US historian: China could be Ukraine conflict's peacemaker

China can play an instrumental role in mediating an end to the Ukraine conflict, according to historian Alfred W. McCoy during an interview on Intercepted.

Alfred W. McCoy is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change. 

McCoy pointed out that China is well-position to mediate and negotiate an end to this war in a way that the US is clearly not. China is in a position where they could actually make both countries come to a bargaining table due to the fact that China has very good relations with both, noted MacCoy.

In contrast, the US' position is to "arm Ukraine to the point where they can achieve a total military victory and push Russia out of Crimea, push Russia absolutely out of the Donbas region", which doesn't give it much of a negotiating position.

If China can negotiate and resolve the conflict with Zelensky and Putin by enabling them to turn up and sit at a negotiation table, MaCoy said, it would, in the end, not only avert a potential thermonuclear war - or at least a use of nuclear weapons for the first time since 1945 - but also help preserve global peace.

MacCoy stressed that resolving this bloody endless conflict would also relieve the profoundly disrupted global economy.

At multiple levels, Beijing's timely mediation and resolution of this could "forge an agreement without a nuclear or bloody military showdown, and restore some guarantees", MacCoy concluded.