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Think about this: What if Vladimir Putin had just invaded Taiwan?
Not actually, of course, but metaphorically. Is what we are seeing in Ukraine a glimpse into a Chinese war on Taiwan?
This is not academic, this is real. Ukraine — a democracy — is under assault from an authoritarian leader. The bombed-out burning ruins, the death toll, the people fleeing mean we have to imagine what this could look like in Taiwan.
China has Russia's back. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin signed what's been called a "no limits" pact during the Winter Olympics in Beijing.
Putin held his fire until the Olympics closing ceremony and then rolled his tanks over the Ukraine border.
If Xi Jinping could stop Putin's war, he certainly isn't doing so. China has abstained from a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Russia's aggression and Beijing's deep pockets are cushioning the impact of harsh economic sanctions on Moscow.
All the while Xi maintains the threat of force against Taiwan, which China believes is a renegade province. Just as Putin built up his troops along the Ukraine border, Xi has over the past year increased the scope, size and frequency of Chinese military intimidation of Taiwan.
Is this how the world is now — what Prime Minister Scott Morrison described as an arc of autocracy confronting democracy? Or is there another way? Is there a moment here for a daring diplomatic move that resets the global order?
Can the world silence Putin's guns and save Taiwan?
When Nixon met Mao
There is a lesson from history. Fifty years ago this year, then US president Richard Nixon went to Beijing to meet China's supreme leader, Mao Zedong.
It was the height of the Cold War, the Vietnam War was raging and China was in the midst of the Cultural Revolution. Relations between communist China and the US were in the deep freeze. China, Nixon said, was in "angry isolation".
Nixon made a high-stakes move. He would describe his visit to Beijing as "the week that changed the world". Nixon saw an opportunity to bring China in and isolate Soviet Russia. China feared and mistrusted Russia, too.
America and China shared a common foe. It was a classic play of "my enemy's enemy is my friend".
Evan Thomas, the author of Being Nixon: A Man Divided, said Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger "cooked up this idea of pitting the Soviet Union and China against each other". Nixon wanted to consolidate the US as the fulcrum of a realigned global order.
Nixon and Mao met for only one hour. Historian Margaret MacMillan called it "curiously inconclusive". Secret minutes of the meeting released years later revealed a Chinese suspicion of American invasion. Mao wondered whether he faced a greater threat from Russia or the US.
Nixon assured the Chinese leader that the US had "no territorial designs on China".
"We can find common ground, despite our differences, to build a world structure in which both can be safe to develop in our own way on our own roads," Nixon told Mao.
Note there was no talk of the supremacy of democracy or a global liberal rules-based order. Nixon did not believe he was on a mission to convert China.
This was cold blooded diplomacy. Pragmatic, not ideological. Each nation developing on their own roads.
Setting the world on a new course
In an article in the journal Foreign Affairs years before his trip to Beijing, Nixon set out his long view, writing:
"...we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbours."
In her book, Nixon and Mao, Margaret Macmillan writes that among Nixon's great advantages was that "he had the determination, the intelligence, and the knowledge to sense the currents in history and to take advantage of them. And he loved foreign policy."
The meeting between Nixon and Mao set the course for a new century. After Mao's death a new leader, Deng Xiaoping, would open China's economy to the world and set the country on the course of becoming a super power.
Nixon's trip to Beijing established a status quo over Taiwan. Recognising a "One China" policy interpreted differently by different sides has held an uneasy peace in place for 50 years.
China and the US have been inseparable from each other. China does not grow without the US order, and China's factories have helped power the global economy.
Not without its tensions, the China-US relationship has proved remarkably resilient even during the dark days of the Tiananmen massacre.
Now the two line up against each other in what US President Joe Biden sees as the great battle of authoritarianism against democracy. The war in Ukraine has made that chillingly real.
Is a Nixon-Mao moment possible at all today? Margaret Macmillan, speaking to the ABC's China Tonight program, fears it may not be.
Xi Jinping has grown especially belligerent and more forceful. He senses his moment and has said the West is waning and the East is rising.
But he must surely be watching events in Ukraine and know now that the West is showing greater unity and resolve. Russia is isolated, its currency has crashed; Xi would know that aggression comes at a cost.
How long does Xi back his friend Putin and carry Russia while the country and its leader are now an international pariah?
Xi says he wants greater recognition and respect for China's great power status. Is this how it is achieved?
Is this Biden's 'Nixon moment'?
Joe Biden may well be calculating his "Nixon moment". Certainly, the two most powerful leaders of the world's two most powerful countries hold between them all our fates.
Is a new rapprochement at all possible? What would it look like? How could Biden reach out to Xi without appeasing China?
What would Xi want? Would China's sphere of influence span the Asia-Pacific and what does that mean for Australia?
A new global order, with an authoritarian power as co-chair, would mean a very different world to the one we have grown accustomed to — especially after the end of the Cold War.
These are hard things to contemplate right now, especially when the bombs are falling and the people are fleeing.
Richard Nixon, before his disgrace in the Watergate affair, saw a world on tilt — wracked by revolution and war — and seized an opportunity to act. It did change the world.
Now we face that moment again. Joe Biden says America is back. Now American resolve is being tested.
But Xi Jinping is the puzzle. He says he is a champion of globalisation and multilateralism. But he sounds and acts increasingly despotic.
Who is the true Xi? If it is the authoritarian who believes his time has come — if he will not talk Putin down — then we face the prospect of an even more deadly conflict in the near future.
In that case, we must accept that Vladimir Putin has not only invaded Ukraine, he has invaded Taiwan as well.
Stan Grant is the ABC's international affairs analyst and presents China Tonight on Monday at 9:35pm on ABC TV, and Tuesday at 8pm on the ABC News Channel. He is also a co-presenter of Q&A.