Sharmini Peries — Russia-China Alignment Challenges U.S. Hegemony

“What's happening is that China is finally going global,” Richard Sakwa told The Real News Network’s Sharmini Peries. “[China] is leveraging its growing economic power into a network of relationships which are spanning not just Eurasia all the way to Europe, but also in Africa.”

Sakwa noted that while China is now developing a second military base, the United States has approximately 600 military bases around the world: “China is challenging not so much U.S. primacy but the way that it has managed it in the past, which is an almost exclusive sense that the United States is the global leader. Well, those days are beginning to come to an end.”...

“The Russo-Chinese alignment is not an alliance, and it's not a bloc, and it's certainly not a military alliance. But Russo-Chinese alignment is far deeper and far more extensive than many Westerners have yet caught on,” Sakwa said. “It's an alignment in which Russia and China will not do each other any harm. They will support each other when it's in their interests—and it's a game changer.”

Meanwhile, U.S. relations with China are deteriorating. Sakwa explained that neither China or Russia will be provoked by U.S. “sabre-rattling.” As is typical, he said, the current situation is a Trump miscalculation based on his tendency to go into negotiations heavy-handed and hope a deal works out, which has massively failed due to his tariff tweets.

“I'm not sure that the policy makers in Washington have fully come to terms with the way that the geo-tectonics at the global level are changing, and the One Belt, One Road initiative is the prime example of that,” Sakwa said....

TRNN

Russia-China Alignment Challenges U.S. Hegemony
Sharmini Peries interviews Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent, and an Associate Fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Program at Chatham House