Search on the Chinese food-delivery app Meituan for ejiao, and all sorts of goodies pop up. Ejiao was once a luxury consumed at the emperor’s court, valued as a traditional remedy taken to strengthen the blood, improve sleep, and slow aging. Today, ejiao is for the masses. People drink it in a tonic that costs about $2 for 10 vials; eat it in small cakes made with rock sugar, rice wine, walnuts, and black sesame at $7 for a tin of 30; or snack on ejiao-coated dates at just under a dollar a packet.

There’s just one problem: The collagenous substance is extracted from donkey hides. China’s domestic donkey population has plunged precipitously, and now the nation’s mass taste is stripping African farms of one of their most essential and valuable assets. In countries as far-flung as Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Botswana, animals that are the mainstays of many small farms—where donkeys are used for plowing, hauling crops to market, and many other purposes—are instead being slaughtered for the cash value of their skins.

The drain has become so damaging to Africa’s rural economy that in February the 55-member African Union approved a continent-wide ban on the slaughter of donkeys for their skins at its heads-of-state summit. Whether the governments of Africa can implement such a ban remains to be seen. If they do, they could seriously pinch the Chinese ejiao industry.

China’s rulers have done nothing to address the issue. On the surface, their inaction is bewildering. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has expended huge sums of political and financial capital on wooing the countries of the developing world, especially in Africa. Given that context, stepping in to regulate the ejiao trade and help preserve the African donkey would seem an easy, low-cost way of proving China’s willingness to be a constructive partner.

[Read: China’s latest food scandal: fox-tainted donkey meat]

“Leadership comes with responsibility,” Oscar Meywa Otele, a political scientist at the University of Nairobi, told me. African countries would like to see China play “a more meaningful and acceptable role,” but the donkey issue is a big enough problem that it “may undermine [China’s] ambitions to be the leader of the Global South.”

Xi’s grand goals can conflict with China’s short-term economic and political interests. When this occurs, it opens a window onto Beijing’s true attitude toward its putative partners and raises doubts about China’s readiness to assume that leadership. That matters in Washington. As the developing world becomes a battleground between the United States and China, with both eager to gain adherents to their competing visions for a reformed world order, the contradictions of Xi’s approach could damage his efforts to portray Beijing as more sympathetic to the interests and needs of poor countries. The humble donkey has thus taken on geopolitical significance.

China’s consumption of ejiao has increased with the country’s wealth. Back in 1990, ejiao makers in China required some 200,000 donkey hides annually. Now they are believed to consume about 4 to 6 million skins a year. That amounts to approximately 10 percent of the world’s estimated donkey population of 53 million—a rate of attrition that is clearly unsustainable. The demand from ejiao producers outstripped domestic supplies years ago and led to a brisk import business.

Exactly how many hides come from Africa is unclear, but the continent is home to two-thirds of the world’s donkeys, so it’s safe to assume that African exports account for a large share. Because donkeys breed slowly—a jennet typically produces a foal only every other year—the drain is rapidly depleting Africa’s herd. One study suggests that South Africa’s donkey population declined from 210,000 animals in 1996 to 146,000 in 2019. On current trend, the donkey could completely vanish from the continent over the next two decades. In addition, the rising value of pelts has encouraged the illicit slaughter of donkeys, the bypassing of regulatory controls, and the widespread theft of donkeys from poor farmers.

Beijing could do much to alleviate the problem. Better regulating the donkey-skin trade on its end could assist African governments in monitoring and controlling exports, as well as ensure a more sustainable supply to China’s ejiao producers. Why Beijing has not bothered to react is a matter of speculation. One factor could be that the government likes to promote traditional medicine, at home and abroad, as a way of highlighting China’s ancient science and civilization; in that respect, it may see any restraint on the industry as counter to the national interest. Or the welfare of donkeys and the plight of African farmers may simply be below Beijing’s attention threshold, compared with its more pressing geopolitical concerns.

