Depending on how you look at it, China’s foreign policy is either amazingly adept, delicately threading the needle of friendship with both Russia and the U.S.–in effect eating its cake and keeping it too–or it’s putting at risk its relationship with the U.S. and the West in a way that will be hard to repair.
China’s unpopular pro-Putin stance is the 900-pound bear in the room. It has arguably caused as much or more diplomatic harm than the South China Sea spats, rampant espionage, chronic human rights abuses, the spy balloon and the bad optics of threatening Taiwan. It confirms China’s willingness to ignore a core interest of the U.S. and Europe–avoiding a land war in the region–and it raises serious questions about sovereignty and the inviolability of borders.
It’s not that the U.S. is highly principled in its foreign policy, far from it. The imprimatur of Henry Kissinger’s cold, calculating foreign policy “realism” is alive and well, which, incidentally, set the tone for U.S.-China foreign policy for years to come, and both sides have done well by it.
Despite irreconcilable differences from the outset, the U.S.-China relationship has been a remarkably resilient one to date. Even major clashes as serious as the Belgrade embassy bombing incident, or the spy plane downing on Hainan, and the various flare-ups involving Taiwan have, until recently, hardly dented the forward momentum of the greatest trade story ever told.
But China’s unblinking support of the aggressor in a land war in Europe may prove a bridge too big to cross.
After “reassuring” the world that Russia was only engaged in border exercises, despite appearances to the contrary, Putin launched a decapitation strike against Kyiv. Russian tanks, jets and guns poured onto Ukrainian soil in the biggest violation of sovereignty Europe has seen since the days of Hitler and Stalin.
During the first few weeks of the war of invasion, China followed the Kremlin talking points to the letter, recognizing it neither for the war or the invasion it was, instead using Putin’s favored term, “Special Military Operation.”
And so it is a controversial foreign policy plank, not Covid, not trade, not even military posturing, that most seriously threatens China’s relationship to the U.S., and much of Europe as well.
Moscow remains, for any socialist steeped in history, the great metropole, and Stalinism, though repudiated even in Russia itself, retains a certain aura from a distance.
That, perhaps, begins to explain his strange and enduring friendship from another survivor of communist chaos. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have met over forty times, and while some of that is standard diplomatic dance, the mutual admiration appears real.
Two men with a mission, and chips on the shoulder, too. They enthusiastically share the mission to knock the U.S. down a notch or two in the name of multilateralism and “shared humanity.” They also share a hatred for NATO, which for Chinese of Xi’s generation began on May 7, 1999, the date of the NATO bombing of Belgrade, whereas for Putin it’s been the bugbear since his salad days as a KGB operative in East Germany.
Politics makes for strange bedfellows, so the budding Xi-Putin relationship has a certain degree of geopolitical logic and it was not too out of the ordinary at first.
But then, just as the world was coming out of the pandemic, and Beijing was putting on the 2022 Winter Olympics, a partnership of “no limits” was declared with Russia.
If Putin had gone home and devoted his better efforts to repairing Russia’s weakened economy, the bold words spoken on February 4, 2022, might have been forgotten as diplomatic bombast of the moment.
But just over two weeks later, after trenchant denials to the world and his own people that he had no intention of invading Ukraine, Putin launched a brutal, full-scale invasion. This was not a minor thrust along the already hotly-contested border, but a failed decapitation strike on Ukraine’s leadership and a failed attempt to put its capital city, Kiev under Russian occupation.
If it was strongly disapproved of by Beijing, one might have expected to see daylight between China’s view of what CCTV calls the “Ukraine crisis” and Russia’s view, but instead there has been close coordination in media coverage and pro-Kremlin message control.
Two and a half years on, with casualties on both sides of the Ukraine battlefield in the hundreds of thousands, Beijing has yet to condemn Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
A gratuitous, unprovoked war has been rewriting the map, obliterating entire cities in the process, putting a strain on diplomacy and disrupting world trade. Hatched in secret, the shots are still being called by a single man on the top of Russia’s hierarchical and undemocratic pyramid of power named Putin.
Just as in the infamous case of Hitler’s shocking attack on Poland that launched a world war, this nefarious act can be pinpointed to the decision of one dictator. It’s a nightmare that Europe hoped never to have to face again after vanquishing Hitler.
To tacitly support the blatant aggressor in such a war does not reflect well on China, despite its pretense of being a peace broker. The war that China will not name hurts Beijing’s credibility, it hurts the perception of fair play, and it erodes the Westphalian notion that national borders should not be violated. But none of that has the potential to move the needle as much as the fact that it’s bad for business.
Europe’s economy is a mess, energy prices have gone through the roof, and there’s less money for Europe to absorb the Chinese imports.
Putin’s war is an ongoing threat to peace in the heartland of Europe. It touches too deeply on the historic predations of Hitler and Stalin to be ignored.
Call it a bromance, call it a Machiavellian exchange at the highest level, the intense Xi-Putin interaction for better or worse is reshaping the world, and they admit as much.
As Xi told Putin upon parting Moscow in 2023:
"Right now there are changes, the likes of which we haven't seen for 100 years. And we are the ones driving these changes together."
The war has hastened the change, but it’s hard to see how it’s changed for the better. There is peril in the polarization of the world into two camps.
Meanwhile, China continues to break bread with Putin while looking the other way. U.S.-China relations, and more broadly, China’s relations with an increasingly unified West, do not have much hope of serious improvement until Putin’s war ends, one way or another.
