China’s Xi Jinping faces an excruciating choice. He can stand back and allow Vladimir Putin to lose the war in Ukraine, leading to the downfall of his key strategic ally. That would risk the emergence of a Western-leaning government from the ruins of defeat.
It would be the end of Xi’s revisionist grand plan to end American hegemony and rewrite the rules of the global order. It might also be the political end of Xi himself.
