By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV, AP

I haven't been able to find a link, but wanted to mention it because it includes this graf:

The new crisis has been highly embarrassing for Russia, which will hold an unprecedented joint military exercise with China later this month, including the use of submarines to settle an imaginary conflict in a foreign land. In the exercise, Russia is to field a naval squadron and 17 long-haul aircraft.

A few days ago, I wrote about the new Russian-Chinese cooperation, springboarding off a bit by Stephen Green. It's the first thing I mentioned when reading about Russian calls for help from the US, UK and Japan. So...

The bad news for Russia and China continues. It's not enough that all around them democracies are springing up. Not bad enough that at some future date they may show up on a liberation list. What's really rough for the autocrats and totalitarians in power now is that at some level they realize the game is up. The Russians and Chinese announce joint exercises. It's a bold statement, suggesting that the superpower rivalries may reemerge. Will their plans to change the landscape succeed?

But when a Russian sub gets in trouble, do the Russians call their new Chinese friends? Of course not. They call the people with the know-how and technology to actually do the job. The Brits, who seem to be better at loading their equipment than us, got there first, but it was clear from the start that an Anglosphere nation was going to fix this if anyone could. And therein lies the dilemma: These obnoxious free societies seem to be better at creating and digging up the money for this stuff. The Russians have spent several years failing to develop equipment and procedures for these situations in the wake of the Kirsk disaster. So they had to settle for a routine British operation instead.

In Stranger and a Strange Land, the character Jubal Harshaw recalls forming a club with his best friend. The club voted unanimously that its members could refer to their mothers as "Crosspatch." Jubal ruefully notes that this didn't work out so well.

Russo-Chinese efforts to reestablish themselves as players are not unlike the "Crosspatch decision": There's a worrying capacity for mischief there, as the two plan out how they're going to be forces to be reckoned with. But for the moment, at least, the Russian sub disaster has reminded us who the grown-ups are.