Who’s the Sucker in This Global Poker Game?

While the world is focused on the growing global financial crisis (and with good reason), there are important stories emerging elsewhere that are just as threatening to U.S. interests and U.S. power. The most important story is the recent meeting between Comrade Xi Jinping of China and President Vladimir Putin of Russia inside the walls of the Kremlin in Moscow, as reported here.

Summit meetings among heads of state are not unusual. But this was more than just another summit meeting.

It was a kind of coming out party for a new world order that pushes the U.S. to the sidelines. Here’s the easiest way to understand what’s happening using a poker game as a metaphor.

The U.S., China, and Russia are the only superpowers in the world. Imagine a three-handed poker game that involves those three. There’s an old saying in poker: If you’re at the table and you don’t know who the sucker is … you’re the sucker. In any three-sided contest, it makes sense for two of the parties to work together to crush the third. Once the third player is wiped out (loses all his chips), the two survivors can turn on each other. That’s life.

The U.S. understood this dynamic implicitly since the end of World War II. The U.S. and Russia (then the Soviet Union) were in an existential struggle during the Cold War.

China was not a great power in the 1950s and 1960s, but it was effectively isolated and not a strong ally of Russia. In the 1970s, Richard Nixon saw the rise of China and moved quickly to end China’s isolation and make it an ally of the U.S. This worked brilliantly.

The Soviet Union went into economic decline in the 1970s and suffered a political decline in the 1980s. Then came the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. By 1991, the Soviet Union was officially dissolved, and the Russian Federation emerged.

The U.S. pivoted again under George H. W. Bush and made an ally of Russia in order to check the power of China. This worked well during the 1990s as Russia privatized and moved toward democracy while China was under a cloud because of the Tiananmen massacre (1989) and the Chinese downing of a U.S. aircraft (2001). Then the poker game started to go badly wrong.

The rise of Putin after 1999 enraged both neoconservatives and progressives in the U.S., who wanted Russia to be a Western puppet. Putin was a nationalist and pro-religious figure who returned Russia to a more traditional conservative state. Then Russia became a left-wing punching bag because it was a convenient way to rationalize Hillary Clinton’s dismal campaign (2016) and to tar Donald Trump.

Finally, the Ukraine War provoked by U.S. warmongers after 2014 became an excuse to exclude Russia from the international system entirely. At the same time, the potential for huge profits in China was irresistible for U.S. businesses despite China’s atrocious record on human rights.

In time, the U.S. was disabused of the notion that China would be “just like us” given enough time. China turned out to be a vicious Communist dictatorship and an even worse enemy than the former Soviet Union.

Where are we now? China and Russia are close allies, and the U.S. is the odd man out. We’re the sucker.

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