[Read: A donkey ambulance for women in labor in Afghanistan]

China’s abusive donkey trade is part of a wider pattern of Chinese exploitation of the global South’s resources. Chinese fleets have long been accused of aggressive overfishing, from the West African coast to the South Pacific. In the South China Sea, most of which Beijing claims as its territorial waters, Chinese vessels block fishermen from neighboring countries from traditional fishing grounds, which is a significant point of contention among governments of the region.

China’s commercial interests are also at odds with Beijing’s effort to promote itself as a champion of the world’s poorest nations. A lending binge by state banks, much of it to support Xi’s global infrastructure-building scheme, the Belt and Road Initiative, has been touted as a sustainable-development program and proof of China’s superiority as an economic partner. But these loans, which turned China into the world’s largest official creditor to the developing world, have contributed to a debt crisis in the global South as some low-income countries have become overburdened and unable to make repayments.

Yet Beijing has shown its debtors little sympathy, and the state banks have been squeezing poor countries hard. They have resisted writing down some of the loan principal—a common practice in debt restructurings that is aimed at speeding a return to solvency—and typically insist on cutting deals in secret to beat other creditors to what’s left in the depleted coffers of debtor countries. When, for instance, Angola had to restructure a $15 billion loan from China in 2020, the state-owned China Development Bank first began paying itself interest from a mandated escrow account. Then, anticipating the exhaustion of that source, the bank demanded that the cash-poor government replenish it.

Developing countries “are getting to know China in a different role,” Bradley Parks, the executive director of the research lab AidData at William & Mary, told me. Less for its largesse, and more “as the world’s largest debt collector.” And he added: “Debt collectors don’t win a lot of popularity contests.”

At the same time, new lending from Beijing has all but dried up over the past five years. As a result, the flow of funds that once went from China to the global South has reversed. A 2023 study of China’s lending program published by the American Economic Association revealed that developing countries are now paying more to Chinese banks to service their debts than they are receiving in new loans.

[Read: The rich men who drink rhino horns]

Chinese leaders’ approach to developing-world debt “is in direct tension with their desire to enjoy influence with the general public and with governing elites within the developing world,” Parks said. Throughout this push for influence, Chinese leaders have been at pains to portray themselves as selfless partners, interested in the global good, in contrast with the West. “In promoting its own development process, China always insists on mutual support with the countries of the South, complementing each other’s strengths, and jointly building a modernized Global South,” Liu Jianchao, the influential head of the Communist Party’s international department, recently reiterated in a top ideological journal.

Yet the reality is that China’s ascent presents as many risks as benefits to emerging economies. Xi still appears to believe that he can lead the rising voices of the global South in a struggle against their former colonial masters in the West. But China’s actual policies toward the developing world are beginning to echo that old colonialism: the exploitation of resources to benefit the center, the metropole’s self-perception that its superior civilization confers special rights, the use of capital to extract more wealth from the less fortunate.

“It’s African governments that need to be much more proactive. You can’t afford to let China dictate to you,” Sanusha Naidu, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Global Dialogue, a South Africa–based think tank, told me. “That’s been the big challenge, the difficulty, in this relationship.”

The African Union donkey ban is a sign that the continent’s leaders are deciding to act in that more proactive way. Implicit in the ban is a strong message that China can’t have all it wants, on its own terms, from the global South. If the African Union succeeds in shutting down the trade in donkey hides to China, Beijing will no longer be able to pretend that its actions have no detrimental effect on African countries or its reputation on the continent. The ejiao industry is already damaging China-Africa relations, Lauren Johnston, a China expert at the University of Sydney, told me. “It’s making people hate China.”

It’s not too late, because it’s never too late. No outcomes are ever preordained, nothing is ever over, and you can always affect what happens tomorrow by making the right choices today. The U.S. Congress is finally making one of those right choices. Soon, American weapons and ammunition will once again start flowing to Ukraine.

But delays do have a price. By dawdling for so many months, by heading down the blind alley of border reform before turning back, congressional Republicans who blocked weapons and ammunition for Ukraine did an enormous amount of damage, some of it irreparable. Over the past six months, Ukraine lost territory, lives, and infrastructure. If Ukraine had not been deprived of air defense, the city of Kharkiv might still have most of its power plants. People who have died in the near-daily bombardment of Odesa might still be alive. Ukrainian soldiers who spent weeks at the front lines rationing ammunition might not be so demoralized.

