On Feb. 4, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin traveled to China to meet his Chinese counterpart President Xi Jinping. In a joint statement, the two leaders declared that they “oppose further enlargement of NATO” and called the organization to “abandon its ideologized Cold War approaches.”
The statement, published in English on the President of Russia’s official site, mentions an array of issues: from geopolitics to coronavirus and climate change.
The central thrust of the statement reads:
“...some actors representing but the minority on the international scale continue to advocate unilateral approaches to addressing international issues and resort to force; they interfere in the internal affairs of other states, infringing their legitimate rights and interests, and incite contradictions, differences and confrontation, thus hampering the development and progress of mankind, against the opposition from the international community.“
Likely alluding to the United States, NATO, and other western countries, the statement contains several mentions of the Alliance and Washington. The U.S. is criticized over the AUKUS [trilateral security pact between Australia, the UK and the U.S., announced on Sep. 2021] alliance in the Indo-Pacific region as well as its withdrawal from the Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate- Range and Shorter-Range Missiles.
The statement also criticizes what they describe as an attempt of international actors to impose their own ”democratic standards” on other countries. And further: “to monopolize the right to assess the level of compliance with democratic criteria, to draw dividing lines based on the grounds of ideology, including by establishing exclusive blocs and alliances of convenience, prove to be nothing but flouting of democracy and go against the spirit and true values of democracy.”
Bigger goals
The joint statement plays into the assumption that the current crisis at the Ukraine border is part of a grander endeavor to review the world order and reduce the influence of the U.S. in it.
While Russia is keen on re-establishing its spheres of influence in the post-Soviet space, China, which until recently avoided making big comments on the situation in Europe, has come forward with its ambitions as well. And that ambition some western observers conclude is to make the world a safe place for autocracies.
Despite being somewhat vaguely formulated and containing ubiquitous innuendos, the statement’s purpose is to show that neither Moscow nor Beijing accepts the idea of nation-states’ right to choose their own allies.
The statement’s separate paragraph that reads, “the sides are gravely concerned about serious international security challenges and believe that the fates of all nations are interconnected.
No State can or should ensure its own security separately from the security of the rest of the world and at the expense of the security of other States” is indicative of that.
Peculiarly, however, while the statement overtly states that Russia opposes “any forms of independence of Taiwan”, no mention of Ukraine or the escalation at its border is present.
Other than that “the Chinese side is sympathetic to, and supports the proposals put forward by the Russian Federation to create long-term legally binding security guarantees in Europe."
