The Arrangement - The Patient (Part 7/8)

Part 7 of 8. Russia has not fired a missile. China has not moved a soldier. Neither has spent a dollar on this conflict.

Both of them are winning.

The most dangerous player in any conflict is the one not fighting, because they have already calculated how it ends.

In this episode of The Arrangement, a special 8-part series from Unusual Practice, we examine the patient strategy: how Russia profits from every barrel of disrupted Middle Eastern oil, how China has built energy independence from three sanctioned nations at below-market prices, why the sanctions designed to contain America's adversaries are inadvertently enriching them, Turkey's extraordinary multi-vector foreign policy that nobody in Western media discusses seriously, and the structural evidence that what we are watching is not a war America is winning... but a symptom of a decline it is accelerating.

Sources:

1. Russia oil revenue as % of federal budget — IMF Russia Article IV

   https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/CR/Issues/2024/russia-article-iv

2. China's sanctioned oil imports — Russia, Iran, Venezuela 33% of mix — S&P Global

   https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/latest-news/oil/china-crude-imports-sanctioned-nations

3. China Belt and Road Initiative scope — World Bank

   https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/regional-integration/brief/belt-and-road-initiative

4. Turkey S-400 purchase, F-35 suspension — NATO / US Department of Defense

   https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/1876821/

5. UN report on Uyghur human rights situation in Xinjiang

   https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/country-reports/ohchr-assessment-human-rights-concerns-xinjiang-uyghur-autonomous-region

6. America's share of global GDP decline — World Bank data

   https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD

7. Two-state solution made structurally impossible — UN OCHA West Bank report

   https://www.ochaopt.org/location/west-bank