A few points on what
Joel Davis and Imperium Press said regarding France and geopolitical decisions.
Russia and America have been at war for at least eight years – 30 with the new Russia, and at least 70 with the old Russia. 200 according to Tocqueville.
This alone makes China a lesser player. Add nuclear weapons to the equation and they drop even further. This aspect cannot be underestimated, yet it does not factor at all into most discussions. Russia too has to factor in a first strike by America, or the fact that it is already existentially on the line of defeat.
Given Schmitt's elements of world order after WWII - anti-colonialism, cosmic spatial appropriation, and industrial aid - China should be understood as a sort of lynchpin, or gordian knot. Industrialising China offers two strategic opportunities: limiting world industrial power to a single zone, a zone which can also act as potential alliance or incursion point.
All this considered, China does not represent a true enemy, which is why the conflict remains an economic and industrial one whereas the conflict with Russia has been real for nearly a century – in cold war, revolutionary war, mixed warfare, and even limited hot war. The question of the East is an extension of American doctrine following the Monroe Doctrine's completion in WWII. It is also a residue of the conflict with communism, China is not the central focus of conflict, but a result.
This does not mean China is irrelevant, only that potential power is accidental. If China realises power it will be due to it being thrust upon them, much as it was for the Americans.
Of course, it would be a mistake to discount China. A billion people and total mobilisation potential threatens a whole other front for America and an unbinding of the world war.
Roughly speaking, the conditions of economic diplomacy may follow that of the explosion of nations into the UN as a response to the eternal Soviet veto. There will be a revolution in industrial order, particularly against aid and any subterfuge which comes with trade in the Western economic zones.
How much leverage does France really have here? I doubt both their potential and will for sovereignty apart from America. Most likely is maintaining relations with China for the benefit of America, or simply self-interest due to austerity and attrition pressure. The West simply does not have the capacity for total mobilisation, and their economic desperation, or capitulation to China, is increasing because of its self-destructive choices, and multiple defeats at the hand of Russia.
The defeats in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and the First Ukraine Conflict cannot be overstated. It is to the extent that America's incursion against Russia is partly an act of desperation and also to not allow defeat to set in. The populace must also forget the images of mass retreat from democratic expansion and the neutralisation of non-democratic states. To some extent this is a war of equalisation.
Russia played a significant part in at least two of these conflicts, and its decisions are seen by most of the world as the graveyard of the American Empire – or at the very least its control of international order through the UN. The legal justification of revolutionary war has ended, and the extent to which Russia can establish a new order is the real.test of this war.
Russia is fighting for a new international order of law; America is fighting for its spatial order, which has suffered potentially mortal wounds. The conditions for victory are, in a sense, limited yet limitless for America. Particularly this is true to the extent that the war is a spatial conflict tending towards territorial gains. To return to neutralising power, to the maintainer of world order, is a much higher demand, and cannot be read in the classical terms which determine the commonplace interpretation of war. Here we see a simple reason for the extreme claims of Ukraine victory apart from propaganda, which should not have an effect anywhere close to what we are seeing.
