I’ve been picking up rumors that Chinese President Xi Jinping has been reaching out to both the Ukrainians and the Russians to broker a ceasefire and an agreement, and that the Russians who are pretty exhausted, not having succeeded in conquering Ukraine, are looking for a face-saving way out.

At the same time, the Ukrainians, while they would like to recapture Crimea and they would like to recapture all of Eastern Ukraine, they realize that they’ve suffered tremendous casualties,
that they have a limited amount of military equipment, and that they need to need to find a way out too. We could end up in the ironic situation of the Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, coming out as the negotiator who brings together Russia and Ukraine, who creates a truce and ends the war,
who then gets a Nobel Peace Prize, who convinces the Europeans that in fact, China is a more useful, more practical, and more reliable ally than the United States.

This would be, I think, both an enormous blow to American prestige and American influence, but an amazing commentary on the gap between President Biden and what we normally think of as the commander-in-chief. The idea that the Chinese could end up being the mediators in Europe is unthinkable. Nobody would have believed it two or three or four years ago. But the steady program of weakness, the degree to which the Biden administration has undercut the Ukrainians, the degree to which the Biden administration has failed to find a way to get the war to a successful conclusion, and just the general sense that Biden is not so much a commander-in-chief as he is an appeaser-in-chief, and that his administration is remarkably pro-Xi Jinping, you could end up in the near future, an amazing moment that nobody would have predicted a year ago, and one in which the Chinese psychologically become very, very big winners.

I have to confess, I’m very concerned about it. I think that it’s something we have to pay attention to. And it would be a very significant blow to the United States, and a very significant increase in Chinese prestige, if that’s what happens.