Why the China - Russia Relationship Should Worry You - Part One

In 1937, Winston Churchill contrasted the “two rival religions” of Nazism and Communism then afflicting the world.  Those fascist and communist “infernal twins”, he wrote, “imagine themselves as exact opposites” but are, in fact “similar in all essentials”, breeding in reaction to each other.  Today’s ‘infernal twins’ – China and Russia – are ostensible great power rivals united by a common adversary.  

On the face of it, these communist and post-communist authoritarian states are unlikely allies with often conflicting interests.  And they are in differing places strategically.  One sees itself as an expanding power assuming its rightful, dominant place in the global order.  The other is a revisionist state, seeking to restore strength and influence lost with the collapse of empire.

Yet, according to the US National Intelligence Council (NIC), China and Russia are “likely to remain strongly aligned as long as (Vladimir) Putin and XI (Jinping) remain in power.”  They have, the NIC judged, formed a “comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination”.  Putin and XI, as President Biden said in comparing the two, share a belief that “that an autocracy is the wave of the future and democracy can’t function” in a complex world.  What they are most united in is a belief that the American giant that has heretofore impeded their respective aspirations is now in a weakened state, plagued by political divides and societal rifts at home while projecting uncertain leadership abroad.  Like sharks that smell blood in the water, these allies of convenience sense opportunity in perceived American vulnerability.  Accordingly, Beijing and Moscow are subordinating potential points of friction between them such as competition for influence in Central Asia and resources in the Arctic to advance their common goals of confounding American policy and diminishing Washington’s role in the world.

In so doing, this diabolical twosome learns from, plays off, and works with each other.  Indications of this abound.  Russia’s effective use of hybrid warfare in its seizure of South Ossetia, Crimea and the Donbas region of Ukraine - as well as the ineffectual response of the West to those seizures of territory from sovereign nations - clearly resonated in Beijing.  The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is applying those lessons in its ‘(re-)unification’ of Hong Kong with China proper in abrogation of treaty obligations in a manner akin to the 1936 reoccupation of the Rhineland.  The ongoing, step-by-step crushing of democracy in that former British colony having to date garnered little more than pro forma condemnation from the US and its allies, we can expect that Beijing will consider a similar approach in dealing with Taiwan.  While Moscow has long sought to contest American power and influence worldwide, its ability to do so in the post-Soviet era has necessarily been much more episodic if only because it has lacked the means to do so.  Exceptions to this such as the small, albeit effective, Russian military intervention in the Syrian civil war, underscore the limitations of Moscow’s ability to project power.  Consequently, the PRC has now taken the lead in challenging the US globally.  The most obvious manifestation of this is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) which, coupled with the so-called “Digital Silk Road” and the “Made in China 2025” programs, is the public face of Beijing’s effort to supplant the US as the world’s dominant power.

In many instances, such as the provision of support to Venezuela, China and Russia are working in parallel if not in tandem.  Another example of this is China’s conclusion of a 25-year economic cooperation agreement with the ‘mullahocracy’ in Iran.  Moscow and Beijing have long sought to get Iran out from under US-sponsored sanctions, evoking concerns about a new anti-democratic Tripartite Pact intended - as was the 1940 original - “to establish a new order of things.”  Implementation of the China-Iran Pact, which stresses “numerous areas of joint cooperation such as energy, infrastructure, industry and technology”, may not always go smoothly.  As they have demonstrated with the BRI, the Chinese Communists have a way of wearing on their partners.  And Iranians are, no doubt (and rightly), bitter over the devastating impact of a COVID virus imported from the PRC.  But the agreement serves the anti-American ends of both countries.  Beijing’s deal with Tehran increases its influence over a key regional power, making Tehran a ready customer for Chinese arms sales while granting the PRC a steady source of oil.  The pact also greatly complicates any attempt by the US and its allies to isolate Iran in response to its nuclear program.  It is hard to envision the US Navy stopping Chinese-flagged tankers or ships transporting weaponry that transit the Straits of Hormuz under any foreseeable regime of sanctions directed against Tehran.  Finally, the deal with Iran strengthens Chinese sway over yet another rogue regime that – in addition to North Korea - can be influenced or pressured by Beijing to act to its benefit in distracting or belaboring the US.  While it remains to be seen how closely China and Russia can work together with the Tehran regime, such an arrangement would portend nothing good for US friends and allies in the region and engender inevitable questions regarding the resiliency of the American commitment to them.

China also seems to have learned from Russia’s effective use of information operations against the West, and the US in particular.  The chaos unleashed in American politics by the relatively small-scale active measures campaign mounted by Russian intelligence in seeking to influence the 2016 Presidential election - an operation that shook Americans’ faith in their democratic system and institutions by engendering a still widely held, albeit long-since discredited, belief in purported collusion between that election’s victor and the Kremlin - was something its authors could never have anticipated.  Having benefitted from such operations, Putin recently made public Russia’s long-held goal of dominating the “information space”.  To that end, Moscow seeks to undermine the Western-led international system that currently governs the internet by putting in place treaties, regulations and compliant oversight officials that will ensure Russia’s ability to continue to exploit the internet both as a means of undertaking active measures operations against its adversaries and to control information flowing to, and between, the Russian people.  China’s aspirations in the information warfare realm are similarly grandiose.  In 2013, Xi said that China should view the Internet itself as a  “new focal point of its national strategic contest” with the US with the goal of exercising “discourse power” over global communications.  Xi has been as good as his word, with his intelligence services and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) United Front Works Department mounting an ongoing disinformation and influence campaign that FBI Director Christopher Wray has described as “a whole-of-state effort to become the world’s only superpower by any means.”