Valdai Club

The high-intensity warfare in Ukraine represents the largest military conflict in terms of forces involved, casualties, and duration since the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war. But it is only the scale of the fighting that warrants comparison. Politically, the current events are unique in recent history.


Back in October 2017, which may seem today a bygone era, a group of Valdai Club experts teamed up with a group of researchers to release a report titled A Look into the Future: Scenarios for Asia and Russia in Asia in the Next 20 Years.

The past achievements of Russia-China interaction became more prominent as the military-diplomatic crisis transitioned into the acute phase. These developments have revealed both the structural strength of their cooperation and the challenges they will have to deal with together.

The visit of Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan in early August can be considered a landmark event in the development of the Taiwan problem. This even had an impact on formal assessments: a few days after the visit, China published a White Paper titled “The Taiwan Question and China’s Reunification in the New Era”. This is only the third white paper on the Taiwan issue ever issued by the PRC.

The value of any potential deal with the Taliban is apparently not entirely clear to Russia, China or any of the Central Asian countries. As a rule, they combine active diplomacy towards Afghanistan with active military preparations, writes Valdai Club expert Vasily Kashin.

The United States became increasingly concerned over China’s growth. By the early 2020s, this concern developed into the recognition of China as a threat to US security and the US-led “liberal international order.” American officials began to talk openly about a new Cold War. The United States fixed the need to deter China in its key doctrines.

The European Union and BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are formally similar interstate organisations according to the institutional theory of international relations. However, in reality they are antagonists, and their antagonism is conceptual — the EU and BRICS embody the old and the new in international politics and the methods of interstate institutional cooperation. Now that legitimate grounds have arisen to question the future of institutional forms of interstate cooperation in principle, the fates of the EU and BRICS are of equal interest for understanding the foundations on which these states can preserve such major achievements of the 20th century.

Statements made by a number of American politicians and publicists that the criminal nature of the Chinese communist regime is at fault for the epidemic only suggest that the practice of international relations has regressed seven to eight decades.

Russian-Chinese relations in the last 20 years are a story of slow but steady progress. Both Moscow and Beijing have made multiple attempts to radically accelerate this progress, generally ending in failure. That being said, neither the breakdown of individual projects, nor the short-term rapprochement between Russia and the United States after September 11, nor the economic crises of 2009 and 2014 could stop the development of bilateral relations.

The current model of Russia–Vietnam relations can be described as transitional, moving from the exclusive partnership of the 1980s to the next meaningful phase. Today, bilateral relations are dominated by the traditional spheres and vectors inherited from the Cold War period.