What is starting to dawn on Vladimir Putin is that, in a free-market system, one is more beholden to one’s customers than to one’s suppliers. It is easier for customers to take their business elsewhere than for suppliers to do so.
Picture = 1K words: Guess who got the better of the natural gas deal? pic.twitter.com/H9aKZwzLBE
— Quartz (@qz) May 21, 2014
China’s biggest customers are Europe and the United States. Russia is attempting to switch their customer from Europe to China. That would move them further down, not up, the supply chain. As Prof Timothy Snyder points out:
…Putin would have to fall back on China, and Russia would become China’s Ukraine.
Pivot to russia is another maladroit and idiotic hilliarian geopolitics of the beast