It is not China that is trying to have it both ways on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, but the United States. The Joe Biden administration has been trying to drag China into its blame game in different ways over the Ukraine crisis while diverting the world's attention from the obvious fact that it is the US that is the sole beneficiary of the crisis that it has manufactured. As highlighted by the last-moment sanctions it has imposed on Russia, which only serve to expose how the US and some of its allies have been benefiting tremendously from transactions of Russia-sourced oil.

The Biden administration's systemic smearing of China as an "enabler of" Russian aggression is an integral part to its efforts to drive a wedge between China and the European Union. By seeking to bind China together with Russia it has given itself a new pretext to try and justify its sanctions on Chinese high-tech entities and form a united front with the EU under the excuse of "de-risking".

In the process, the Biden administration has fabricated an "axis of evil" that spans the Eurasian continent. This "axis of evil", which comprises China, Russia, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and Iran, is intended to zip together its transatlantic alliance targeting Russia with its "Indo-Pacific" partnerships targeting China.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in a recent interview with the Financial Times, boasted that the Biden administration had succeeded in getting Europe and Asia to chorus in one voice the US-made mantra of democracy versus authoritarianism, highlighting US hopes that this combination punch will be able to deliver knockout blows without getting itself directly involved in the fray.

That the US has been looking to benefit tremendously from embedding its multipronged smear campaign against China in its overall China-containment strategy explains why the Biden administration has continued to persist with it even in the last few days of its tenure.

After the imposition of what may be the last round of sanctions targeting Russia's oil sector, the Biden administration's ambassador to China strummed the same tune in his job-well-done interviews with the media.

According to reports of the New York Times and Foreign Affairs, the US ambassador to China Nicholas Burns asserted that nearly 400 Chinese companies have supplied Russia with so-called dual use products that have both military and commercial applications, alleging that China has supplied 90 percent of the microelectronics used by the Russian military in its special operation in Ukraine.

But Burns was as mute as fish on the size and structure of the trade between China and Ukraine, including those carried out via third parties.

After working in China for nearly three years, during which he has traveled extensively around the country, Burns should know better than most of the armchair strategists in Washington that trying to shape China in the US' mold is a fool's errand.

The Biden administration has spent four years rebuilding the US' worldwide network of alliances, but it has done so on the tide line of an ideological beach.

Knowing the inherent weakness of the network's fragile foundation, it is no wonder, that during a roundtable with journalists in Washington on Friday, outgoing US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, a main maintenance man for the US' global alliance network, urged the incoming administration to continuously bolster ties with allies, warning that straying from this team-building work will "bring risk".

A message Blinken and Burns also sent to their successors in their respective de facto farewell interviews with the media. It's a message that in all likelihood will have fallen on deaf ears.

Most sandcastles, before being washed away by the tide, are demolished by the kicks of those who follow in the footsteps of the builders, once the latter have left the beach.

The castles built by the Biden administration will be of little value to its successor unless an exorbitant fee can be extracted for their upkeep.