© Provided by Washington Examiner Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov wants China "to move away" from relying on the U.S. dollar for international trade in order to undermine the power of U.S. sanctions.
"We must consolidate our independence," Lavrov told Chinese state media. "So, we must reduce our exposure to sanctions by strengthening our technological independence and switching to settlements in national and international currencies other than the dollar. We need to move away from using Western-controlled international payment systems."
Treasury Department sanctions authorities have proven a powerful financial weapon in the hands of U.S. policymakers, who can ban anyone who does business with pariah governments from the U.S. financial system. Lavrov's proposal to blunt that tool punctuated a trip to China that allowed Moscow and Beijing to signal a united front against Washington after officials in both capitals clashed with President Biden and his national security team.
"Foreign Minister Lavrov's remarks are right to the point," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Monday. "The more unstable the world is, the more China and Russia need to advance our cooperation."
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Lavrov's denunciation of U.S. sanctions measures coincided with a broad-based Western effort to freeze the assets of Chinese communist officials involved in the repression of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.
"For a long period, the U.S. and the West wantonly interfered in other countries' domestic affairs by using democracy and human rights as an excuse," Hua said. "China and Russia always stand together in close cooperation, firmly reject[ing] hegemony and bullying practice and have become a major force for world peace and stability."
Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin have put on cooperative displays in recent years amid Western sanctions on Russia stemming from Putin's invasion of Ukraine and the intensifying rivalry between the United States and China. The rhetorical clashes last week, which continued into Monday, suggest that both the Kremlin and the Chinese regime are "probing for weakness" on Biden's part, according to a conservative foreign policy observer.
"The Chinese and Russians are very clearly looking for ways to needle the new administration," the Heritage Foundation's James Carafano said. "The dollar is ... the de facto global coin of the realm. The only thing that will change that is people's confidence in the dollar."
Lavrov and Chinese officials were explicit about their desire to counter the foreign policy of the United States on the grounds that Western allies are trying "to preserve their domination of the global economy and international politics at all costs," as the Russian official put it.
"In response to this, Russia and China are promoting a constructive unification agenda," Lavrov said. "China is a truly strategic partner and a like-minded country for us."
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The timing of the Sino-Russian unity theater could undermine their own efforts, according to Carafano, given international outrage over Chinese human rights abuses.
"At a time when people are less and less interested in being a suburb of Beijing or Moscow, I think this kind of rhetoric only stiffens people's opposition to that," the Heritage Foundation analyst said. "The Europeans just put sanctions on these guys, you know? What the Russians are saying [and] the Chinese are saying is really kind of tone-deaf."
Hua leaned into her talking points. "The U.S. and the West wantonly interfere in others' domestic affairs and make trouble by citing democracy and human rights," she said. "On this issue, China and Russia share the same position."
Tags: News, Foreign Policy, National Security, China, Russia, Human Rights, Uyghurs, Sergey Lavrov
Original Author: Joel Gehrke
Original Location: Russia urges China to ditch US dollar in bid to bust sanctions