites, woman versus men, straight against gay. Grievances long since resolved are advertised as though they were current.

This is a massive recipe for failure, on a scale never before seen in American History. The future of the nation depends on shattering these ridiculous illusions.

Illustration: Pixabay

The politicization of every facet of American life is tearing the nation apart.

There was a time, not so long ago, when you watched a sporting event and didn’t care about which candidate the athletes voted for, or which party the team owner contributed to. You bought groceries based on the product, not the politics of the manufacturer. When you watched entertainment shows, you weren’t bombarded with propaganda. Journalists were encouraged to confine their opinions to the editorial page.

But then China developed a “social credit” system as a method to exert tyrannical control over every aspect of their citizens’ lives, a concept picked up by American college campuses.  Leftists turned it into an obsession.  They called it “Intersectionality,” defined as an “ytical framework for understanding how aspects of a person’s social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege.”

Woke politicians signed on, reaching its high (or low, if one favors personal freedom) during the Biden Administration. The whole power of government was turned into a partisan weapon for the purpose of perpetuating left-wing ideals.

Hermeet Dhillon, writing for Imprimis, called out the politicized Department of Justice for its actions. “…the DOJ today appears to be increasingly motivated by partisanship. Compounding the problem, it has access to the powers of the modern surveillance state…the DOJ was in the midst of a year-long campaign of spying on Project Veritas—a campaign that involved no fewer than 19 clandestine subpoenas, orders, and warrants obtained from nine magistrate judges. The secrecy of this spying campaign was maintained through the use of wide-ranging gag orders, including at least two that were obtained without notice to the judge overseeing the Project Veritas case. Through this spying campaign, we now know that the DOJ obtained approximately 200,000 Project Veritas emails from Microsoft and countless text messages (and heaven knows what else) from Apple, Google, Uber, and other still unknown companies.”

The Wall Street Journal provides this example: “In an effort to ’promote diversity and inclusion,’ the State Department is funding “drag theater performances” in Ecuador through cultural grants. “

National Review adds this: “Beginning in fiscal year 2023, the Department of Energy will require applicants for research funding to explain how their research projects will incorporate the tenets of diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Even the Pentagon signed on. Consider this note from American Military News: The Air Force has taken ‘full responsibility’ for leaking a confidential personnel file of a service member and Republican congressional candidate, which revealed a sexual assault she suffered on duty in Iraq… The Air Force leaker gave the files to a Democrat research firm in the lead-up to the midterm elections.”

The corporate world became a battleground. Corporate executives who opposed the Chinese Social Credit system in America spoke out at their own risk. A New York Post article describes one instance: “Jennifer Sey was Levi’s brand president and on track to be the jeans company’s CEO. But when she complained online about extended school closures and their effect on children, she was attacked and falsely labeled a “COVID denier” who wanted to get former President Donald Trump re-elected. Levi’s management gave her a choice: Shut up or leave. As she explains in her new memoir, “Levi’s Unbuttoned,” Sey felt she had to quit her dream job on principle… Sey explains how many of today’s CEOs — lacking any backbone, yet desperate to be seen as ‘good’— cave to performative woke mobs.”

Internet search engines were among the most virulent advocates of this politics over truth concept. Fox News has reported that “Google is manipulating search engine results to harm Republicans in critical Senate races, according to the Media Research Center. “

Not surprisingly, since colleges have been the leading advocates of the Chinese concept of “social credit,” education has been on the front lines of the problem.  A Heritage study found that “our children are being indoctrinated. The education system designed to teach them how to think critically has been weaponized by the radical left to push an anti-American agenda… the left propagandizes through the normalization of its views and positions as nonpolitical.”

Much more unites us than divides us. By attempting to permeate every aspect of life with Leftist propaganda backed by various forms of social and financial punishment, these social credit antagonists seek to achieve goals which they could not win at the ballot box.  

Illustration: Pixabay

2022 is in the rearview mirror, and for most, that didn’t happen soon enough. 

It was the year that common sense and common decency were shunted aside by ideologues who saw the suffering they caused as irrelevant to their pursuit of Progressive goals. In affairs both foreign and domestic, on issues as broad as international affairs and as domestic as local school boards, absurd policies reigned supreme.

The Biden Administration pushed the fiction that alternative energy could replace fossil fuels.  The assault on U.S. energy independence initiated an inflationary spiral that continues to cripple the world economy and bankrupt families, all without producing any benefit to the environment particularly since China, the world’s largest polluter, ignores the whole idea. The White House doubled down on irrational economics by spending profligately, on areas that produce no long-term benefits. The national debt has reached $31 Trillion, and consumer prices jumped to an absurd 9.1% hike.

2022 was the year in which lies reigned supreme. Despite clear, televised contrary evidence broadcast into homes every night, the President and his aides continue to insist that the U.S. Southern Border is under control.  Unprecedented numbers of illegals literally storm across.  In at least one instance, a horde of military-aged young males carrying the flag of their home nation aggressively attacked border patrol agents. Illegals rushed into southwestern states, leading local officials to declare an invasion and begging Washington for help, which never came. Human trafficking, fentanyl pushing criminals are the chief beneficiaries.

