Why did Biden need a climate summit?

МОСКВА, 30 апреля 2021, Институт РУССТРАТ.

When US President Joe Biden began to convene an international environmental summit, the expert community became interested in the reason for the obviously increased activity of the current US administration in this area.

The Americans approach everything in a packaged and systematic way, they link all their political steps with other steps. Each direction should support and strengthen the other ones. The synergistic effect is a universal principle of American foreign policy.

This is in general an important part of Anglo-Saxon culture, and it is always necessary to keep it in mind when you have to hear from the Americans this or that proposal, as well as what they are doing now will affect other issues that are important to them.

For Biden, the environment is not only what is surfacing: an opportunity to stop the development of China and India through environmental regulations, to determine the industrial and energy policy of the EU, and to get involved in Russian oil and gas projects.

This is also not only a way to open up an additional niche for investment and ride the wave of transition to a new technological way. And not just a reason to consolidate vassals and re-position himself as a leader. All this is the case, but this is not the main thing, since these issues can be solved not especially through the environmental agenda.

The environment for Biden and his team is a way to strengthen the pro-American “Komsomol” group in China, which opposes Xi Jinping. This is a way to contain China in its current format. And, if possible – a way to remove Xi Jinping from power through a coup d’etat and provoke an intra-elite conflict in the People’s Republic of China.

The US is quite thoughtfully implementing this line. For Xi Jinping, the environmental direction is secondary, and therefore he put a dangerous rival there – Xie Zhenhua, a man with a very specific biography. He is a native of the Chinese Komsomol. Now he has been China’s climate representative since 2015, and in the past a political worker of the Komsomol cell, secretary of the Komsomol cell at Tsinghua University, secretary of the Komsomol Committee of the Construction Committee of the People’s Republic of China, head of the Environmental Department of the People’s Republic of China 1983-2005.

It was precisely Xie Zhenhua who was assigned to meet with Biden’s climate adviser, John Kerry, and to discuss the topic. On the eve of the Kerry-Zhenhua meeting, Li Keqiang, former first secretary of the Chinese Komsomol and now Prime Minister (and therefore Xi Jinping’s main rival), met with representatives of 20 major American companies in China. The conversation was naturally about the offer for cooperation, but that’s not what it is.

In China, the culmination of the confrontation between the so-called “siloviki” and “Komsomol Members” is approaching, between those who come from nationally oriented circles that rely on the army and intelligence agencies and are controlled by Xi Jinping, and the Chinese Komsomol group, who are in fact, the support base of the US Democratic Party in China. By the summer, the decision of the National People’s Congress on changing the power functions of the government and its presidium is being prepared. This is a reduction in the functionality of Komsomol members in general, and Li Keqiang in particular.

The answer for the “Komsomol members” may become to go into street activity, informal trade unions, inciting student riots, and here the US has very conveniently prepared a bunch of documents: from the “Strategic Competition Act” as part of a package of anti-Chinese laws, to instructions from the State Department to its diplomats about “liberalising” relations between the US and Taiwan, where “security issues” are at the centre of the agenda. I.e., measures to organise military and political resistance against China.

Among such measures, according to the main American strategy of constant provocations, is pushing the Taiwanese authorities to declare sovereignty, which will immediately entail a military response from China with a cascade of measures to isolate it, including removing it from the UN Security Council and generally reformatting the UN without a decisive role for Russia and China.

Yes, to do this, the US will first have to ensure that the Democratic Progressive Party in Taiwan wins the election in such a way that it creates a coalition capable of making these decisions. To do this, there will be need to hold back the Kuomintang, which supports unification with mainland China. But the process needs to start urgently, because by 2030, the Chinese Navy will gain such strength that the US will no longer be able to cope with it. 

The window of opportunity to inflict a local military defeat on China without the use of the strategic nuclear forces is very short, but without this, Xi Jinping will not be removed from power. Until the moment when such an opportunity arises, the “Komsomol members” in China need to be protected from defeat. 

Traditionally, the Komsomol members of China are grouped in the construction sector, where everything depends on investment. Xi Jinping has launched a campaign to reformat the transport and digital sectors in order to subordinate logistics and technology companies to the interests of the state and create additional investment opportunities there.

This will reduce the role of construction as the patrimony of the “Komsomol Members” and weaken their political resource. In the same direction are China’s actions to create a digital yuan – a currency that causes acute concern in the US, because for countries that have fallen under US sanctions, it will be possible to circumvent them.

Biden’s environmental agenda is a way to support his fifth column in China on the eve of its complete defeat. To stop Xi Jinping from inflicting this defeat by raising the environmental agenda from the periphery to the centre of politics, involving the “Komsomol members” in dialogue with the US and thereby saving them from defeat. The environment is the channel through which the US wants to organise a colour revolution in China.

The Chinese Komsomol is their version of our systemic Western liberals. The Chinese security forces are their version of our state security forces. Komsomol members are globalists, siloviki-sovereignists. But this is not an accurate description. Komsomol members are not globalists, but Americanists. They are satisfied with globalisation as a synonym of Americanisation.

Xi Jinping needs globalisation based on multipolarity. I.e., with a Chinese and ever-growing sector of dominance. For the US, this means an imminent complete displacement from all the niches that they currently occupy. Therefore, the environment for Biden is a new weapon in the struggle for the survival of the US as a global empire. And the world as a unipolar Space, where the US will be the Sun.

In other words, the environmental agenda is primarily a weapon against China. And along the way – strengthening the position of the leader among the vassals, as well as a way to tactically influence Russia on the eve of its transfer.

If Russia will conduct the transfer in a way as it needs it, and not in a way as it’s needed by the US, and China will reduce the “Komsomol members” and “optimise” their status, then Washington will lose all interest in the environment after 2024. It will instantly disappear from the agenda. The Americans will have to find the keys to China and Russia some other way.

Институт международных политических и экономических стратегий Русстрат

(@russtrat)