The Emerging Russia-China Alliance

National Review Online

Tuesday, February 28, 2023

 

The Biden administration is clearly preparing the American people for some bad news. The only real news about its revelation that the Beijing regime is considering supplying Russia with weapons is that China has not (so far as we know) done so already.

 

“We are watching closely,” Jake Sullivan told ABC. “We know they haven’t taken it off the table. And we are sending a clear message, as are our European allies, that this would be a real mistake because those weapons would be used to bombard cities and kill civilians, and China should want no part of that.”

 

The idea that Beijing’s genocidaires would be moved by the thought of bombed cities and dead civilians is laughable.

 

Russia’s war with Ukraine has been a double win for Beijing. Thanks to sanctions, Russia’s trade with the West has fallen sharply, but it has been able to turn to China for the goods, ranging from cars to electronics, required to keep its consumers content and its industrial base supplied. More important still, in China, Russia has a reliable customer that will be willing to buy increasing amounts of the oil, gas, and other raw materials that it can no longer sell to the West. Russia’s new pipelines will be heading toward China, not Europe. Its economy is doing fine, at least for now.

 

For its part, China has not only found an expanded market for its products in Russia but, critically, now has a “captive” supplier for oil, natural gas, and other raw materials, and one with which it shares a long land border. Given the weight that China, which is rapidly shifting to a quasi-autarkic economic model, attaches to security of supply for those resources it does not already have within its borders, this counts as a major win. Under the circumstances, it has no interest in seeing Russia dissolve into the chaos that defeat might bring, both for economic and geopolitical reasons. A Russian defeat, after all, would be an American victory. If anything, China has an interest in the prolongation of a war that keeps Russia dependent, and the U.S. (expensively) distracted. All this suggests that China will supply Russia with matériel as and when it judges it necessary.

 

When it comes to the combatants, Beijing’s peace plan has nothing of substance to offer. Its main function is to act as a device to allow Xi Jinping to pose as an honest broker. That’s an act designed to play well in the “global south” and reinforce the image of China as a world power. The plan’s most interesting provisions are those designed to ensure that the war does as little damage beyond the battlefield as possible, whether to global trading systems or through the consequences of a nuclear “crisis.” China is a hegemon on the rise, doing well with the world as it is, a world that it wishes to inherit more or less intact.

 

China has ample ability to sell or even give (spoiler: it would be the former) matériel to Russia. China’s production capacity of ground weapons exceeds NATO’s. The U.S. can complain all it wants (and it will), but it won’t find it easy to devise sanctions that it could wield that would have any effect, without hurting the U.S. too. If it could, that wouldn’t bother Beijing too much: The Chinese economy is now managed on the principle that the economic is subordinated to the political. Accepting some knocks goes with that territory. The most effective sanctions might be to put decarbonization — a process that will leave the West dangerously dependent on China for far longer than its politicians are prepared to admit — on hold. But that’s not going to happen.

 

The only positive to come from a more lethal Sino-Russian alignment (which, of course, would complement the arrangements that Russia already has with Iran and North Korea) would be if it put an end once and for all to the pretense that we can be partners with China in some areas (climate, say) and rivals in others. We cannot. And behaving as if we can is more dangerous than a straightforward recognition of a new Cold War. Accepting that reality may be unpleasant, but it is a starting point for navigating our way through it realistically, prudently, and without beguiling illusion.