How Worried Should We Be About the China-Russia “Alliance”?

The big news of the opening weekend of the Winter Olympics, other than the Olympics itself, which wasn’t all that big, was the meeting between Presidents Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia.  The presidents signed an oil-gas deal and issued a joint statement opposing the expansion of NATO (the first time China had ever done that), criticizing the AUKUS security pact signed last year between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and more.₁ 

But how big of a deal is this challenge really?  The answer to that question is probably dependent on how big of a power you think Russia is going to be in ten or twenty years.  Mitt Romney recently quoted John McCain as saying that Russia is a gas station parading as a country.  Unfortunately, a combination of the economic rebound from the pandemic and Joe Biden’s restrictions on fracking and drilling in the U.S., and other things, has pushed up the price of oil and gas, making Vladimir Putin’s gas station more valuable.

Still, Russia is on a downhill trajectory.  The spike in oil prices, combined with stupid German energy policies (“let’s get rid of nuclear power so we can be more dependent on Vladimir Putin for our energy”), is giving Vladimir Putin a little more time to act like a great power.  But the trend is clear.  And as Russia becomes weaker and China becomes stronger, it is hard to see Xi Jinping, or whoever runs China at that point, really caring all that much about Russia.² 

Russia and China are not allies in the sense of the members of NATO.  They are just two countries who have, at this point, a common enemy.  As long as this continues and they can be useful to each other, they will work together.  But if that changes, or if either of them, especially China, thinks they can get more by doing something different, they will.

The China-Russia arrangement may last for twenty years – or maybe twenty months.  That doesn’t make the China-Russia relationship any less dangerous today, but it does inform us as to how we need to plan for the future,
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¹ It would be interesting to see the pricing on the oil and gas agreement.  It would give us an indication of how the two countries view their relative power.
² A separate question is the stability of Xi Jinping’s rule in China.  Xi seems to be establishing the most centralized leadership in China since Mao Zedong (f/k/a Mao Tse-tung) himself.  Whether and how long that will last is a question beyond the scope of this post.