Carnegie Moscow Center
The apparently long-term rupture of Russia’s relations with the West offers an opportunity to China to enhance its already close relationship with the Kremlin and thus turn the global geopolitical balance in its favor.
Western sanctions against Russia are driving the Kremlin toward closer economic, political, and potentially military alignment with China.
On August 7, China conducted a test of a hypersonic weapon. Open-source information about what happened that day in a remote part of Inner Mongolia allows for a few observations.
The only possible source of money for the Power of Siberia pipeline is no one else but China, and the terms of this assistance will be dictated from Beijing. The Kremlin’s inability to come to terms with the Western world does not come cheap.
Russia’s efforts to find an acceptable place for itself in the U.S.-led Western system have ended in a bitter disappointment. The changing trading patterns point to a new era in Moscow’s foreign relations, in which Sino-Russian relations will be taking center stage.
As new rounds of Western sanctions seem more likely, some large Russian companies are moving their cash reserves away from Western banks and currencies. In the long run dependence on China’s money and its financial institutions may be a new reality for Russian leaders for decades.
China will study U.S. strategy toward Russia and draw its own conclusions. Its interests are in keeping Russia as its stable strategic hinterland and a natural-resource base.
The Chinese do not have to listen to the Russians to see threats to their national sovereignty and domestic stability on the horizon. Both see Western support for democracy as a tool to contain them internationally and to weaken them from within.
In mid-2014, the United States' relations with China and Russia are substantially worse than those two countries' bilateral relations. The unique position that the United States has held since the 1990s as the dominant power in Eurasia is now history.
Russia must know that an exclusive alliance with China will incur its own cost.