Irish Examiner view: Why China should be on our mind amid Ukraine crisis

The European security order as we have known it for the last 60 years has collapsed. Russia has made its ambitions clear; China has not.

Russia president Vladimir Putin and Chins president Xi Jinping at a meeting in February. Picture: Alexei Druzhinin/AP

Napoleon Bonaparte, one of the best geopolitical thinkers of his age, had a straightforward response when he was asked what should be done about China. “Best let her sleep”, he said, “for when she wakes, she will shake the world.” 

Amid the horror of the heavy armaments falling on the heads of Ukrainian civilians, the prospect of a Götterdämmerung at Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant, the closing of ranks, financial and symbolic, against Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin war machine, another enormous issue looms.