If the US Talks About War and China Peace, Guess Who Wins?
The West shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss Xi Jinping’s Moscow summit. His bid to play global peacemaker resonates across the developing world.
Landmark visit.
Photographer: Pavel Byrkin/Sputnik/AFP/Getty Images
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow this week may not have resulted in big new energy deals or progress toward ending the war in Ukraine. But it is nevertheless a landmark in China’s search for diplomatic preeminence in a post-American global order.
Dismissing the summit may seem easy. There was something pompous about Xi’s parting words to Vladimir Putin that the two autocrats are driving changes to the world order of a kind, in Xi’s pet phrase, “not witnessed in a century.” The Chinese leader may be making too much of the fact that, in recent weeks, his country has offered what it calls a “peace proposal” for Ukraine and brokered a deal to restore diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran.