The Eurasian Express just got derailed.
Biden and Blinken have notched up significant successes. Germany has cut itself off from Russia and therefore China.
Astonishingly, Chancellor Scholz found 100 billion euros and announced Germany would upgrade its military forces.
Le piece de resistance was the dramatic declaration that the NordStream 2 gas pipeline is finally dead in the water, fulfilling long-standing US objectives in the western half of Eurasia.
Can the Russians win?
The vagaries of war don't automatically warrant Russian victory in the next few days, but it would be a surprise if they did not do so.
Unlike the massive US bombing of Iraq, Russia seems relatively more restrained with its immediate neighbour and has encircled the enemy methodically.
The current parley is over three demands: 1) A chastened Kyiv, feeling being led down the garden path, is telling Moscow it no longer wants to join Nato. Russia will want that guarantee on paper, from Washington itself. 2) The self declared republics in the east of Ukraine are to be recognized, and 3) Crimea is to remain part of Russia.
In diplomacy, "impossible" means never, but Ukrainian negotiators have said demands (2) and (3) above are "practically impossible."
That extra word suggests flexibility and further bartering. Ukraine has concluded that, at least for now, Nato is not going to defend it.
Not so rosy medium term
Victoria Nuland, the infamous architect of the US-backed coup in 2014, may turn out to be a liability. With her father being Ukrainian this is perhaps also personal for the under secretary of state.
Questions are starting to be asked.
Firstly, the Chinese have officially demanded answers about the presence and purpose of US bio-war labs on Ukrainian soil (as they were in Kazakhstan).
Secondly, some are wondering if the US, on the prodding of people like Nuland (and her neo-con husband Robert Kagan of the Project for a New American Century) has been dragged into strategic overstretch.
In the short term, the draconian economic assault on Russia's financial system is designed to panic the Russian people, to rush to ATMs and start a bank run and then bring out anti-Putin protests.
So far the system has held up. The regime is not yet in peril.
Doomsday weapon
The US has launched financial Armageddon by "seizing" the dollar assets of the Russian Central Bank.
This has sent shivers down the spine of every other central bank and government across the globe.
It means that your dollar reserves can be turned worthless at the flick of the switch .
China and the rest of the Global South have seen the dollar weaponized by Washington, even against a nuclear Russian power.
You get to use this doomsday weapon once. No more.
The history books will record this as not the end, but the beginning of the end of King Dollar.
Russia, China, India, Iran and the rest will increasingly trade in their own currencies.
What next
China (RCEP), being the largest consumer market in the world, will only grow larger and larger, and simultaneously being producer and consumer, will ultimately de-dollarize.
The Egyptian leader Abdel Nasser once remarked: "The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves, which leaves us to wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them that we are missing."
China and Russia since the mid 2010s have reacted by accelerating their measures to jettison dependence on US technology and US finance.
Russia sold off all its US treasury bonds not long after the 2014 US coup in Kyiv.
Later this decade, China's CIPS financial messaging system will replace the West's SWIFT (in the East).
Russian banks will accept yuan and its big companies are already inviting Chinese capital.
Winter is coming
Meanwhile, Europe has erected its own Berlin Wall to keep out the Russians. But the basic resources and commodities are to Europe's immediate east. The markets are further east of the Ural mountains in Asia.
This winter, the Europeans will be looking at each other and wondering why they are purchasing expensive gas from the US and wiping out parts of their industrial base.
Imran Khan went apoplectic when a score of European ambassadors impudently sent him a joint letter about the UN vote.
The bulk of the subcontinent is for once on the same page.
An unfortunate Nepal was reportedly pressured very hard by David Lu. Beijing will have observed that, as will have Dhaka.
If Russia survives, and if the US slaps sanctions on India for purchasing S400 missiles, expect a Russian initiative for peace between India and China.
China might even broker a peace between Russia and Europe, only at its pleasure.
The world is changing and Europe will be learning a painful lesson very soon as inflation kills it.
Before the ominous coming winter, German and French industrialists may bang heads together.
Some European ambassadors might want to go to evening class and learn some economics.
Farid Erkizia Bakht is a political analyst. @liquid_borders.