Ukraine peace talks could be held under Chinese auspices as President Joe Biden has been outmaneuvered by Communist strongman Xi Jinping, according to former Donald Trump diplomat Richard Grenell. The ironies are as plentiful as they are infuriating.
I was quick — maybe too quick — to dismiss Jinping’s 12-point Ukraine peace plan last week. On Friday, I wrote at Instapundit that “if I had to guess, Beijing is putting this out there for Ukraine and the West to reject to justify sending arms to Russia.
Yet I was far from the only one. Biden said that “the idea that China is going to be negotiating the outcome of a war that’s a totally unjust war for Ukraine is just not rational.” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said, “China doesn’t have much credibility because they have not been able to condemn the illegal invasion of Ukraine.” And America’s own top diplomat, Anthony Blinken, warned that China was more interested in supplying “lethal assistance” to Russia than in pursuing peace.
However, two people with vested interests in the outcome of this war were less dismissive of China’s 12-point plan. Their names are Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
“Russian President Putin and Ukrainian President Zelensky immediately complimented the peace plan,” Grenell wrote for the California Globe on Sunday, “with Zelensky saying he welcomed a meeting with the Chinese diplomatic team to discuss the next steps.”
“The move by China embarrassed Biden, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken for spending the last year failing to come up with an American plan for ending the deadly conflict.”
Well, they should be embarrassed, but I have to wonder if they’re capable of shame.
Irony One
For almost as long as this stupid war has been waged, I’ve been writing here that the administration should be pursuing a “two-track” effort, much like President Ronald Reagan’s strategy to both deploy and abolish destabilizing intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Europe in the ’80s. In the Ukraine War, our first track is supplying Ukraine with enough weapons and ammo to stay in the fight, while using every diplomatic means to pursue peace as the second track.
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Instead, Biden has publicly threatened Putin and endlessly lionized Zelenskyy, thus poisoning any American-led peace process. Speaking personally, the lionization is a national embarrassment. All of this has allowed Xi — master of the Uighur genocide, crusher of Hong Kong, and potential invader of Taiwan — to put on a facade as a peacemaker.
Irony Two
As I quoted above, Grenell noted that China had embarrassed Biden, Jake Sullivan, and Anthony Blinken for not coming up with an American plan to end the war. Secretary of State Blinken should be embarrassed the very most. “You had one job,” I’d like to tell him. “Diplomacy.”
“The Pentagon is in charge. The State Department is just supporting indefinite war,” Grenell quoted a State Department foreign service officer’s complaint.
Winston Churchill said, “Jaw, jaw is better than war, war.” But Blinken has done almost nothing but jaw about war. His timing last week couldn’t have been worse, accusing Beijing of seeking to escalate the war, while China’s foreign ministry was actually putting the finishing touches on a peace plan.
Irony Three
China can’t be trusted.
Parts of the plan are simply not acceptable to Washington, like “blaming the West for instigating the start of the war,” according to Grenell, and the whole thing is missing vital details like how a ceasefire would be put in place and monitored. But after a year of fighting, the two sides might be desperate enough to cling to Beijing like drowning men to a lifesaver. “I think that, in general, the fact that China started talking about peace in Ukraine, I think that it is not bad,” Zelenskyy said on Friday. “Everything is progressing, developing, said Putin that same day. “We are reaching new frontiers.”
Thanks to Team Biden having a perfect 100% absent record on the peace process, it’s now possible to envision a peace deal with an anti-Western slant that would potentially move Ukraine into China’s orbit — after all of that cash and all of those weapons were sent to Kyiv from the West.
“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up,” Barack Obama is supposed to have said.
Biden turning Xi into a peacemaker while hollowing out our State Department and making Ukraine into China’s plaything (instead of a toy for connected westerners) is about as big a f***-up as you can imagine.