Valdai Club

The value of any potential deal with the Taliban is apparently not entirely clear to Russia, China or any of the Central Asian countries. As a rule, they combine active diplomacy towards Afghanistan with active military preparations, writes Valdai Club expert Vasily Kashin.

The United States became increasingly concerned over China’s growth. By the early 2020s, this concern developed into the recognition of China as a threat to US security and the US-led “liberal international order.” American officials began to talk openly about a new Cold War. The United States fixed the need to deter China in its key doctrines.

The European Union and BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are formally similar interstate organisations according to the institutional theory of international relations. However, in reality they are antagonists, and their antagonism is conceptual — the EU and BRICS embody the old and the new in international politics and the methods of interstate institutional cooperation. Now that legitimate grounds have arisen to question the future of institutional forms of interstate cooperation in principle, the fates of the EU and BRICS are of equal interest for understanding the foundations on which these states can preserve such major achievements of the 20th century.

Statements made by a number of American politicians and publicists that the criminal nature of the Chinese communist regime is at fault for the epidemic only suggest that the practice of international relations has regressed seven to eight decades.

Russian-Chinese relations in the last 20 years are a story of slow but steady progress. Both Moscow and Beijing have made multiple attempts to radically accelerate this progress, generally ending in failure. That being said, neither the breakdown of individual projects, nor the short-term rapprochement between Russia and the United States after September 11, nor the economic crises of 2009 and 2014 could stop the development of bilateral relations.

The current model of Russia–Vietnam relations can be described as transitional, moving from the exclusive partnership of the 1980s to the next meaningful phase. Today, bilateral relations are dominated by the traditional spheres and vectors inherited from the Cold War period.

Modern international relations have entered a period of global change unprecedented in the postwar history. The processes unleashed by the changed role of China and India are making an important contribution to the burgeoning “Eurasian phenomenon,” or the surge in international trade and expectations for the traditionally peripheral landlocked regions of Central Eurasia.

The recent official opening of the Chinese military base in Djibouti should be seen in the context of the Chinese naval presence expansion in the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean and the coming change of China’s role in global and regional security.

Before it began, Xi Jinping’s July 3–4 visit to Russia was described by the Russian side as a milestone event In Russian-Chinese relations. It was accompanied by the signing of a number of policy papers regarding principles of further international cooperation and plans for developing bilateral relations. At the same time, from the point of view of practical economic results, it is more of a routine annual top-level visit, rather successful, but not accompanied by grand achievements.

It is common knowledge that Chinese businesses are unwilling to invest in the Russian economy. Last year, in fact, China invested over $170 billion in different countries but Russia seems to have missed it all. The notorious absence of Chinese investments is reason enough for drawing global conclusions regarding the Russian investment climate and the Far Eastern development strategy. This may also invite a pessimistic assessment of the outcome of the “pivot to the East” and the “connectivity” policy.