Last Wednesday, the French newspaper Le Figaro ran a front-page headline titled “Two Worlds Collide”. Vladimir Putin and his Joe Biden. A day earlier and just days before the anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, two leaders delivered powerful speeches—Putin in Moscow, Biden in Warsaw—outlining diametrically opposed strategies for the international order. However, this somewhat retro depiction of the international situation, which predisposes to some return to the Cold War between the US and the USSR, overlooks an important, emerging peacekeeping protagonist: China Xi Jinping.

When Joe Biden stepped onto the platform set up near the Royal Castle in Warsaw, Wang Yi, a member of the CCP Politburo, arrived in Moscow for talks with top Russian leaders. Xi Jinping’s foreign policy adviser. It was the last stop on his long European tour, which had taken him to Paris, Munich (where he attended the annual international security conference) and Budapest in previous days. In meetings with Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and ultimately President Vladimir Putin, Wang stressed China’s unwavering determination to continue the “borderless cooperation” established by Xi and Putin in Beijing just days before the Russian invasion of China. Ukraine. The message was clear to everyone: China is unwilling to give up its valuable ally, which is being tested in the Ukrainian minefield, especially when the Americans, as Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang said, were imbued with the “today Ukraine, tomorrow Taiwan” mentality.

CNN made no secret of its concern that same day. “The US Faces the Possibility of a Two-Front Conflict with Russia and China,” read a headline on his website. Of course, Americans weren’t surprised to see Beijing supporting Moscow’s account of Western responsibility for the war in Ukraine, or taking advantage of the war and Western sanctions to buy Russian oil at mostly low prices (which imports have increased nearly 50-fold in a year). ). But what has been troubling them lately — at least if you take at face value what US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken told Wang during their meeting in Munich — is US intelligence that China is preparing to cross a red line and fortify Russia with weapons.

If American fears are confirmed (a very big if), then the war in Ukraine will dramatically change its character, acquiring the dimensions of a conflict between the West and a single Sino-Russian bloc, that is, the second economy in the world and the first atomic energy. Something like this did not happen even during the most difficult years of the Cold War, as the split between Mao and Khrushchev and the real politics of Henry Kissinger prevented the formation of a strong Russian-Chinese axis. In fact, Russia and China were engaged in border skirmishes on the Ussuri River for half of 1969 that cost the lives of dozens of soldiers on both sides, highlighting the danger of open war between two countries sworn to the name of “proletarian internationalism.” What Americans managed to avoid in the era of existing socialism threatens them today, when capitalism in its state-oligarchic version has long since triumphed in Russia and China.

If American fears are confirmed, it will be a conflict between the West and a single bloc of the world’s second economy and the first nuclear power.

We are not there yet and may never get there. While China is backing Russia economically and politically, it is trying to appear neutral on the Ukrainian situation — a spirit Xi’s expected “peace initiative” will follow — as it doesn’t want to risk harsh U.S. sanctions that will deprive Western markets. But the Americans also know that it is much more painless for them to impose sanctions on Russia than on China, a country with an economy ten times the size of Russia’s, with a trillion. (trillion!) dollars of American debt in her hands and dozens of American multinational corporations who have grown rich on her lands.

It will be much more difficult for the Americans to lure their allies to the anti-Chinese front than it (was not) hard for them with Russia. Olaf Soltz may have buried Nord Stream 2 and dramatically changed German policy towards Moscow, but last November he laid out the red carpet for him that Xi laid out for him in Beijing, dragging dozens of CEOs from the cream of German business – except that a little earlier he sold the terminal of the port of Hamburg to the Chinese Cosco. Saudi Arabia, which received Biden very coldly last July, idolized Xi in December and even hosted the first-ever Sino-Arab summit.

The fact is that if, until recently, Joe Biden’s pre-election rhetoric about “democracy colliding with authoritarianism” (that is, the West with Russia and China at the same time) seemed like a theoretical scheme for restoring transatlantic unity, was severely undermined by Donald Trump, today it tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Some politicians (mostly Republicans) and analysts in America are concerned that Biden’s preoccupation with the anti-Russian fight in Ukraine leaves his most dangerous competitor, China, defenseless, if not favorable in the long run. Perhaps it was this internal pressure and Biden’s need to appear tough on Beijing that fueled the incredible hysteria about Chinese balloons over America (after all, there was only one, as the US president admitted), where F-22 fighters took off. Shoot down $400,000 rockets into balloons that cost several hundred dollars.

Needless to say, if anyone is in danger of being drawn into the tangled web of a re-emerging US-China bipolarity, it is the EU. During the Iraq crisis in 2003, French President Jacques Chirac urged Poles and other Eastern Europeans associated with the US to “get the hell out of here.” Until recently, Kaczynski and Morawiecki’s Poland, along with Orban’s Hungary, was considered the black sheep of the Union, synonymous with nationalist blindness, racism, and violations of the rule of law. Yet it was the Poland that Joe Biden chose to deliver his fateful speech last Tuesday, in his own way emphasizing that the new Europe has shifted its center of gravity from the Rhine to the Oder. Mark Brzezinski, the US ambassador to Poland and the Polish-born son of Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the architects of American geopolitics, may feel posthumously rehabilitated in his father’s name. Playing on the “Grand Chessboard” for America is going well.