Over the holidays, this column is looking ahead at the urgent issues of 2025. Today, the expansion of the partnership between Beijing and Moscow<\/p>\n
It is almost three years since Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin declared a friendship with \u201cno limits\u201d \u2013 weeks before Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Since then, they have retreated from such rhetorical enthusiasm. The \u201cno limits\u201d language was quickly dumped, probably at Beijing\u2019s behest. When Mr Putin visited in May last year, he claimed that he and his counterpart were \u201cas close as brothers<\/a>\u201d. Mr Xi more coolly called<\/a> the Russian president \u201ca good friend and a good neighbour\u201d. China has conspicuously not reciprocated Mr Putin\u2019s description of it as an ally.<\/p>\n Yet the partnership continues to broaden and deepen, to western alarm, across economic, political and military fronts. The US Council on Foreign Relations recently assessed it<\/a> \u201cthe greatest threat to vital US national interests in sixty years\u201d. The last 12 months saw unprecedented joint military activity by Chinese and Russian forces \u2013 though the aim was probably to signal their combined might rather than pursue the interoperability that is foundational to the US-European alliance. In September, the US suggested for the first time that Beijing might be supplying direct support<\/a> for the Russian war machine in Ukraine, beyond the kind of dual-use equipment it has been shipping and the essential role it plays as an export market for Russian oil. A flurry of books<\/a> on the \u201cnew cold war\u201d<\/a> appeared in 2024.<\/p>\n Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters<\/a> section, please click here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Over the holidays, this column is looking ahead at the urgent issues of 2025. Today, the expansion of the partnership between Beijing and Moscow It is almost three years since Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin declared a friendship with \u201cno limits\u201d \u2013 weeks before Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Since then, they have … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29522"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29522\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}