In Moscow's Shadows 249: Pragmatism in Asia
5/24/202654 min
After Putin's Beijing visit - long on rhetoric, short on results - I look more broadly as Asia: the limits of the "friendship with no limits" with China, heding with India, and the ebbing of hegemony in Central Asia. In short, everyone is a transactional pragmatist, behind the talk of "all-weather partnerships" and "eternal friendships." But then again, isn't everyone everwhere, these days?
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First 90 secondsMark Galeotti· Host0:00
In the wake of the recent Trump and Putin visits to Beijing, and about a year since I last looked at the Sino-Russian relationship, let's look to Asia. [upbeat music] Hello, I'm Mark Galeotti, and welcome to My View of Russia in Moscow Shadows. This podcast of varying length, frequency, and format, yet always reassuringly low production values, is supported by generous and perspicacious patrons like you, and also by the crisis exercise software company, Conductor. Now, I get why Putin travels to Beijing more often than he travels to, well, frankly, Russian cities these days. Lots of pageantry, lots of great footage of honor guards, crowds of chanting school children, all that kind of thing. He's meeting an ally. It demonstrates that he is not isolated in the world, and it's a chance to essentially renew. Well, what is that relationship between Russia and China? There's a lot of nonsense spoken about some kind of lockstep anti-Western alliance.