As its rivals self-destruct, China is quietly tightening its grip on the future

The current state of global affairs is playing out something like the phantasmagorical drug-fuelled scenes in the Johnny Depp movie, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Human beings turn into reptiles before our eyes, and the solid floor of a casino disintegrates into a primordial sludge. Confusion, paranoia and disorientation reign as we are propelled stumbling through a whirlwind of mayhem, punctuated with bright flashes of light and the discordant yelling of deranged salesmen and incensed parking attendants.

Making sense of what is happening to us seems futile, as the pace of horrifying events is unrelenting. Things do, truly, appear to be falling apart.

The geriatric egomaniacal showman in the White House is in command of a Charge of the Not That Bright Brigade, which is so senseless, so utterly doomed and on such a gigantic scale as to ensure its uniqueness in human history.

What Donald Trump is doing to America, and by extension the world, deserves special recognition in the annals of human folly. Never in the history of our species have a people shot themselves so comprehensively over and over in both feet. There is even a glimmer of a bizarre, ragged glory in the monumental foolishness of it, such is its breathtaking scale.

On the other side of the Atlantic, something equally disastrously self-defeating is occurring.

From, we imagine, a secret underground bunker/luxury dacha complex on a private lake somewhere near Moscow, a bargain-basement Adolf Hitler named Vladimir Putin is waging an ego-driven, unprovoked dictator-fashion-accessory of a war which, quite apart from the catastrophic human suffering it has caused, is white-anting his Russia, irreparably hollowing out its future.

Putin’s savage attack on Ukraine serves absolutely no purpose – tens of millions have been displaced and millions killed and injured for absolutely no reason.

Ukraine was never a threat to Putin

Ukraine was never a threat to Putin. Nato isn’t and has never been a threat to Putin. Putin’s beef with Nato is its ability to contain his imperial ambitions.

If it were not for Putin dragging Russia back to authoritarianism from the brink of a democratic dispensation, Russia would be a Nato member, as was always intended by Boris Yeltsin.

Putin obviously wants to plunder Ukraine’s natural resources, but the price he is paying for them in blood and treasure is extortionate by anyone’s standards.

He has much cheaper minerals at home. Or he could simply buy minerals instead of buying weapons and ammunition. As the war enters its fourth year, Mr Putin has emptied his prisons and tried every trick in the book to lure recruits into the meat grinder, including South Africans.

He is relentlessly whittling away Russia’s human and economic future on the adamantine anvil that is the Ukrainian people. My time volunteering in Ukraine in 2024 and again in 2025 helped me understand this simple fact: the Russians will never win.

They can capture every centimetre of Ukraine, but they cannot capture or even truly damage its soul. There is a sacred, unseen something in those mountains, woods, villages, fields and rivers that lives in the Ukrainian heart that will never let the Russians hold their land again.

Every soldier the Russians kill, every hospital they bomb, every child they abduct, every woman they rape, every pensioner they make homeless, every single blow they land strengthens Ukrainian resolve.

Russians will just keep dying and dying, one way or another, until they leave Ukraine forever: packing their bags and staggering home through the fog they created for themselves, like blood and rain-sodden Roman legions fleeing Scotland, leaving thousands devoured whole by a landscape defended with the exact same ferocious tenacity that guards Ukraine.

Who benefits?

So who benefits from all this? A madcap America led by a remedial school’s Breakfast Club of bullies, drunks, halfwits and sadists is storing up an economic catastrophe that will devastate the US and has already vastly emboldened its enemies abroad.

Worse, this coterie of incompetents is dismantling the few global institutions that actually promote peace and stability, however unevenly or imperfectly. This situation gives Putin the space he needs to mindlessly erode Russia on the battlefields of Ukraine. Cui bono?

The winner out of all this is incontestably China. As well as a fractured, ineffectual Western response, China is getting exactly what it wants from the war in Ukraine: a hopelessly weakened Russia.

China continues to facilitate Putin’s war in Ukraine through trade that Russia desperately needs to keep its war machine inching over Ukraine’s vast plains, as well as to keep the lights on at home. Of course, China makes sure it doesn’t actually help Russia win.

