Nina Khrushcheva - Russia and China: A Fleeting Friendship or Strategic Embrace?

While US President Donald Trump wages a trade war against China, Chinese President Xi Jinping has found a new ‘best friend’ in his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. Professor Khrushcheva makes the case that Moscow relishes the opportunity to use its increased military, economic and political cooperation with China to deter, and even complicate, America’s global influence. She questions whether this new friendship between the Kremlin and the ‘Middle Kingdom’ is in Russia’s best interest in the long term.

About the Speaker:

Professor Nina Khrushcheva is a Professor of International Affairs at The New School. She is a Senior Fellow of the World Policy Institute and an editor of and a contributor to Project Syndicate. She received her PhD from Princeton University, and was subsequently a Research Fellow at the School of Historical Studies of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Her articles have appeared in Foreign Policy, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times and other publications. She is the author of Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics (Yale UP, 2008), The Lost Khrushchev: A Journey Into the Gulag of the Russian Mind (Tate, 2014), and co-authored In Putin’s Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia’s Eleven Time Zones (St. Martin’s Press, 2019).

Q&A begins at 26:59

Filmed on the 22nd of November 2019