One of Trump's early advisors was a fellow called Carter Page who gave a talk about how Russia, China, and America have complementary economic strengths and could work together. He was one of the early victims of the "Russiagate" witch-hunt.
It seems to me that Russia has abandoned any hope for economic synergy with America for now, in favor of negotiation over more elemental strategic matters.
First, Putin gave a state-of-the-nation speech in which he announced new nuclear weapon delivery systems meant to nullify missile defense (like a nuke torpedo and a nuke-bearing cruise missile), and explicitly said that this is meant to make the west negotiate.
Then, a few days later, a Russian traitor - a military-intelligence officer who had spied for the British - was nerve-gassed in the UK. This was an audacious and extreme step to take, and I now interpret it as deterrence. Britain is where the biggest concentration of Russian defectors, double agents, and oligarch oppositionists is found. Russia is saying, do not work for the enemy, now more than ever, or we will kill you.
Meanwhile, ExxonMobil abandoned a trillion-dollar oil deal with Rosneft, and now Trump has replaced Secretary of State Tillerson, the former ExxonMobil CEO, with Pompeo, who had been heading up the CIA.
Tillerson, with his business background, would have been a good chief diplomat to make an economic grand bargain with Russia. But it seems that the resistance from the American security establishment, and their allies in the media, has finally rendered that impossible. So instead, we're going to have strategic hardball, over North Korea, Iran, and perhaps NATO.
There has also been reporting in western media that Xi Jinping is now "president for life". I wish to present my own interpretation of this, which owes a lot to history as presented by "spandrell".
In China since the 1990s, it has been a political principle that the same person should hold the three offices of power, head of state, head of party, head of the military. First that was Jiang Zemin (but Deng Xiaoping was the power behind the throne), then it was Hu Jintao (but Jiang remained the real power), now it is Xi Jinping.
But Xi is a more transformational leader than Jiang or Hu. He is now officially regarded as a paramount leader, the first since Mao and Deng. He is overseeing China's shift from building up its strength and playing along with the American world order, to using that strength in order to assert a different ideology and build an alternative order.
"spandrell" says that the abolition of term limits on head of state (this is what western media has called "president-for-life") is meant to tell corrupt officials that they can't just wait for Xi to pass from the scene; the campaign against corruption (part of the larger plan) is here to stay. But I would also emphasize that it's just one element of that larger political transformation.
