By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
There’s a children’s playground called Multipolarity (aka Polycentricity). It’s large enough for children to play games of hide and seek*.
That’s a game as ancient as the Greeks of the time of Thucydides. He’s famous in China because President Xi Jinping quotes him to American presidents – last week to Donald Trump – as an invitation not to cheat when playing the game.
Let’s play hide and seek with Xi and his visitor this week, President Vladimir Putin. They are the hiders. We are It – the ones who must cover our eyes, count to ten, while the hiders do their best to conceal themselves from us. If we find them out, we win. They win if we don’t – at least that’s what they think.
Wait a minute! that’s not the rule of the Multipolarity Game.
Putin and Xi have just spent a night and a day together and concluded by announcing they and their allies and partners should be It. The enemies – they are the other players, the hiders in the game with names which Putin and Xi use like “hegemon”, “unilateralist”, “fascist”, “jungle man” instead of their legal names, Americans, their European and Asian allies, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia. In this variant of the Multipolarity Game, these players should hide from It finding them out, then doing to them what they have been threatening or doing to It already.
“Our meeting today,” Putin said at one of his Beijing meetings, “falls on a momentous date, but our friendship with China is not directed against anyone. We are not fighting anyone. We are simply pursuing our own interests and following our own development path. What is more, we are ready to cooperate with everyone, with all our global partners, including the United States.”
This is not a Putin joke. Russia is at war, fighting on several fronts “including the United States”. Scores of Russians are being killed every day on the Ukraine battlefield and in the hinterland of the country; their ships, cargoes and money seized or destroyed far away from the homeland. About them, Putin is announcing to the hiders that he’s the seeker; that he’s put on his blindfold and is about to count to ten (one hundred, one thousand more like) while he has sent a special friend called Kirill Dmitriev to join the Americans in their hiding places.
Wait a minute, another minute! In the game Putin and Dmitriev are playing with the Americans with whom they have been friends since their meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, last August, who is hider, who is seeker, who is It, who Isn’t?
The game, Xi told Putin before they had their Wednesday tea party, “remains far from tranquil. The damage caused by unilateral actions and hegemony is unprecedented, and the threat of regression to the law of the jungle looms large. In this regard, I have put forward the concept of a community.” This is Xi’s way of saying we are all children together so let’s play the game and stay the best of friends, win or lose.
“In the 21st century,” the game — they have just solemnly signed (May 20) — is “evolving towards a long-term state of polycentricity and the formation of international relations of a new type.” The game’s up, they say, for those “states to single-handedly manage world affairs, impose their interests on the entire world and restrict the sovereign development opportunities of other countries in the spirit of the colonial era.”
“I have agreed with President Trump,” Xi had announced the week before, “on a new vision of building a constructive China-U.S. relationship of strategic stability. “Constructive strategic stability means positive stability with cooperation as the mainstay, healthy stability with competition within proper limits, constant stability with manageable differences, and lasting stability with expectable peace.” This is Chinese for adults, not children – no playing hide and seek because everything will be in its proper place.
Does Xi really mean that, or are he and Putin kidding, just like adults do with children?
One answer has come from Michael Hudson, an adult of 87 years old, US professor of economics with Marxist method and anti-imperialism convictions who explains that the US is in permanent war against everybody they can get hold of. His idea of the hide-and-seek game is that the US is It — It’s counting down before It will come and find the hiders.
“The United States does not want stability in the world, because stability means the status quo. The United States has continually lost what used to be the American empire. It has lost its trade and balance-of-payments surplus. It has lost its industrial dominance. It has lost its dollar financial dominance. It is now a big debtor. It has been losing almost everything…The only asset that the United States now has to cope with a changing world dynamic is the ability to hurt other countries.”
Michael Hudson; Super Imperialism: The Origin And Fundamentals Of U.S. World Dominance (2003)
The hiders in Hudson’s variant of the game are all of us, including Russia and China.
“When China and Russia,” Hudson says, “refer to their enemies as ‘our partners,’ as they have done again and again, they are not posing as if they will fight back in a confrontational way. That is not the Asian way of conducting a negotiation. You do not say: we will fight back, you fight and we fight. That is not the way to find any resolution. Of course you are prepared to fight. But of course you say: why don’t we have a peaceful, logical discussion? Here is the kind of world stability that we are going to create.”
Iran is also one of the hiders, Cuba too. The list is a long one, especially if you count the countries which the US has already found, conquered, destroyed.
The hiders have no alternative but to fight. In Hudson’s theory of imperialism, the hopeful part, “China and Russia have already realised that they cannot maintain their own military, political and economic independence if the United States conquers Iran and essentially takes over control of the world oil trade, because it will weaponise this oil trade against them. So they have already said that they are going to support Iran to an increasing degree as America requires it.”
Hudson is kidding. He knows there are iron laws of imperialism and that there is no Asian way of negotiating with it or fighting — no way for any state of any race, to avoid fighting unless they wish to succumb, to be found and then to submit.
Hudson believes the Iranians have made their assessment of this choice, and chosen to fight. “What Iran has achieved is saying: we will not surrender. It has realised that if it does not fight, the United States is going to do just what it said it would do. It is going to have regime change, as it tried to do when it recently killed Iranian leaders. It is going to take over the government. It is going to put in a client oligarchy, just like the Shah. And Iran is saying: we would rather fight than end up becoming a colony, a client dictatorship and a client oligarchy of the United States, which would take over all of our natural resources and oil for itself… Iran says: if you do not care, you had better care, because the cost of not supporting our defence, our independence and our sovereignty is going to be a world depression as bad as the 1930s. Take your choice. Iran is upping the ante to force the whole world to ask: do you want to permit America simply to grab Iran, to do to Iran what it has just done to Venezuela?”
