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The late Henry Kissinger’s reputation as a diplomatic genius was built, above all, on one achievement: the US-China rapprochement of the early 1970s.
Negotiated in deep secrecy and then sprung on a startled world, America’s opening to China changed the dynamics of the cold war. The Soviet Union suddenly looked much more isolated.
The memory still hovers over international politics. Ever since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, many western governments have looked for ways to repeat the trick — by breaking the “no limits” partnership between Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China.
But airy talk of dividing Moscow from Beijing glosses over a division of opinion on which country to woo. Many Europeans hope to persuade Xi to take a tougher line with Putin over Ukraine. Their goal, in other words, is to isolate Russia.
In Washington, however, the consensus view is that China is the more dangerous long-term adversary. Some American strategists worry about driving Russia into the arms of China and so altering the global balance of power in Beijing’s favour.
Despite his long-standing admiration for China, this seemed to be the view of Kissinger himself. He told me shortly before his death he was concerned that a weakened Russia would in effect become a satellite of China, with the result that Beijing’s sphere of influence could extend to a few hundred miles from Warsaw.
In theory, engineering a second Moscow-Beijing split would be a solution to such anxieties. Unfortunately, that kind of geopolitical move is highly unlikely to work in practice — at least in the foreseeable future. The warmth of Putin’s reception when he visited Beijing last week is testament to the enduring solidity of the China–Russia relationship.
The Xi-Putin bond remains strong because it is based on a common world view. Both are autocratic nationalists who see the US as the main threat. In their joint statement issued during Putin’s visit to China, the two accused America of pursuing a policy of “dual containment” aimed at Russia and China and of “hegemonic” behaviour.
Moscow and Beijing regard the US as trying to encircle Russia and China with hostile military alliances — Nato in Europe and the bilateral US alliances with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Australia in the Indo-Pacific.
Of course, the reason the US has so many allies in Europe and Asia is that Russia and China both inspire fear in many of their neighbours. This is a reality that Putin and Xi are unwilling to recognise. Instead, they insist that they are defending their countries from an expansionist America. In all probability, they genuinely believe this.
As they look out suspiciously at the US allies in their regions, Russia and China see each other as relatively reliable neighbours. They share a long border. So maintaining friendly relations is regarded as critical by both countries, to foil “dual containment” by the US and its allies.
Viewed from Beijing, the defeat of Russia would risk leaving China dangerously isolated. As one Chinese diplomat puts it, sardonically, America’s proposition to Beijing could be summarised as: “Please help us to defeat your closest ally, so that we can turn on you next.” In a similar way, Putin knows that Chinese support is completely indispensable to the Russian war effort in Ukraine.
This mutual reliance means that Moscow and Beijing will remain bound together, whatever the underlying tensions in their relationship.
And yet those tensions are undoubtedly there. For all the similarities in their world views, Russia and China are in very different geopolitical situations. Putin has turned Russia into a pariah state in the west. China, by contrast, remains one of the largest trading partners of both America and Europe.
That difference makes Russia willing to take risks that the Chinese may regard as reckless. On a recent trip to Beijing, some Chinese analysts told me they were uneasy about the increasing closeness of the military relationship between Russia and North Korea. One concern was that — in exchange for North Korean artillery shells — the Russians were unwisely sharing advanced military technology with the Kim regime in Pyongyang.
Over the longer-term, the Kremlin must also be anxious about Russia’s increasing dependence on China — and about the growing power imbalance between the two nations. The Russians are well aware that hundreds of thousands of kilometres of territory were ceded to them by China during the 19th century. But recent Chinese maps have shown some Russian cities with their old Chinese names — a cartographical shift that will certainly have been noticed in Moscow.
However, all these tensions remain largely below the surface. That is a vital difference with the situation in 1971-72, when the Sino-Soviet split was fairly open — presenting Nixon and Kissinger with a clear opportunity to woo China.
Taking that opportunity in the 1970s required the US to make significant concessions to the Chinese world view, above all on Taiwan. A second western effort to disrupt the Russian-Chinese axis today would probably require even more difficult policy shifts — on Taiwan again, or on Ukraine. There is very little appetite in Washington to make any such move. At least, not so far.
