This week, the Munich Security Conference is taking place in Germany and the United States is being represented by Secretary of State Antony Blinken. It’s the first diplomatic conference where representatives from both America and China are present since all of the unpleasantness about the Chinese spy balloon broke out. Bliken reportedly took the opportunity to arrange a side meeting with one of his Chinese counterparts, Wang Yi, the Director of the Office of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission. Yi is China’s highest-ranking diplomat and Blinken reportedly issued a list of demands, warnings, and threats of consequences to him. At the top of the list was “no more spy balloons,” obviously. But he also warned Yi that China should not be providing any lethal aid to Russia in Ukraine. (Fiscal Times)

The US has said it is “very concerned” China will soon supply Russia with lethal arms to help in its war against Ukraine after a fraught meeting between the two sides’ top diplomats on Saturday that addressed multiple Sino-American tensions.

The frank exchanges between US secretary of state Antony Blinken and China’s top foreign policy official Wang Yi were the first face-to-face interactions between top Washington and Beijing officials since the US shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon that floated over North America earlier this month.

During the meeting on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, Blinken demanded China cease the use of spy balloons over the US while stressing that any material support from Beijing for Russia’s military would have “serious consequences” for US-China relations.

As you might imagine, this didn’t sit very well with Yi. He said that he had only agreed to the meeting out of diplomatic interests “at the request of the U.S.” A statement from China’s Foreign Ministry quickly followed, saying that Beijing “would never accept US attempts to dictate the terms of its relations with Moscow.” They also repeated their previous assertion that shooting down their spy balloon “violated international conventions.”

As far as China’s relationship with Russia goes, it’s currently believed that China has only been providing non-lethal, humanitarian aid to Russia. But Blinken suggested that there may soon be evidence that Beijing plans to start offering military equipment and “lethal aid” to Putin. Blinken is saying that any such aid would have “serious consequences” for Sino-American relations.

But it doesn’t appear that China is very concerned about any further deterioration in our relationship, which is pretty much a dumpster fire at this point anyway. And there is some obvious duplicity in “demanding” that China not provide lethal aid to the Russians while we’re busy sending tanks to Kyiv and will very likely follow those up with fighter jets later this year.

Perhaps, as some have already suggested, it’s time to stop tap dancing around the elephant in the room. China is no longer just another international trading partner of the United States with whom we have some philosophical differences. They are our enemy for all intents and purposes and they are seeking to supplant the United States as the dominant global superpower. They are part of the new Axis of Evil and they have their own allies, including Russia, Iran, and North Korea. (And increasingly Turkey as well, unfortunately.)

I don’t want a war with China any more than anyone does. But they are clearly going to follow their own path at this point and they no longer fear any reprisals from us enough to allow our Secretary of State to start barking orders at them. The same people in Washington who have been pushing economic warfare against Russia have been rather slow to embrace the idea of quickly cutting the legs out from under China’s dominance of the global supply chain. I’ll leave it up to you to decide why that might be, but our foreign relations position has deteriorated significantly in a very short period of time. And the American people probably need to be ready for the situation to deteriorate further.