Is China Supplying Weapons for Russia?
Why NATO has shown itself the fool and cost Ukraine the war.
False assumptions and misplaced priorities have led NATO to commit serious strategic errors that have undermined US and European security. One crucial error in particular has been the miscalculating of Russian industrial capabilities and capacity. The consequences of this key intelligence failure are beginning to reach the level of a strategic disaster for the US and NATO. This biased miscalculation underpinned numerous military and diplomatic assumptions and has led to a cascading series of failures that no one to date has been held accountable for. In particular, I would like to address the West’s motives for, and the consequences of, attempting to prohibit China from providing weapons to Russia.
Why are NATO and the collective West committed to a policy to prevent Chinese weapons being provided to Russia? Are there weapons being provided? What, if any, impact has this had on the war with Ukraine? To understand this policy and its effects, one must look to the genesis of this fear, which is rooted in decades of biased assessments of Russia. NATO was convinced by its own propaganda that Russia was completely backward, incapable of domestic production, and that Russian weapons were crude and inferior. Therefore, as the plan for the Ukraine war went, if Russia were isolated, it would quickly collapse. This also drove the belief that NATO weapons stockpiles would be sufficient to achieve this collapse (remember, NATO has been lying to the world that Russia would run out of everything since the first week of combat). As such, it was deemed critical to prevent other nations stepping in to help what would be a collapsing Russia with a shattered backwards and corrupt deindustrialized economy. Because of these obviously very wrong assumptions NATO used for planning the war, the West went forward with its standard bullying tactics of sanctions reinforced by a weaponized dollar to achieve its goals instead of looking internally at how to better prepare. To prevent any support by China, the West repeatedly threatened it with reprisals to include trade sanctions if it was determined that China was providing Russia weapons. Despite what must come across to China as outright hubris and hypocrisy from the West, both China and Russia had already outmaneuvered NATO. While the US focused on handing out cash and weapons and crushing the economies of major trading partners, Russia focused on mobilizing its military industrial base. This has provided Russia a decisive advantage over NATO and has enabled it to prosecute a long-term war while NATO and Ukraine are quickly running out of men, money, and military hardware. Time is one thing money cannot buy and the West is learning this the hard way. Based on the trajectory of things in Ukraine, it does not look like there is anything NATO can do to catch up now with Russian arms production prior to Ukraine experiencing a collapse of its military and defeat. Knowing this now, let us look more at how NATO’s miscalculation sealed the deal for Ukraine’s destruction.
To begin, the mere fact that NATO had to sink to threatening China and the rest of the world with helping Russia telescopes weakness. If the collective West were firmly in control of the situation, this would be unnecessary, and they would have no need to be worried. Further, if Russian weapons were truly inferior, why would NATO be concerned? The answer is obvious. Now NATO knows its intelligence assessments of Russia were completely wrong (as usual) and the US has lost its technological edge when it comes to weapons technology and industrial production. As it stands, NATO is being badly outproduced by Russia when it comes to critical munitions and weapons in Ukraine and cannot afford to allow any other help for Russia.
This issue has many dimensions. From the prestige, business, and wealth perspectives, the US, and in particular its weapons manufacturers, are quietly terrified that their overpriced super weapons will be found wanting against Russian and/or Chinese weapons. Having to add any other “advanced” NATO weapons to the growing list of burned-out German Leopard II tanks and ineffective Patriot missile defense systems could fundamentally destroy their entire trillion-dollar weapons business. As such, the US fears any influx of Chinese weapons that would force NATO to provide even more sophisticated weapons to Ukraine at a time when NATO is running out of everything. In addition to the weapons Russia already has and is producing, Chinese support would give Russia both a huge quantitative and a marked qualitative edge. The concentration of men, material, resources, industrial capacity/capability, and technology is more than the West can compete with and would shatter the current geopolitical order. In short, Russia + China = an insurmountable force for NATO. This puts NATO and the West in a dangerous conundrum. If they do not escalate, they lose in Ukraine and NATO is fractured and weakened. However, if they do escalate, they risk losing in a major global conflict and their period of supremacy will have passed.
