In return for allowing the Chinese to cart away more than half a billion pounds’ worth of minerals a year, Mr Mugabe not only makes a vast personal fortune for himself and his henchmen, but is given all the arms he needs to keep his criminal regime in power, including guns, jet fighters and military [...]

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Gazprom is a busy beaver these days. First Libya, then Iran. This probably falls under the strategic unhelpfulness category.
From the article:
A few days after French oil giant Total withdrew from its planned multi-billion dollar gas investment project in Iran, Russia’s Gazprom is entering the market in a multi-billion-dollar deal.
Gazprom’s Chief Executive Alexei Miller met on [...]

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More strategic unhelpfulness out of China.
From the article:
The BBC has found the first evidence that China is currently helping Sudan’s government militarily in Darfur.
The Panorama TV programme tracked down Chinese army lorries in the Sudanese province that came from a batch exported from China to Sudan in 2005.
The BBC was also told that China was [...]

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Russia and the West are losing each other yet again. The magnetic attraction and repulsion between the two has been going on for centuries. Indeed, historians have counted as many as 25 of these cycles since the reign of Tsar Ivan III.
In the past, however, the Kremlin’s sharp anti-Western turns were reversed — usually out [...]

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Both Russia and China have exceedingly different foreign policy aims than the United States, and domestic complexities inevitably have distanced Moscow and Beijing from Washington on a series of pressing international matters. The common aspiration to produce a multipolar world has driven Russia and China to effectively align against the United States incorporating a skilled [...]

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Summary of “Hedging Against China”
Hedging Against China
by John J. Tkacik, Jr.
Backgrounder #1925
April 17, 2006
While Beijing has prudently avoided head-on collisions with U.S. policies, an examination of China’s strategic unhelpfulness at virtually every level of engagement with the United States—from the war on terrorism to the proliferation of weap­ons of mass destruction (WMD) to even the [...]

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