China just makes sure Russia stays in the fight long enough to achieve true pariah status and irreversibly tank its own future. China could absolutely assist its supposed “ally” with sufficient men and material to overwhelm Ukraine and achieve a tactical victory: there are more than two million soldiers in the People’s Liberation Army twiddling their thumbs right now.

It doesn’t do this, largely because it has no interest in an end to the war. Unlike the flailing social-media-bait postures adopted by Trump, Xi Jinping has never promised to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, or even try to end it at all.

Russia’s mineral and water resources

Xi has his cold view levelled squarely at Russia’s mineral and water resources, which he knows a desperate and isolated Russia will sell to China for a song soon enough.

What of China’s supposed ambitions to take Taiwan? Isn’t this as diabolically ridiculous as Putin’s imperial adventure in Ukraine? Well, yes, it is.

The result of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be a national disaster quite similar to the catastrophe unleashed by Russia in Ukraine. China would immediately embroil itself in an unwinnable war with the US, Japan, Australia and Taiwan: a war which would quite likely rapidly expand to numerous other nations and theatres, possibly into World War 3.

Putting aside the risk of nuclear conflict as a subject worthy of an entirely separate analysis, the economic cost to China would be devastating and derail Beijing’s strategic economic plans for decades.

So does China genuinely intend to attack Taiwan and potentially provoke a third world war? Could that be why Xi is relentlessly centralising military power around himself by purging his air force, army and navy of its top generals and commanders, many of whom have been “disappeared”?

Strategic mistake

It seems improbable that China could be so strategically astute in Ukraine, yet make an even bigger strategic mistake than Russia with Taiwan – after all, Russia at least has a land border with Ukraine.

China would be assaulting a well-defended island across a sea teeming with the fleets of numerous enemies. Fighting a massively costly imperialist war might stir up national fervour for a while, and poking the sleeping American giant may boost the morale of the short-sighted.

But why would China compound the population precipice it created for itself via the One Child policy by throwing hundreds of thousands of its youth into a pointless amphibious quagmire under allied hellfire? Especially when it has so deftly enabled Russia to impose its own population crisis, through exactly the same sort of jingoist adventure.

China has just signed a massive trade deal with Canada, a direct result of Trump’s unparalleled incompetence.

Among many other indicators, this points to what is a likely truth: China sabre-rattles in the Taiwan Strait and surrounds to keep the old West and its allies disconcerted and off balance. Mr Xi very probably has no genuine ambition to derail China’s continuing ascendancy by doing exactly what it has helped Russia do in Ukraine.

China outwardly touting its imperialist ambitions gets Japan to re-arm with money better spent elsewhere. It gets Britain gutting the rest of its military to buy aircraft carriers that don’t seem to work too well.

America under Trump needs no Chinese manipulation. It loudly stumbles around in ever more absurd and destructive foreign policy circles, bombing this lot, kidnapping that lot, threatening allies and bullying friends, although it is unlikely Mr Xi lets that deter him from stirring the pot of American foolishness.

But Trump won’t be around forever. China knows this, and China is making hay before the orange sun sets. Maybe Xi is purging his military because he needs it under a very tight leash, not for imposing an imperialist daydream, but because the foreign policy his grand strategy depends on is predicated on a massive deception plan: Help Russia limp into its self-made shackles by ensuring it exhausts itself on a battlefield far away from Beijing, thus converting China’s old frenemy into a vassal state for generations.

This would secure China the cheap minerals and water rights it needs to feed its manufacturing and agriculture, and for its next steps forward.

Destabilise the South China Sea and keep its economic adversaries guessing, wasting enormous resources and looking the wrong way, thus creating the platform to ensure China’s rise continues unopposed, ultimately eclipsing the US.

Sounds like Mr Xi knows what he is doing. DM

Hector Eliott is the Managing Director of Bearfish, a strategic consulting company. He has a degree in history from Rhodes University and an engineering master’s from Stellenbosch University. He is a graduate of the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. He is a member of the Ukrainian Association of South Africa and has volunteered in Ukraine twice since the full-scale invasion by Russia.