Are Russia and China allies? Will their alignment last? Are we living in a new Cold War? On today’s episode, we discuss these questions with Sergey Radchenko, a cold war and Russia-China expert.
Hey POFA fans just a quick disclaimer before we get started. This episode was recorded on February 18th, a week before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. One of our questions is outdated because of this. Alright, let’s get back to programming.
In the first decade of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and Communist China were intimate partners in what they called an eternal and unbreakable alliance.Breakable it was and eternal it was not, the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s left the two great powers at odds for the next thirty years. Within the past decade however, China and Russia have rapidly strengthened their economic, military, political, and, ideological ties in defiance of the liberal democratic order. Is this close Russia-China partnership an alliance, might it break like the last, and given the two countries shared ideological vision, is this a new Cold War? To answer these questions, today on the podcast we have Dr. Sergey Radchenko.
Sergey Radchenko is the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He has written extensively on the Cold War, nuclear history, and on Russian and Chinese foreign and security policies.