Lyle Goldstein
Earlier this month, Chinese President Xi Jinping hosted Russian President Vladimir Putin in Beijing, where the two leaders observed China’s military parade. Watching it, one could be forgiven for thinking Beijing and Moscow are growing dangerously close to the detriment of the United States.
That’s all the more concerning given the Chinese military might on full display at the parade. And while the People’s Liberation Army is indeed no paper tiger, the Beijing spectacle raised an obvious question: if China and Russia are really marching in “lockstep,” why is none of this fearsome Chinese hardware currently being used on the battlefield in Ukraine?
Washington pundits rarely stop to ponder why Russian forces have not been reinforced with Chinese “volunteers” or military gadgetry and firepower. In fact, China has offered the Kremlin only tepid support for its Ukraine war effort.
While this has frustrated some Moscow strategists, it reflects Beijing’s caution, restraint and a more fundamental conviction that a “new cold war” against the West should be strenuously avoided.
This could be seen at the recent Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) meeting in Tianjin, attended by both China and Russia among other nations, which had diplomatic and economic overtones but very little military agenda.
The major headline from that summit was that Chinese and Indian leaders were finally coming together to dialogue and hopefully get beyond the persistent border dispute that has drastically soured that key bilateral relationship since 2020.
Instead of wringing their hands over a new world order run by an “axis of authoritarians,” Washington should be celebrating a major breakthrough between two formerly hostile nuclear powers with a history of recent and intensive violence.
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