[David Frum: Trump deflates]

The delay has changed American politics too. Only a minority of House Republicans, including Speaker Mike Johnson, joined most Democrats to approve $60 billion in aid yesterday. What is now clearly a pro-Russia Republican caucus has consolidated inside Congress. The lesson is clear: Anyone who seeks to manipulate the foreign policy of the United States, whether the tin-pot autocrat in Hungary or the Communist Party of China, now knows that a carefully designed propaganda campaign, when targeted at the right people, can succeed well beyond what anyone once thought possible. From the first days of the 2022 Russian invasion, President Vladimir Putin has been trying to conquer Ukraine through psychological games as well as military force. He needed to persuade Americans, Europeans, and above all Ukrainians that victory was impossible, that the only alternative was surrender, and that the Ukrainian state would disappear in due course.

Plenty of Americans and Europeans, though not so many Ukrainians, supported this view. Pro-Russia influencers—Tucker Carlson, J. D. Vance, David Sacks—backed up by an army of pro-Russia trolls on X and other social-media platforms, helped feed the narrative of failure and convinced a minority in Congress to block aid for Ukraine. It’s instructive to trace the path of a social-media post that falsely claimed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky owns two yachts, how it traveled up the food chain late last year, from the keyboard of a propagandist through the echo chamber created by trolls and into the brains of American lawmakers. According to Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina, some of his colleagues worried out loud, during debates about military aid to Ukraine, that “people will buy yachts with this money.” They had read the false stories and believed they were true.

But with the passage of this aid bill, Russia’s demoralization campaign has suffered a severe setback. This is also a setback for the Russian war effort, and not only because the Ukrainians will now have more ammunition. Suddenly the Russian military and Russian society are once again faced with the prospect of a very long war. Ukraine, backed by the combined military and economic forces of the United States and the European Union, is a much different opponent than Ukraine isolated and alone.

[Read: The war is not going well for Ukraine]

That doesn’t mean that the Russians will quickly give up: Putin and the propagandists who support him on state television have repeatedly stated that their goal is not to gain a bit of extra territory but to control all of Ukraine. They don’t want to swap land for peace. They want to occupy Kharkiv, Odesa, Kyiv, and more. Now, while their goals become harder to reach, is a good moment for the democratic countries backing Ukraine to recalibrate our strategy too.

Once the aid package becomes law this week, the psychological advantage will once again be on our side. Let’s use it. As Johnson himself recommended, the Biden administration should immediately pressure European allies to release the $300 billion in Russian assets that they jointly hold and send it to Ukraine. There are excellent legal and moral arguments for doing so—the money can legitimately be considered a form of reparations. This shift would also make clear to the Kremlin that it has no path back to what used to be called “normal” relations, and that the price Russia is paying for its colonial war will only continue to grow.

This is also a good moment for both Europeans and Americans to take the sanctions and export-control regimes imposed on Russia more seriously. If NATO were running a true economic-pressure campaign, thousands of people would be involved, with banks of screens at a central command center and constantly updated intelligence. Instead, the task has been left to a smattering of people across different agencies in different countries who may or may not be aware of what others are doing.

As American aid resumes, the Ukrainians should be actively encouraged to pursue the asymmetric warfare that they do best. The air and naval drone campaign that pushed the Black Sea Fleet away from their coastline, the raids on Russian gas and oil facilities thousands of miles from Ukraine, the recruitment of Russian soldiers, in Russia, to join pro-Ukraine Russian units fighting on the border—we need more of this, not less. The Biden administration should also heed Johnson’s suggestion that the United States supply more and better long-range weapons so that Ukrainians can hit Russian missile launchers before the missiles reach Ukraine. If the U.S. had done so in the autumn of 2022, when Ukraine was taking back territory, the world might look a lot different today.  

This war will be over only when the Russians no longer want to fight—and they will stop fighting when they realize they cannot win. Now it is our turn to convince them, as well as our own pro-Russia caucus, that their invasion will fail. The best way to do that is to believe it ourselves.