Lies have been the hallmark of 2022. The evidence that federal agencies conspired with social media outlets to warp the 2020 election is now clear, thanks to the unsealing of records following the Elon Musk takeover of Twitter.  It is also clear that Rep. Adam Schiff utterly lied about “Russian Collusion,” yet he continues to remain unpunished.

As Russia prepared its invasion of Ukraine, the Biden Administration not only failed to take steps to dissuade it, it actually encouraged the illegal move when Biden bizarrely stated, on January 20, 2022, that he would tolerate “a little invasion.”   

Lies were prominent in domestic affairs.  Americans were told that remote learning was the only proper response to the pandemic. U.S. school children will suffer for years because of it. Private and parochial schools managed to stay open with no harm to their students.  But one good result came from the action: Parents got a glimpse into the horrific garbage that was being shoved down their kids’ throats, both in subjects that schools traditionally teach and in topics that reflect the mental disorders of some adults.   Political propaganda and woke nonsense replaced objective teaching of civics and history.

Topics that have no place in school curriculum were inserted.   In one jurisdiction, New York City, it was reported that $200,000 was spent on drag queen shows. Objecting to this usurpation of parental prerogatives in personal issues is not being “anti-gay” or “anti-LGBTIQQ.”  School officials and teacher-union bullies have no right to intervene into personal areas that are the rights of parents to decide. The actions of the Biden Administration to label outraged parents as “domestic terrorists” deserve universal condemnation.

Academic and editorial fools tried to tell us that men could give birth, and that there were more than two physical genders.

As Washington surrendered control of the borders, state and local officials gave up control of the streets to the worst criminals. Violent crime, including murder, assault, rape, and robbery in Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, Seattle and Washington, D.C. rose up to 40%.  Despite the clear statistics, elected officials insisted there was no crime wave, and continued with their absurd bail reform and decriminalization policies.

2022, and its irrationalities, are over. America’s 2023 resolution should be to undo the damage done by the collection of dishonest and incompetent elected officials and progressive ideologues who caused so much harm to the nation.

Illustration: Pixabay

As many as 37 million Chinese could have been infected with Covid-19 in a single day this week. China’s December total of Covid-19 infections now appears to stand at around 248 million people or 18% of China’s total population. The infected roughly make up a population the size of Indonesia. “The scale of infections and death, suggests that the virus has spread beyond major urban centers such as Beijing and Shanghai into the countryside… [and] presents a major challenge for China as its rural healthcare infrastructure is ill-prepared to handle a mass wave of infections. Yet, despite the serious nature of the pandemic, the Chinese government decided to lift restrictions for Chinese wishing to travel outside the country. It is seen by some analysts in the West as an attempt to level the playing field by reinfecting foreign populations around the world. 

Re-weaponizing the virus is only one branch of China’s aggressive foreign policy. For the first time in the history of Russian-PRC relations Russian naval assets are expressly practicing implementation of a blockade together with their Chinese counterparts. The joint naval exercise was held from December 21-27 near islands off of Taiwan. The Global Times reports that “due to the background of the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the fact that the military exercise area is the closest to Taiwan in the past 10 years, the misunderstandings and misinterpretations arising from this joint military exercise are more than in previous years. US and Western public opinion is watching the military cooperation between China and Russia with vigilance.”

The naval drills have carried express political implications, from the mock-blockade of Taiwan following Speaker Pelosi’s visit there to one of the largest assemblies of a Chinese carrier group shortly after Japan announced its new, more aggressive national security strategy, according to the Jamestown Foundation. “Joint Sea 2022” appears to be a reaffirmation of Russian support for China in any potential cross-strait conflict. As tensions increase, US Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith suggested that the implications of the military cooperation are far-reaching and that China and Russia are increasingly sharing a “toolkit of strategies to undermine NATO.”
  

A Global Times editorial published this week adds that “Some subjects of the exercise, such as anti-submarine and air defense, involve relatively sensitive data, reflecting the high strategic mutual trust and transparency between China and Russia, which will be further deepened and enhanced along with the exercise.” In addition to raising the two countries’ capabilities in maritime combat and joint operations, the exercise is a further indication that China is not turning inward nor is it backtracking on its aggressive stance in the East China Sea. The Russian Foreign Ministry defends the so-called “no limits” relationship between the two communist nations by labeling it as a “counterweight to the United States.”

Russia and China, according to The Hill, have engaged in multiple military drills since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine last February, including nuclear-capable bomber flights in May that took place during President Biden’s visit to Japan. A September joint exercise involved more than 2,000 Chinese troops, and the two countries in November flew bombers in joint patrols over the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea. China and Russia are continuing to develop their mutually convenient friendship with the world as witness to drills that reflect a growing defense cooperation between the two countries. What is concerning to analysts is how far the cooperation will go in the coming year. Neither country has an extensive list of countries friendly to them or their causes. According to the Russian News Service TASS, Chinese President Xi Jinping is scheduled to speak with the Russian President before the end of the year. There is no indication that the relationship will change. Although China’s rise to power over the last few decades has skewed the relationship in Beijing’s favor, it still needs Moscow to distract the world from the CCP’s misadventures. Taken individually, each event cementing their bilateral relationship does not represent a new, more dangerous level of security threat to the world. In combination over time, however, the Russia-China relationship may end up destabilizing the free world and potentially lead to kinetic warfare in Asia, Central Asia, or Europe.