If this is the choice in the global game, is it the only choice for players like Putin and Xi? If their game is Multipolarity or Polycentricity, as they have just announced, what do they have to say between themselves, and what they have told Trump they intend about Iran’s choice?
According to Hudson, “China and Russia have already realised that they cannot maintain their own military, political and economic independence if the United States conquers Iran and essentially takes over control of the world oil trade, because it will weaponise this oil trade against them. So they have already said that they are going to support Iran to an increasing degree as America requires it.”
Did Xi tell Trump that China is going to support Iran to an increasing degree as America requires it?
One answer is in the the records the two of them made during and after their meetings in Beijing last week. Trump said that Xi “has been very nice about it. He gets 40 percent of his oil there. He didn’t send anybody. He didn’t send ships. He didn’t send ships with big fat guns on them that we would have had to repel. We would have.”
Who then rules the seas? Trump was asked. “China got three tankers out this week filled with Iranian oil”, he was asked by a reporter. “Because we allowed that to happen.” “You did?” “We allowed that to happen.”
In the White House readout, Trump and Xi “agreed Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, called to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and agreed that no country or organization can be allowed to charge tolls.”
Trump clarified that the game he and Xi are playing in Iran isn’t “constructive strategic stability”, it’s quid pro quo and finders keepers. “He agrees with me on that. He agrees with me that he wants to see it [Iran war] end. He’d like to see it end. He would like to help. If he wants to help, that’s great. But we don’t need help. And, you know, the problem with help, when somebody helps you, they always want something on the other side. That’s the way help works.”
Responding to Japanese press reports of what US officials say Xi told Trump about Putin’s Ukraine war campaign, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said on May 19: “We have released information on the China-U.S. summit. What you just cited is completely false.” There has been no comparable denial of Trump’s version of Xi’s remarks on Iran. Instead, the Chinese Foreign Ministry repeated that the game is stability.
Left: https://www.mfa.gov.cn/eng/xw/fyrbt/lxjzh/202605/t20260518_11912625.html Right: https://www.facebook.com/GreatestCountryOnEarth/videos/president-trumps-interview-with-bret-baier-in-beijing-may-15-2025-/2229948624425969/
“During the visit, the two presidents agreed on a new vision of building a constructive China-U.S. relationship of strategic stability, charted the course for high-level exchanges in the next stage as well as dialogue and cooperation in diplomatic, economic and trade, military-to-military, law enforcement and other fields, and had an in-depth exchange of views on international and regional hotspot issues of mutual interest. The Chinese side made clear its consistent position on the Iran issue, the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue and others, and has asked the U.S. to take seriously reasonable concerns of relevant parties and stick to dialogue and negotiation for the peaceful settlement of issues.”
It’s now time for readers to play It in the hide-and-seek which Putin and Xi have just spelled out for the playground they are calling Multipolarity (Polycentricity):
DECLARATION OF STABILITY UNDER THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF CHINA
“Our meeting today falls on a momentous date, but our friendship with China is not directed against anyone. We are not fighting anyone. We are simply pursuing our own interests and following our own development path. What is more, we are ready to cooperate with everyone, with all our global partners, including the United States. Today we discussed this with President Xi Jinping. I am very pleased to see that, having received your education in Russia, you are successfully building your professional career in your home country under the leadership of President Xi Jinping and the Communist Party of China…This policy provides both political and economic stability, which is an essential foundation for sustainable national development. When such stability exists, we often take it for granted, assuming it has always been present and will continue indefinitely. Yet it is only when challenges emerge in these areas that we fully recognise its importance. Stability creates the conditions necessary to improve living standards, expand educational opportunities, and foster the long-term development of the people.” Source: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/79790
THE JOINT DECLARATION
Source: http://kremlin.ru/supplement/6486
Source: http://kremlin.ru/supplement/6487
PRESS STATEMENTS WITHOUT PRESS QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Source: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/79787
RUSSIAN STATE MEDIA EDITORIAL ON FRICTION
Explaining the failure of the two sides to finalize terms for the start of the Power of Siberia-2 gas pipeline – without mentioning it – the editorial declares: “None of this means the relationship is free of friction and it’s clearly not. Russia and China are both major powers with long histories, strong national interests and their own strategic ambition which means disagreements over trade, investment, logistics and regional influence are inevitable. But the crucial difference is that these disagreements aren’t existential in nature. Unlike US-China relations, where competition increasingly revolves around limiting and constraining the other side, Russia and China don’t fundamentally view each other as adversaries so while practical disputes may cause irritation, delays or bargaining, but they don’t threaten the relationship itself. Both sides may occasionally exercise restraint in directly supporting the other if circumstances become too risky or complicated. But neither Moscow nor Beijing is prepared to undermine the broader partnership for the sake of tactical advantage elsewhere because the relationship is seen as strategically valuable in its own right.” Source: https://www.rt.com/news/640157-putin-trump-xi-triangle/
[*] Lead image is a fresco depicting Cupids playing hide-and-seek, from the cryptoporticus of the House of the Deer in Herculaneum, dating from the Roman Empire in the first century AD. Watch as the ancients played the game with weapons.
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