At last week’s BRICS Summit in South Africa — the group consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — China and Russia unleashed a rhetorical fusillade against the United States.
The content of these attacks was not itself noteworthy, blaming America for provoking the war in Ukraine and for adopting a “Cold War mentality.” And the BRICS countries aren’t all aligned with the idea of using the grouping as a battering ram to topple the existing world order and replace it with a new one. But Beijing and Moscow certainly want to use it that way.
They’re not exactly hiding their broader efforts to jointly develop their military capabilities for a future confrontation with America and its friends, either.
The paranoia about and disdain for Western democracies that they hold in common is the driving force behind the “no-limits” partnership that Putin and Xi forged in Beijing days before the Russian invasion last year.
Yet there is a notion afoot in the Republican Party, advanced notably by Vivek Ramaswamy, that Russia can be pried away from China by giving Moscow its current territorial gains in Ukraine and welcoming it into the Western fold. Ramaswamy characterizes this as “Nixonian realism,” which might be worth taking seriously, if it were realistic.
It is certainly the case that China and Russia don’t have identical interests, and Cold War–era tensions are still salient. A case in point: A new map issued by the Chinese government this week asserts that an island it shares with Russia is wholly within China’s national borders — an expression, quite possibly, of continued Chinese resentment over immense Russian land grabs back in the 19th century. It’s also notable that Beijing has so far declined — publicly, anyway — to donate more military equipment to Russia’s war effort, beyond a certain amount of matériel that Chinese state-owned enterprises have sold to Russia.
But there is a durable, and fast-developing, partnership between the two.
Earlier this year, in Moscow, Xi described the spirit at the core of this entente as he bid farewell to Putin: “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.” Putin replied, “I agree,” as Xi stepped into his car. Now, following the BRICS summit, Putin is expected to travel again to China in the coming months, according to a new report.
The two countries have also taken the joint military relationship to new heights since 2022, with a series of new drills. Since the start of this year, they’ve held naval exercises off the coast of South Africa and in the Pacific, near Japan. By some counts, there were five or more joint Sino-Russian exercises near Japan last year.
Meanwhile, lower-level diplomatic exchanges are occurring without fanfare but resulting in more policy coordination between the nations.
It is always worth trying to find wedges between the two countries, but Putin’s actions and speeches have indicated that he has solidified in his view that confrontation with the West is a matter of his and his regime’s survival. The idea that he would meaningfully ditch the “no-limits” pact to ally with Western countries, whose institutions and values are anathema to him, is hard to credit. Even if we cut a deal with Putin to cease hostilities in Ukraine, it would likely only be a temporary expedient as he reloads to continue to pursue his long-term ideological and territorial goals in Ukraine.
The alliance with China is in line with Putin’s repeated calls for a “multipolar world” in which Western “hegemony” is overthrown, and he welcomes, as well, the way that it allows Russia to be at the heart of an expanded BRICS.
These are hard geopolitical facts that, unfortunately, can’t be wished away with glib talking points.