Seeing the Big Picture: Russia-China Economic Cooperation, the SCO and Global Climate Change
This year’s Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok was as usual the subject of dismissive coverage – if any in the mainstream US and UK media. Viewed through the feverish and unregulated speculative bubbles that have defined what passes for 21st century global finance in New York and London, the slow but steady and enormous moves towards industrial and resource consolidation and cooperation between Beijing and Moscow are occurring at too slow a rate to grab Western imaginations shaped by Attention Deficit Disorders.
This failure to grasp the scale of what is going on is like Aesop’s Fable of the Tortoise and the Hare. Western leaders, strategists and financiers think in 24 hour news cycles and soundbites. Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China are thinking in terms of decades and generations.
Western leaders and commentators believe Russian-Chinese economic cooperation has already failed and can never succeed be because it is moving slowly. They fail to grasp that it is moving consistently and steadily in the same direction.
What Russia and China are doing, as perceptive contributors to the Strategic Culture Foundation such as Federico Pieraccini have pointed out is to integrate the strategic security dimension of the highly successful and now well-established Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) with the economic investment dimension of China’s Road and Belt Initiative.
A comparison could be with the much touted success of the combined Marshall Plan and NATO Alliance initiatives produced by the United States in the late 1940s to integrate all of Western Europe under US leadership and control.
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