2022年6月15日，乌克兰东部顿巴斯前线的乌克兰军人用法国自行式155毫米/52口径的凯撒枪向俄罗斯阵地开火。/CFP
Editor's note:David Ferguson, a winner of the Chinese Government Friendship Award, is a senior translation editor at Foreign Languages Press. The article reflects the author's views and not necessarily those of CGTN.
编者按:大卫·弗格森，中国政府友谊奖获得者，外文出版社高级编译辑。这篇文章反映了作者的观点，不代表CGTN的观点。
The current international situation is possibly more worrying than anything else since the darkest days of the Cold War, and China must exercise its diplomatic influence with as much skill as possible to prevent events from spiralling out of control. This will be no easy matter.
自冷战最黑暗的日子以来，当前的国际局势可能比任何时候都更令人担忧，中国必须尽可能高超地运用其外交影响力，以防止事态失控。当然，这不是一件容易的事。
For two decades, the U.S. think tank Pew Research has been carrying out an annual survey on public attitudes to China in around 20 major developed countries throughout the world. The survey is very simple – it asks ordinary members of the public whether their attitude to China is generally positive or negative. The results show a steady trend of growing hostility to China that suddenly diverged into an enormous gap around 2017-2018. A relentless Western media campaign covering the Tibet Autonomous Region, the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, the Taiwan region, the South China Sea, the Belt and Road Initiative, technology, COVID-19, and many other targets has succeeded in poisoning public attitudes to China in the developed world.
20年来，美国智库皮尤研究中心(Pew Research)一直在全球约20个主要发达国家每年进行一次公众对中国态度的年度调查。这项调查非常简单——它询问普通公众对中国的态度总体上是积极还是消极。结果显示，对中国的敌意呈稳定增长趋势，在2017-2018年左右突然分化为巨大的差距。西方媒体对西藏自治区、新疆维吾尔自治区、香港特别行政区、台湾地区、南中国海、一带一路、科技、新冠肺炎和许多其他目标的无情报道已经成功毒化了发达世界的公众对中国的态度。
Of course, China has friends too, in the developing world and the Global South. But their voices do not carry far in the international arena, and they are not the ones entitled to decide where wars will be waged. They had no say, for example in the war in Ukraine that is now damaging their vital interests.
当然，中国在发展中国家和南半球也有朋友。但是他们的声音在国际舞台上并不响亮，他们也无权决定在哪里发动战争。他们没有发言权，例如在乌克兰战争中——虽然这场战争正在损害他们的切身利益。
Some parties, most notably the entire Western mainstream media, take a "Creationist"view that history began on February 24, 2022. Others point to the U.S.-backed Maidan coup in 2014, which made nonsense of the popular Western shibboleth: "The great strength of democracy is that if you don't like the guys who are running the show, you can just vote for somebody else!"
一些政党，最明显的是整个西方主流媒体，坚持“创造论”观点，认为历史始于2022年2月24日。还有人指出，2014年美国支持的独立广场政变使西方流行的谚语变得毫无意义:“民主的伟大力量在于，如果你不喜欢那些掌控全局的人，你可以投票给别人！”
But the true roots of the war in Ukraine go all the way back to the fall of the Soviet Union and creation of the "new Russia"in 1991.
但乌克兰战争的真正根源可以追溯到苏联解体和1991年“新俄罗斯”的诞生。
The ordinary Russians who ended the Soviet Union and disbanded the Warsaw Pact were utterly betrayed. Their reward was to see their state assets looted by a combination of home-grown oligarchs and greed-maddened Wall Street financiers, and their GDP fall by a frightening two-thirds in a decade, causing unimaginable hardship. Even worse, proposals to ensure security in Europe through the 1990s Partners for Peace initiative,and commitments not to expand NATO eastwards, were cynically abandoned or brazenly flouted. Then, as the 21st century progressed, Russians found themselves and their country being systematically demonized in the West, endlessly accused of all sorts of egregious crimes.
