Valdai Club

The US alliance is one of the major topics in contemporary international studies. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States’ alliance policy has formed a complex structure with the aim of maintaining hegemony, based on unipolar advantages and shared values, centred on the Trans-Atlantic and Trans-Pacific alliances. However, during the Trump 2.0 era, the United States has been widely criticised for imposing tariff barriers on its partners and forcing its allies to increase defence spending, which is arguably weakening its alliance system.

Since 2016, strategic competition between the United States and the People's Republic of China has become a prominent feature of the evolution of the international system. Analysing the reasons for this rivalry is an important task in understanding contemporary international relations

The Chinese leadership believes that the main reason for the current changes in international relations lies in the acceleration of the transfer of power between East and West, which is a reflection of changes in the structure of the world order. From a historical point of view, this process of transfer of power will be a long-term process, writes Xu Bo, Professor at the Northeast Asia Research Center of Jilin University (Changchun, China)

The close bilateral relationship between China and Russia is one of the most important features of the evolution of international relations in the early 21st century. At the same time, the changing international order has also created new areas for Sino-Russian cooperation. Today, politicians and scholars from the PRC habitually refer to the changes in the modern international order as "a big change not seen in a century"