Visiting Beijing on Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin proved that the mutually described “no-limits partnership” between Russia and China is flourishing.
The two leaders did little to hide their disdain for their Western interlocutors. Chinese President Xi Jinping repudiated French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent and rather pathetic encouragement that Xi pressure Putin into ending the war in Ukraine. Instead, Xi and Putin affirmed that while they support a “political solution” to the war, that solution must respect everyone’s security interests. This is coded language for a solution that leads to Russia’s domination over Ukraine’s political sovereignty. That Xi or Putin has any interest in a meaningful negotiated settlement is unserious. The opposite is proved by Russian offensive action targeting Kharkiv and a recent Russian warning that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s “fate is definitely sealed.”
To be fair to Macron, he is bolstering European leadership in Ukraine’s defense. Still, Macron and a significant bloc of the European Union, most notably led by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, continue to deceive themselves that close relations with China are compatible with Europe’s security.
Put simply, Xi is playing the Europeans for fools, gambling that their desperation for short-term economic investment (or, in Scholz’s case, boosted car exports) will motivate them to excuse his enabling of Putin. Xi’s vast sanction-skirting trade flows to Russia and his expanding purchases of Russian energy prove that he wants Putin to win. Putin, after all, is China’s key partner in destabilizing the United States-led alliance structure and creating political space for Beijing’s own agenda.
That agenda is clear: the Chinese Communist Party’s supremacy in global politics. Xi and Putin said Thursday that they seek the “democratization of international relations in an equitable and orderly manner, and unite their efforts to build a just and rational multipolar world.” But Xi actually wants to displace a U.S.-led democratic order based on free trade and democratic rights with a Chinese-led order based on feudal mercantilism. An order, that is to say, in which access to economic growth flows wholly through political submission to Beijing. An order in which democratic sovereignty thus hemorrhages with the need to make ever greater political sacrifices at the CCP altar.
The proof of this geopolitical alignment isn’t measured simply by the Sino-Russian alignment against Ukraine and America. It is measured by the two nations’ common antagonism toward Taiwan, Japan, and the Philippines. China is now threatening war with the Philippines, infuriated by its willingness to defend its exclusive economic zone against utterly ludicrous CCP claims that this zone constitutes Chinese territory. Here, the Sino-Russian alignment bears common teeth. While the Chinese and Russian intelligence services deeply mistrust one another, military-to-military cooperation is leaping forward. Russia’s capable submarine forces are boosting the People’s Liberation Army’s ability to contest the U.S. military, for example.
The threat is also strategic in nature. The risk of Russia launching a simultaneous escalation against NATO in the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan or the Philippines is also increasing. And because the Europeans have neglected their military capabilities, especially in terms of long-range fires and logistics/air-to-air refuelers, a simultaneous Russian escalation or Taiwan war would feasibly allow for a division of the most finite and capable U.S. military forces between Europe and the Pacific. This underlines why the U.S. must clamor for increased European defense spending and deprioritize allies who fail to provide it now.
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The key here is to recognize what Putin and Xi are actually doing beyond their red-carpet rhetoric. If recognition is paid, those nations that value Ukraine’s sovereignty, Europe’s stability, and the sovereignty and stability of the Indo-Pacific will recognize Xi and Putin aren’t cooperating because they feel like it. Rather, they are doing so because they share fundamentally similar ambitions for the future of the world.
And those ambitions manifestly do not comport with the better interests of free peoples.
