Big Two G2 USA and China

[Anomalocaris]

1.  Sort of, devil is in the details.

2.  Cool in the sense that China has raised the income of some 1.4 billion people by around a factor of 10, while russia has done little or nothing for its people in the same 3 decades.   Not cool in the sense that China has begun to significantly overestimate her own capabilities in a game she really has not gotten to be very good at yet, while Russia is very experienced and dexterous at the game, and that is rendered even more potent by the fact that it is still underestimated by others.

3.  Debatable.   Parts of Europe is poorer than Mexico. 

4.  Not everything Russia wants, but far more than the USA or NATO thought possible.  China actually wants good relation with Ukraine, because Ukraine’s soviet bequeathed military industrial infrastructure is still important to china’s quest to fill important weak spots and round out the capabilities of her own military industrial sector.  Also, while supporting Russia may create a sort of precedence for China undertaking much larger scale foreign hard power influence  champaign in Taiwan and disputed islands in East and south China Sea,  it also set a sort of precedence for green lighting foreign influence in a way that might boomerang back on China in Tibet and Xingjiand/East Turkistan.     So it is unlikely China would overtly support Russia in Ukraine.

Germany and the Scandinavians are the most developed in the world

It's good that Russia is isolated

Russia is not nearly as isolated as the west, steeped in the mythology of its own righteousness and the universality of its own, loudly but not all together convincingly proclaimed, values, would like to think.   Russia has good relationship with israel, plays turkey and Iran like fiddles, is still Indian’s hedge against being discarded at the end of any transactional alliance with the west, and is building a alliance with China that will greatly decrease the relevance of Europe in world affairs.

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