Letters | For the West, it’s Murphy’s law of geopolitics

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In his column, “Game strategy shows there can be no good outcome in the US-China-Russia power contest” (March 25), Andrew Sheng likens geopolitics to chess and Go. As a Russian, I don’t know the game of Go, but in chess, it’s frequently wise to sacrifice a pawn to achieve a positional advantage. Both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, in their current gambit, are sacrificing the West to achieve an alliance with each other.

Actually, Russia and China are the only two countries that can treat the West thus. What is happening now proves Murphy’s Law: anything that can go wrong will go wrong. The West might have avoided the present situation, if it had made a better job of the collapse of the Soviet Union. But not only did the West move Nato to Russia’s border, it also sent warships to the Taiwan Strait. Expecting Moscow and Beijing not to react was a bridge too far.

After fist-bumping with Saudi Arabia for oil failed, US President Joe Biden and his advisers at the State Department seemed not to believe that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman would play the China card and that Chinese diplomacy, with its success in facilitating re-establishment of diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia, would be placed a close second to the decades-long US-Saudi relationship.