终结苏联和解散华约的普通俄罗斯人被彻底背叛了。他们的回报是看到他们的国有资产被本土寡头和贪婪成性的华尔街金融家联手掠夺一空，他们的GDP在十年内下降了三分之二，造成了难以想象的困难。更糟糕的是，通过20世纪90年代的和平伙伴倡议来确保欧洲安全的提议，以及不向东扩展北约的承诺，都被无情地抛弃或公然蔑视。然后，随着21世纪的推进，俄罗斯人发现他们自己和他们的国家被西方系统地妖魔化，无休止地被指控犯有各种令人震惊的罪行。
Those who call the real shots in the U.S. and the wider Western world have no intention of allowing friendships between the West and Russia or China. They make their money from enmity, not friendship; from war, not peace. They need Russia and China as adversaries, not partners.
那些在美国和更广泛的西方世界发号施令的人无意让西方与俄罗斯或中国建立友谊。他们从敌意中赚钱，而不是友谊（互惠互利）；从战争中牟利，而不是和平（相得益彰）。他们需要俄罗斯和中国作为对手，而不是合作伙伴（双赢结局）。
There was never any possibility of a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis from 2014 to 2022, because every Russian failure to respond to provocation with military action simply resulted in further provocation, until the West finally got what they wanted – war. NATO is bleeding Russia dry, while it gains priceless information about Russia's military technology and offensive and defensive capabilities, at almost zero cost to itself.
从2014年到2022年，乌克兰危机从来没有任何外交解决的可能性，因为俄罗斯每次放弃用军事行动回应挑衅结果都招致进一步的挑衅，直到西方最终得到他们想要的东西——战争。北约正在榨干俄罗斯的血汗，而它却以几乎零成本获得了有关俄罗斯军事技术和攻防能力的无价信息。
2022年9月30日，乌克兰基辅，乌克兰总统弗拉基米尔·泽伦斯基(中)、总理丹尼斯·什米哈尔(右)和乌克兰议会主席鲁斯兰·斯特凡丘克(左)拿着申请快速加入北约的文件。/CFP
It is vital that China responds to Western provocation with a cool head. With mature, considered, sensible diplomacy. Outrage, indignation, and threats will achieve nothing, for two reasons. Firstly, they will not deter further U.S. provocation because they are precisely the response that the U.S. is trying to engineer. So they will simply result in more provocation. Secondly, they leave no room for manoeuvre. Once you have indulged in outrage, indignation and threats, you cannot backtrack or you will simply look weak. So you have no alternative but louder outrage and indignation, and more serious threats, until events lead to their inevitable conclusion.
对于中国而言，至关重要的是以冷静的头脑应对西方的挑衅。以成熟的、深思熟虑和明智的外交手段达成意愿。愤怒、慨激和威胁不会有任何效果，原因有二。首先，它们不会阻止美国的进一步挑衅，因为它们恰恰是美国试图策划的回应。所以它们只会导致更多的挑衅。第二，它们没有留下任何回旋的余地。一旦你沉溺于愤怒、慨激和威胁，你就不能回头，否则你只会显得软弱。因此，你别无选择，只有更强烈的愤怒和愤慨，以及更严重的威胁，直到事态发展到不可收拾的局面。
The most important message that China should send is not to the U.S., or the other Western countries, but to the ordinary people in China's Taiwanregion:
中国应该传递的最重要的信息不是给美国或其他西方国家，而是给中国台湾地区的普通民众:
"If the U.S. had any interest in 'freedom and democracy'on the island where you live, then why did it spend 40 years arming and financing Chiang Kai-shek's military dictatorship under martial law? You literally cannot get further from freedom and democracy than a military dictatorship under martial law. The U.S. has no interest whatsoever in making the lives of people in the Taiwan region better. It only wants to make Chinese lives worse. If it can achieve that objective using the island of Taiwan as a tool, then Taiwan is utterly expendable. If the whole place was turned into a sea of molten glass and every person living there was vaporised, Uncle Sam would not lose a wink of sleep, as long as other parts of China had suffered some harm in the process."
“如果美国对你们所居住的岛屿上的‘自由和民主’有任何兴趣，那么它为什么花了40年时间武装和资助蒋介石在戒严法下的军事独裁呢？从字面上看，没有比军事独裁统治下的戒严令更远离自由和民主的了。美国对改善台湾地区人民的生活毫无兴趣。它只想让中国人的生活变得更糟。如果它能够利用台湾岛作为工具来实现这一目标，那么台湾是完全可以牺牲的。如果整个地方变成熔融玻璃的海洋，住在那里的每个人都蒸发了，只要中国的其他地方在这个过程中受到一些伤害，山姆大叔就不会失眠。”
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