Europe

I don't know. Honestly probably nothing. I think the commies rightfully see EU and US capitalist democracies as being one bad election away from fascism and for a good reason. Examining the trajectories of our politoeconomic systems, we have been on that trend for a long time now. We're not doing anything meaningful to stop it. So from their perspective, they understand that our capitalist systems are unsustainable and they understand the right ideologues are diametrically opposed to socialism around the world and have used military and economic force against it in the 20th century. I'm pretty sure they see this happening again, aimed at them and they would need to be able to protect themselves. Having a gas station or two that are isolated from the rest of the world is a great asset in this scenario. So I think the best we could do is getting Russia to agree to some compromise which would most likely include significant land loss for Ukraine. Unless there's a military solution that someone is willing and able to fight. Maybe if the US goes full in weapons supply to Ukraine. Don't know.

First of all I am actually curious what you think about this as you seem to have done some research on the matter, thanks for your reply!

Sure, would have been better to use the nuclear option 10+ years ago. Let’s see how we got there, to what you describe as a multi-polar world.

When China was taking over the solar industry, in which Germany invested tons of money, just so that China can steal the technology and make profit off that by selling them to Europe which was happily subsidizing them, killing its own industry (China did only subsidize domestically produced solars for context). Then came EVs - again, European companies were busy shifting production to China, sharing technology, and subsidizing all the EVs no matter where they come from again, Chinese included, while China would only subsidize Chinese EVs. Now France is busy exporting plane parts, so that Chinese Comac can build their own planes by scraping together European parts, and gradually replacing the European parts with Chinese clones, and then actually improved Chinese designs. Would be impossible if you just banned plane part exports to China and would delay they efforts for ages, but apparently learning from mistakes isn’t the strongest trait of our leaders. But who could think that sharing technology and shifting production to an authoritarian regime could eventually backfire?

Does this mean that nothing can be done and we have to accept our fate? No, Europe has still many strong sectors. Sure, not much can be done about solars at this point, but, as an example, banning plane part exports and stopping subsidizing Chinese EVs, would still greatly hurt the pace of further growth of the beast that we’ve raised. And Trump is on the same page with China, so if we sit down and talk together with the US, we can actually still do a great harm to the Chinese economy as two of the three biggest polars of the current day multipolar world. Let’s cooperate with Japan, South Korea, Australia and Canada on that, let’s bully India and Vietnam a bit which would love to get some western foreign investments, and China is screwed. Yes, we should have done that in 2016, but we were busy bailing China out when US finally started fighting them. I don’t get why no one did it before and why no one does it to this day.

Regarding cheap oil - China doesn’t need cheap oil anymore. They invented their own, alternative energy sources, and the falling global oil prices are partly attributed to the declining demand from the Chinese side. Their alliance with Russia is not an economic one because Russia barely has anything to offer for China nowadays, with their economy of a size of Spain. What Russia has is nukes, a similar authoritarian regime, a great network of spies, and a will of destabilizing the European continent, which China loves, as it keeps Europeans busy with Russia, and shifts the focus away from China.