onsdag 22. mars 2023

How Xi and Putin’s new friendship could test the US

As two autocrats traded tributes over a feast of quail, venison, Siberian white salmon and pomegranate sorbet, China and Russia seemed to conjure the anti-Western compact the US has long feared. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit this week to his friend, President Vladimir Putin, came at a critical moment of Russia’s quagmire war in Ukraine and of Beijing’s emergence as a great power whose influence now stretches far beyond Asia.

The entire visit has been refracted through a prism of both nations’ mutual antagonism toward the United States. And at every step, Washington, watching hawkishly from the sidelines, poured scorn on the idea of China as a peacemaker in Ukraine, accusing Xi of offering diplomatic cover to a thuggish Russian leader who was just cited for war crimes by the International Criminal Court.