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As two autocrats traded tributes over a feast of quail, venison, Siberian white salmon and pomegranate sorbet, China and Russia seemed to conjure the anti-Western compact the US has long feared.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit this week to his friend, President Vladimir Putin, came at a critical moment of Russia’s quagmire war in Ukraine and of Beijing’s emergence as a great power whose influence now stretches far beyond Asia.
The entire visit has been refracted through a prism of both nations’ mutual antagonism toward the United States. And at every step, Washington, watching hawkishly from the sidelines, poured scorn on the idea of China as a peacemaker in Ukraine, accusing Xi of offering diplomatic cover to a thuggish Russian leader who was just cited for war crimes by the International Criminal Court.
But whether China and Russia have truly forged the kind of united anti-US front long dreaded by Washington’s foreign policy professionals seems doubtful.
Still, the United States clearly now has a serious foreign policy challenge on its hands. The US is simultaneously gearing up for what many experts warn could become a Cold War with China and waging a proxy fight in Ukraine with its foe in the 20th century’s version of that showdown. And China and Russia, together, have more capacity to frustrate American goals in Ukraine and elsewhere.
Xi and Putin are united on a core foreign policy priority – discrediting and even dismantling a world order that they believe is built on Western hypocrisy and denies them due respect as great global powers. This resentment has festered in Putin’s mind ever since the Soviet Union collapsed, and he has tried for years to reshape the international system. But according to President Joe Biden’s national security strategy, China is the only US competitor with “the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to” reshape that order.
In the short term, China’s 12-point peace proposal for the war in Ukraine runs largely counter to US goals in punishing Moscow for its unprovoked invasion, although it appears to have little chance of gaining traction in Kyiv since it would lock in Putin’s seizure of swathes of Ukrainian territory. A separate peace plan proposed by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky – which would include a final peace treaty with Moscow and a special tribunal for alleged Russian war crimes – was not discussed between Putin and Xi on Tuesday, the Kremlin said.
But even if China declines what the US says are Russian requests for lethal arms, the country’s expanding economic and trade ties with Moscow could help Putin stay in the war for much longer. A grueling attritional conflict could not only bleed Ukraine’s military manpower dry, it could also test the resolve of US and allied states to continue to bankroll Kyiv’s resistance and open the kind of Western political divides over the war already emerging in the Republican presidential primary. And if Washington remains deeply committed in Ukraine – and depletes its own stocks of ammunition and weaponry, for instance – it may be less focused on what may be a generational tussle with China in Asia. That would suit Beijing just fine.
In order to puncture the choreography of unity in Moscow this week, the White House mounted a public relations counter-offensive during the Xi-Putin summit. And it reinforced its multi-billion-dollar support for Zelensky’s government by announcing on Tuesday the earlier-than-expected deployment of US Patriot missile defense systems. Ukrainians are learning to operate the systems at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where men and women aged 19 to 67 are training from 7 a.
