My Take | There’s only one way to peace in Ukraine but the West says no

Here’s an idea for peace in Ukraine. China, the United States, Britain, Germany and France will work together to press Kyiv and Moscow to sit at the negotiating table. That’s all the members of the United Nations permanent security council, plus the European Union’s most powerful state. How fitting and necessary! Minus Germany, they are all the original nuclear-armed nations and the world is facing the possibility of a nuclear war threatening to spiral out of control. That’s how international diplomacy usually works, when those involved actually want results.

That won’t happen any time soon, though. The West is arming Ukraine and it won’t stop until its war aims are achieved in this openly acknowledged proxy war. Meanwhile, the Western propaganda against China will continue relentlessly to blame it for not ending the war. Russia may be the junior partner in this relationship but the stakes are too high for Moscow to follow just the say-so of Beijing.

In his state visit to China, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz again urged Beijing last week to use its influence on Russia to stop the war, during talks with President Xi Jinping.

If he had meant business, he would have proposed that Germany and China work together to push the combatants to the negotiating table rather than calling on Beijing to tell Russia to stop the war while continuing to flood Ukraine with powerful German weapons.

But the West doesn’t want peace, at least for now. In fact, talking publicly about a diplomatic solution is a no-no, guaranteed to rain down opprobrium on you.

Two weeks ago, there was the absurd spectacle of the progressive caucus of the Democrats in the US House of Representatives retracting, after less than a day, a letter to President Joe Biden sent by 30 members calling for “a proactive diplomatic push” to end the conflict.