This is important. People here often complain that China isn't doing enough against its enemies. I would argue that China is engaged in two proxy wars against its main enemies right now - against NATO via Russia and against India via Pakistan. And it's the ideal form of proxy warfare, one where Chinese troops are not involved whatsoever.
If you dispute my characterization of the Russia/Pakistan conflicts as China's proxy wars, ask yourself if either conflict can be sustained if China didn't exist.
You got it backwards. It was India who attacked Pakistan, and the Ukraine war would not have happened without relentless NATO expansion since the fall of the Soviet Union and the regime change of the legitimately elected Ukrainian government because they had the audacity to accept Russia’s better deal over the EUs.
It is the west that is endlessly trying to cause problems and destroy countries left right and centre for the unforgivable sin of not wanting to be their slaves.
It’s hilarious to argue China is waging a proxy war against NATO when it’s not even selling arms to Russia. If China was seriously waging a proxy war against NATO using Russia, the battlefield would be over actual NATO territories right now.
But China is wise enough not to gift the EU to the Americans for free, so it’s limiting its assistance to Russia both as a fig leaf to the EU, as well as keeping a ready sword over their collective heads to prevent them from getting too close to the US. Because the moment the EU pledges itself to the US in its planned war of aggression against China is the same moment China flips the collective EU and NATO from an asset to a liability for the Americans by opening the floodgates of Chinese arms to Russia so that it can not only crush Ukrainian resistance rapidly, but also seek to repay the rest of the EU for all the Russian blood they helped to spill in Ukraine.
But that’s really endgame moves where once committed, you have to see things through to the bitter end and fast. The EU is still a vast and rich collection of nations with vast natural resources and hundreds of millions of citizens. Given time and if sufficiently motivated to endure hardships, they can build a formidable military industrial complex and sustain a vast standing army. That’s why the play with them is to either incentivise them to stay out and continue their comfortable lives, or give them no mercy and take them out before they can start to realise much of their potential. Needless to say, the Russians, even with functionally unlimited Chinese arms, don’t have the numbers for that, so China will need to commit a significant proportion of its own armed forces to the European front. So on balance, it’s far better for everyone if the EU can be persuaded to site the next war out instead of escalating it into a full blown 3rd world war.
