Originally appeared on strategic-culture.org
Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomed China’s Xi Jinping to Moscow this week for a three-day state visit. It wasn’t just the personal warmth between the two leaders that was on display. They have met on nearly 30 occasions over the past six years. President Xi referred to Putin as his closest international ally and friend.
President Xi Jinping of China during a welcoming ceremony in Moscow on Wednesday. IMAGE: Shamil Zhumatov/Reuters
More importantly, the two nations are solidifying a strategic alliance that could define the shape of geopolitics for the 21st Century.
Putin and Xi, who also attended the annual St Petersburg International Economic Forum this week, signed a raft of bilateral commercial agreements which will propel Eurasian development and indeed global development.
Of particular significance is the continued drive by Moscow and Beijing to conduct international trade in national currencies, obviating the US dollar as a payment means. This is a crucial step in countering the desired “hegemonic control” of the global financial system by Washington. Time and again, Washington has abused its privileged position of printing or withholding dollars in order to further its own agenda of dominating other nations. That abuse has to stop, and it will stop as Russia and China pave the way to a new, fairer mechanism of international finance and trade.
The vision of cooperation and partnership outlined by Putin and Xi is one based on mutual respect and peaceful prosperity. Not just for those two nations but for all others who participate in the multilateral vision that they promulgate. In that way, the alliance being consolidated by Russia and China is one that offers renewed hope in a progressive and peaceful future for the planet.
This positive vision is especially welcome at a time when the US under President Donald Trump is unleashing a barrage of tensions and potential conflicts from its bid to assert global dominance. The US is wielding sanctions and threats at numerous nations, including Russia and China, as well as even towards its own supposed allies in Europe, all in a desperate attempt to assert a hegemonic unipolar ambition.
Such a scheme is a negation of the vision of solidarity and partnership outlined by the Russian and Chinese leadership. The “American way” is not only futile. Ultimately, it is a zero-sum mentality that leads to destruction and war. A path to where, ultimately, nobody wins.
It is not as if history has not shown us that already. Two horrendous world wars were fought in the 20th century – with a total death toll of as many as 100 million people – largely because of selfish imperialist rivalry and zero-sum mentality.
Russia and China were two nations that suffered the most in those conflagrations. They both know the horrific cost of conflict, but also the preciousness of peace. That’s why it is heartening to see those two countries forging a new paradigm of international cooperation based on mutualism and a commitment to development for the common good of all people.
The much-vaunted multilateralism during the so-called Pax Americana decades following Second World War was always over-rated. It was always a cover for Washington’s presumed global hegemony. The present unwinding of the US-led Western order is really just the ugly face of American power coming to the surface.
While Putin and Xi were embodying a vision for the future this week, it seemed ironically appropriate that the US and some other Western leaders were indulging in a backward look at history. The faux camaraderie of Western leaders was also apparent, belied by ongoing seething squabbles and rivalries between the US, France, Britain and Germany.
President Trump and others were marking the 75th anniversary of the D-Day Normandy Landings in June 1944. That event heralded the opening of the Western Front against Nazi-occupied Europe and contributed to the final defeat of the Third Reich in May 1945. Lamentably, however, Western leaders persist in a conceited and false notion that D-Day was the key turning point in the definitive victory of the Second World War.
It is frankly incontestable that it was the Soviet Red Army and the colossal sacrifices of Soviet citizens that were the pivotal force in defeating Nazi Germany and yielding the liberation of Europe from fascism. The momentous Battle of Stalingrad which smashed the Nazi war machine was over by February 1943, some 16 months before the Western allies launched their long overdue D-Day.
Western leaders can indulge in self-serving vanities about presumed past glories all they want. It doesn’t change the historical record or objective truth. And besides, those who don’t learn from history are bound to be trapped by repeating its errors and dead-ends. They are quite literally yesterday people.
Fittingly, Putin and Xi were not at the D-Day nostalgia event and its escapism to delusional glory of the 20th Century. They were busy forging an alliance fit for the 21st Century.