If it has not become obvious, all of this demonstrates NATO has no true understanding of what matters in warfare in the 21st century and has antiquated incompetent leaders. It also suggests a corrupt bureaucracy incapable of the necessary agility to make proper decisions to win a war. NATO, political leaders, and the media are fixated on “weapons,” like guns, bullets, and artillery shells, but ignored the high-tech low-density items that give Russia (and China) the ability to hit NATO anywhere at any time. Part of this was the inherit bias in the West against Russia. Simply admitting Russia had any high-tech weapons was an anathema to the projection of a backwards and corrupt Russia. This led to institutional blindness of Russia’s true weapons capabilities and industrial capacity. Therefore, the need to pressure China to not provide cases of ammunition was never necessary and neither Russia nor China have any issue with compliance to this demand…because it does not matter. Russia can already mass produce bullets, guns, and shells in numbers Western industry and resources cannot compete with because NATO and the US long ago stupidly gave up their industrial capability for greed. To make a few more cents off an item by paying slave wages, Western elites sold out the long-term security of the West and offshored its industrial might along with the jobs, technical knowhow, and tooling. Now that the world’s industrial capability is firmly in China, there is simply no way to enforce a sanctions regime against China. China can send whatever it wants to Russia and there is not much the West can do about it. Further, the “weapons” that do matter, which the West ignored in its planning, like cases of computer chips, micro-cameras, and industrial machines, or software are being supplied in bulk to Russia from around the globe. Contrary to the “weapons” NATO is focused on and incorrectly believes it can control, these innocuous chips and other dual-use commercial-off-the-shelf items provide the necessary technological components to support Russian mass production of the most lethal and effective weapons on the battlefield. For example, satellites, drones, hypersonic missiles, guidance and targeting systems, cyberwarfare programs, and electronic jamming and signals intercept capabilities all are created primarily from products and components that do not look like “weapons.” Not that Russia domestically can source and produce most anything it needs. Chinese support only allows them to make more of those weapons faster. Here are some questions to illustrate my points:
· What is the bigger risk on the battlefield…a latest generation NATO tank or a small airborne drone?
· Would 100,000 bullets or 100,000 microchips be more beneficial for Russia?
· How many bullets does a drone need? How many microprocessors does a drone need?
· Is a rifle scope going to support taking out high value targets more than a digital micro camera mounted on a drone?
· Would it be better to have the machines and factories to make rifles and bullets or a warehouse of rifles and bullets?
Do you see? Russia is focused on building long term production capacity for all types of weapons, which China is in a great position to support. Russia does not need Chinese ammunition and guns. By Russia accurately assessing and focusing on what matters during a war of attrition like its capacity for industrial production, it gained a decisive advantage. The result is that Russia has increased its supply of weapons while NATO fiddled thinking it could just buy its way to victory. This left Russia with an overhauled and modernized military production industry and NATO bankrupt with weapons stockpiles depleted or gone.
As such, the threat of sanctioning China if it provides “weapons” to Russia is a moot point. Not only would the sanctions prove to be self-defeating and futile to enforce, but it also would not affect Russia’s military capacity. If anything, it would motivate China to cut off the significant supplies it provides the West (and indirectly Ukraine) while intentionally helping Russia out of spite. This leaves NATO looking like a dull hypocrite. Rather than threatening a sovereign nation and using bullying tactics to try and force compliance, it would have been far better if the US and its NATO allies focused on mobilizing its industrial base, acquiring raw materials, rooting out inefficiencies, cutting wasteful bureaucracy, and building true capacity for a long war. Unfortunately for Ukraine, they bought into the CIA’s deception and relied on a hollowed out and incompetently led NATO. The costs of this for Ukraine will be generational. They already lost the war whether they realize or admit it or not. Their only option now is to end the slaughter and save what is left before it is all destroyed.
Till next time…