America’s Best Answer to the China-Russia Alliance

Foreign Policy | Daniel S. Hamilton, Angela Stent

Washington must abandon its passive approach to the China-Russia axis by actively raising the costs of their opportunistic partnership rather than attempting an impossible reverse Nixon realignment. Although Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin remain united in challenging Western primacy, their lopsided alliance is fraught with underlying frictions, including Beijing's exploitation of Russian economic dependencies, espionage efforts, and anxieties regarding Moscow's reckless risk-taking.

China provides over 90 percent of the sanctioned technology imports sustaining Russia's war economy while simultaneously refusing to recognize Kremlin annexations in Georgia and Ukraine due to its own territorial claims over Taiwan. The United States should leverage its own global partnerships to widen these strategic divergences, limit third-country dependence, and make the bilateral relationship significantly harder to operate.

Comment

The structural asymmetry of the "no-limits" partnership limits Beijing's willingness to underwrite Moscow's fiscal exposure indefinitely. Consequently, Beijing leverages Russian hydrocarbons and territorial vulnerabilities through restricted infrastructure financing, such as delaying the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline.

Strategic Question for Discussion

How do Beijing's competing territorial imperatives regarding Taiwan shape its calculations when managing the economic dependencies of the Russian war economy?

The partnership remains transactional because Beijing's strict adherence to territorial sovereignty prevents it from officially endorsing Moscow's border revisions. This calculated ambiguity allows China to exploit Russian isolation while insulating itself from secondary Western sanctions.

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