Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China

by Hal Brands

China, for its part, has been pursuing hedges against strategic isolation. It has built an entente with Putin’s Russia, another angry, revisionist autocracy with a penchant for aggression and a talent for making enemies. That partnership features deepening economic, technological, diplomatic, and military cooperation beyond what most Western observers would have predicted a decade ago. It features a tacit agreement that Beijing and Moscow won’t make trouble for each other along their once-contested border, so that they can maximize the trouble they make for the United States and its allies across Eurasia and beyond. On the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin declared that their friendship had “no limits”; Moscow’s subsequent attack, and the global security crisis it precipitated, underscored that the balance of power is under strain in Europe and Asia simultaneously. If China and Russia have traditionally struggled to tame their historical rivalry for long, for now their anti-U.S., anti-democracy agendas are binding them together.