August has been a revealing month for Moscow. Russian leaders are abandoning the charade of being America’s comrades and working to cement Russia’s relationship with China.

On August 1, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said the United States is in “systemic disarray” and that it is dealing with its financial crisis by “turning on the printing press and throwing money at the world.” He called American policies “hooliganism” and said Americans “are living like parasites.”

Putin has often lashed out at Washington’s policies. At the same time, he has been quite open about his desire to rebuild the Soviet empire, even calling the Soviet Union’s collapse the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. Thus, his recent criticism of the U.S. is not all that surprising.

But when similar bluster comes from President Dmitry Medvedev, who has worked over the years to cast himself as the pro-U.S. alternative to Putin, analysts take note.

On August 6, Medvedev abandoned his pro-U.S. image and said the option of pressing the “reset button” for improving U.S.-Russian ties (which President Obama in 2009 said was a foreign-policy priority) is now out of the question. Medvedev also bizarrely accused the U.S. of instigating the 2008 Georgia war, during which the Russian Army invaded the Republic of Georgia. He claimed Washington is now plotting with Georgia to seize the Russia-friendly breakaway states of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, both of which now pledge allegiance to Moscow. The Russian president went on to say that President Obama’s promise of granting Russia World Trade Organization (wto) membership “is too high a price to pay here.”

His remarks were unsettling to many in Washington who had celebrated earlier signs of warming U.S.-Russian relations. After all, the Obama administration has made a string of concessions to Russia—approving a new start treaty on nuclear disarmament, offering full support of Russia’s wto ambitions, and agreeing, albeit tentatively, to cooperate on a ballistic missile shield. Why, then, would the Kremlin’s rhetoric take such a hostile tone?

New York University Professor Emeritus Albert Weeks said Russia is distancing itself from the U.S. in order to transform its relationship with China from a “‘mere’ partnership … into an all-out alliance.” In the Herald Tribune on August 10, Weeks wrote (emphasis added throughout):

[T]he Kremlin seems to be reasoning that hitching its wagon to the red flag flying over Beijing is the safest way to go, especially given China’s mounting economic power and its potential military supremacy looming in the not-too-distant future …. Maybe an emerging Chinese superpower on Russia’s borders is a better bet for the Kremlin than the United States. Moscow and Beijing now speak the same language on “U.S. global hegemony” and America’s “parasitical” policy with respect to global finance. What Moscow used to call its mere “partnership” with China may now be escalating into an all-out alliance.

A crucial facet of this developing alliance is military cooperation.

On Monday, China’s People’s Daily reported on a six-day visit the Chinese army’s chief of the General Staff, Gen. Chen Bingde, made to Russia earlier this month. The visit featured high-level meetings between top-tier military officials from both nations. “As their bilateral relations have developed from ‘friendly neighboring relations’ into a ‘constructive partnership’ and then into ‘strategic cooperative partnership,’ the two countries have made great efforts to promote the healthy and rapid development of bilateral military ties in a comprehensive way,” the state-sponsored newspaper said.

Russia and China also agreed for the first time to conduct General Staff-level military exchanges, a milestone which the Daily called a sign “that the cooperation in the realm of military operations between China and Russia will continue to develop deeply and widely.” The article also said the military relationship between Russia and China has grown to an uncommon level of strength. The degree of cooperation between the two countries, the top-tier level of the training, and the large number of military students sent by each country to the other “could rarely be seen in the military cooperation between any other large countries,” the report said.

As the nations of Asia watch European states taking great and rapid strides toward unification, expect the Russian bear to become increasingly dismissive of the American eagle and to draw ever nearer to the rising Chinese dragon. To understand more, read Russia and China in Prophecy.