Sino-Russo alliance is a natural progression and dates back to the origins of the USSR and PRC, when both faced western imperialist destabilization as they do today. However, in the past 30 years, China has become the predominant economic power while USSR collapsed and Russia alone was left to pick the pieces post 1991 break-up and the tumultuous Gorbachev and Yeltsin years, when the west opportunistically undermined every Russian institution and openly plundered Russia economy by a brazen cabal of Jew oligarchs. Russia regained stability during the Putin early years, but mistakenly believed that it could work with US and EU as “partners”, but subsequent events disproved that. China was too big and homogeneous to undermine via subterfuge so the west became alarmed at its rapid rise and invoked an economic war, to cut it down to size. Therefore an alliance of China and Russia is a natural phenomenon to rebuild the fraying US and Zionist dominated thuggish world economic and strategic order, a leaf for neo-racist imperialism designed to keep Asian nations from reaching their true potential . The only mistakes Russia and China have made in the past two decades was to let the US and NATO destroy a number of nations from Afghanistan to Libya and beyond. The illegal sanctions on Iran and DPRK should never have been allowed, neither the illegal wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. Hopefully, the Sino-Russo alliance will broaden and link up with more independent nations and create a counter-balance to the rogue bandit system of wars, threats, terrorism and sanctions imposed by US and its NATO vassals.
Well thought out.
Whilst I agree with everything you said in principle. In practice allowing the USA to squander its resources in pointless wars, whilst Russia and China increased their resources has hastened the end of the American empire, and made the victory over the US so much easier.
The Chinese call it a death by thousand cuts. In reality, both Russia and China have not used all the tools at their disposal to literally bankrupt the fraying US empire. Firstly, they could and should arm resistance movements from Afghanistan to Yemen and most importantly, they should arm Iran, large sophisticated nation that has the potential to change the regional and global balance of power. A military and strategic alliance of Russia, China, Iran, Armenia, Serbia, DPRK, Bolivia, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Syria, Yemen, Iraq etc is far more viable and potentially powerful than the treacherous Warsaw Pact ever was. Historically, the Russians, Chinese and Persians have far more in common than Russians ever had with the Poles, Hungarians or Czechs. Also Iran can not be penetrated, blackmailed or bullied like small confused Warsaw pact states were by the west.
Russia and China want Germany to join with them in their Eurasian empire. So they are seducing Germany, whilst the US behaves like a jealous lover who beats his wife. The plan seems to be working, if Nordstream2 is completed, it will bring Germany and Russia together. If the USA manages to stop Nordstream2 the Germans will never forgive the US, and will simply move the energy intensive parts of its industry to Russia. WWI was about Britain and France stopping Germany from obtaining oil directly. The Germans take their energy independence very seriously, either way the US loses, and Russia wins.
The Russian – Chinese land mass is ringed by American bases. That in itself is telling. The clear implication is one of ‘containment’. That containment extends to bottling up Russia and China both economically and politically. I think we are now reaching a critical point. Either Russia and China will breech the containment or they will be pushed back. I don’t know how things will turn out, though I do think things will get increasingly heated. In the end rather than a multipolar wold we may end up with a fractured world .
Rubbish, Russia wants war (Sarc.)
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-gwCXwhcEwbY/U2UOiLysETI/AAAAAAAAM2E/-KYAY3nfRMI/s1600/russia-wants-war-us-bases-sarcastic-map.jpg
Eroding military capacity and over extension make the NATO base containment strategy more and more irrelevant, as Freddy the Great put it, he who defends everything defends nothing.
The two great friends! I’m sure they are thrown together by convenience, but hey, it’s what we make of our challenges and opportunities that make us what we are. It is a great moment in history. All of East European states should join the SCO in preference to the totally corrupt Washington vassal EU.
The Russia and China strategic alliance against the US economic terrorism. The other partners of this alliance are Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Korea, Malaysia, India and so on.
Ethiopia
Thanks
We are witnessing the birth of the great Eurasian empire, and the fall of the American empire. We live in interesting times.
When the US decided to make Russia an enemy again, instead of an ally against China, they sealed the fate of the western world. The decline that the US will suffer for the next century is totally self inflicted.