Trump’s Trade War Is Making Russia and China Comrades Again
Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin toast with vodka during a signing ceremony on May 21, 2014, in Shanghai. Russia and China signed a 30-year contract for supply of gas.
Photographer: Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images
Fu Ying recalls vividly how, as a young woman, she’d get woken by sirens in the middle of the night for drills to practice for a Soviet invasion. It was the time of China’s traumatic Cultural Revolution and, although the farm she’d been sent to was more than 200 miles from the border, the threat seemed imminent—strong enough, it turned out, to throw Maoist China into the arms of its capitalist nemesis, the U.S.
Today’s world could hardly look more different. The U.S.-China realignment that began with President Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to Beijing has been reversed in the most consequential geopolitical shift since the fall of the Berlin Wall. China and Russia are now as close as at any time in their 400 years of shared history. The U.S., meanwhile, has targeted both countries with sanctions and China with a trade war.