The heirs of two of the most violent revolutions in modern history shook hands and assessed the “Coordination Comprehensive Strategic Partnership for a New Era,” at a recent meeting in Moscow. Many in the West have been baffled by this relationship between the head of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Some imagined, for example, that Xi would be a neutral party to Putin's war in Ukraine, or that he could be a peacemaker. But instead of imagining a troubling new partnership that has emerged unexpectedly after decades of peacetime globalization, we should look to a longer arc of history to understand Russia and China's shared confrontation with the world.
Putin's invasion of Ukraine — backed openly by China's economic might — is just the first geopolitical product of a restored Russo-Chinese axis and the return of two states whose aspirations have never been touched by a post-Cold War peace. Once again, the world's democracies face the challenge of organizing their defenses against these two dictatorships in both Europe and Asia.
In 1950, as American grand strategy began to coalesce around the Cold War challenge posed by the Soviet Union, US State Department official Paul Neitz articulated the turbulent period that defined his generation's experience in international affairs.
During the past thirty-five years, the world has witnessed two world wars of massive violence. It has seen two revolutions - the Russian and the Chinese - extreme in scope and intensity. It also witnessed the collapse of five empires - the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, German, Italian and Japanese - and the severe collapse of two major imperial systems, the British and the French. Architect of one of the Cold War's primary strategic documents, NSC-68, Neitz noted a world in which "the international distribution of power has fundamentally changed."
Among the causes of this change and upheaval are the two revolutions which he so wisely acknowledged, the Russian and the Chinese. Two revolutions whose consequences we must now admit are not entirely over, We must remind ourselves that Russia and China in the twenty-first century—and the leaders who run them—are products of the original Russian and Chinese revolutions that Neitz understood would shape the history and geopolitics of his life.
Xi and Putin, as the products of these revolutions, are also the inheritors of their own anti-Western ideas and strategies of confrontation. As American spy chief Jack Devine points out, Putin's career took place in Dresden, East Germany, rooted in the world of the Warsaw Pact, and has called the collapse of the Soviet empire "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century." Now, as head of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi is considered the heir to what the party calls the "great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation," a project of national revival that originated with Mao's "New China" and has continued in various forms since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949.
China seeks confrontation with the United States and the establishment of a new order with China to "occupy the first place in the world." In this endeavor, Russia regards Putin as Xi's main collaborator and "strategic partner." As totalitarian communist states in the 20th century, Russia and China challenged the world's democracies and sought to establish their own order. The decade-long Sino-Soviet alliance stretched through the Korean War and multiple Taiwan crises, creating a two-theater strategic challenge to the United States and its allies involving both Europe and Asia. Perhaps the United States, having just fought World War II in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, was more willing to run a two-theater strategic contest.
The simultaneous containment of both Communist China and the Soviet Union provided a check against their ambitions. The Sino-Soviet alliance eventually became unsustainable and fractured, largely because Mao aspired to restore China to a position of power and centrality in world affairs; He will not tolerate the role of Moscow's junior partner. Today, these roles have been reversed, and these aspirations have returned, not in the name of communist ideology, but in the shadow of an aggressive militaristic nationalism that animates both regimes.
Xi and Putin showed the world the depth and philosophical lines of their relationship in their joint declaration of partnership at the 2022 Beijing Olympics, just weeks before Putin invaded Ukraine. But the strategic partnership dates back even earlier. During 2010, the two countries expanded their military, economic, and diplomatic relations. In a statement at the Beijing Olympics, China and Russia pledged mutual support for each other's "core interests".
Moscow pledged to support Beijing's claims on Taiwan, which it called "an inalienable part of China," and Beijing vowed that "both sides oppose further NATO expansion and call on NATO to abandon its ideological approaches to the Cold War." Joint nuclear bomber exercises, land and sea exercises, increased trade in energy and technology, Chinese propaganda support for Moscow, and new reports of Chinese assault rifles and body armor for Russia are just some of the elements that have shaped since Putin's invasion. Ukraine. The joint Sino-Russian division of Europe and Asia is reminiscent of the original geography of the Sino-Soviet alliance. As Stalin told his counterparts in Communist China: "There must be some division of labor between us... You may have more responsibility in labor in the East... and we will take more responsibility in the West." Putin's war in Ukraine is not the only conflict, of course, that could result from this axis.
China's economic engagement with democracies in the post-Cold War era has propelled a modern People's Republic of China that now competes with global democracies in critical technologies and strategic industries, and has built an army unlike any in Asia that aims to liquidate scores of nations. Especially in the Pacific. This is the return of antagonists in the twentieth century, whose ambitions have not really gone away
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