Splitting Russia From China Is Possible—and Vital

When debating grand strategy, it pays to consult the whiskered sages and practitioners of yesteryear. One finds the near total unanimity of view among everyone from Thucydides and Otto von Bismarck through Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger that, everything else being equal, it’s better to balance with other great powers against your competitors than to have your competitors balance against you. It is remarkable, then, that leading neoconservative epigones have spent decades inveighing against and working to overturn this iron law of international politics when applied to the most important great power dynamic of our time: the U.S.–Russia–China strategic triangle.

This issue was reignited in recent months by a new push from the Trump administration to pursue a framework for diplomatic and economic normalization with Russia. One of the reasons for doing so is to apply downward pressure on what has been a steadily deepening partnership between Moscow and Beijing that, while not officially formulated against the U.S., is nonetheless inimical to American interests across the world. 

The latest broadside against these efforts comes from the former Ambassador Michael McFaul and Professor Evan S. Medeiros in Foreign Affairs. Trying to “peel” Russia away from China, they argue, is a bad idea because Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has no reason to acquiesce to such a scheme and, even if he did, this kind of rebalancing would “bring few real benefits to the American people and come at a steep cost to other U.S. interests.” 

McFaul and Medeiros somberly warn that Putin will exploit a diplomatic thaw with the U.S. to serve his own ends, balking at the notion that Russia’s leader would prioritize Russian interests. But that’s precisely the point: The beauty of maneuvering within the balance of power rather than pushing against it, as the U.S. has intermittently done for the past three decades, is getting others to engage with you not out of the goodness of their hearts but because it’s in their interest to do so. The authors end with the rather astonishing admonition that trying to peel Russia away from China is imprudent because it would make Moscow a “pivot player in the competition between Beijing and Washington.” 

In fact, Moscow is inherently a pivot player between Beijing and Washington. Recognizing and acting on this reality sets the stage for a long-overdue strategic retrenchment that lightens the American burden in Europe, something most presidents since Dwight Eisenhower have tried to accomplish, and generates a host of positive spillover effects that would put Washington on better footing to productively engage China. Indeed, for Russia to act as more of a pivot player and less as China’s situational partner against the West would in itself be a major victory for the U.S. and Europe.  

It is important here to proceed with a healthy dose of epistemological humility. No one is suggesting that it is feasible or necessarily even desirable to formally ally with Russia against China. Not only would Moscow never go for it for some of the reasons ably rehearsed by McFaul, but even if it did, an “alliance” along these lines may induce the Chinese to counter with aggressive balancing behavior that could very well create more problems than it solves. 

Rather, the realist claim should be this: There are inherent fault lines in the Russia–China relationship, the most important being Moscow’s concern with playing junior partner to an economically more powerful China. The Western diplomatic and economic maximum pressure campaign in the wake of Russia’s 2022 Ukraine invasion has rendered the Russia–China relationship more lopsided than ever, with the Chinese market occupying a whopping 36.5 percent of Russia’s imports and 30.5 percent of its exports as of 2023 even as Russia only comprises roughly four percent of Chinese foreign commerce. 

The tensions stemming from Russia’s uncomfortable dependence on its Chinese neighbor have been suppressed only by Moscow’s existential short-term need to balance against the West. It stands to reason that a stabilization or improvement in relations between Russia and the West, but especially between Moscow and Washington, will allow these tensions to rise to the fore in ways that will inevitably prompt a degree of strategic distance between Russia and China. 

Working out a framework for Moscow to reenter Western commodities markets and financial institutions pending a negotiated settlement in Ukraine will cut into China’s growing economic leverage over Russia. It would also give Moscow a stake in stable, constructive relations with the West rather than a continued incentive to work with China to create and bolster alternatives to Western economic and political platforms. This will enable Russia to pursue more freely and vigorously its national interests in areas where Moscow and Beijing do not necessarily see eye to eye, including hedging against China’s growing influence in Central Asia, dialing back certain kinds of security and defense technology cooperation with China, pursuing independent pacific partnerships with states like Vietnam in ways that indirectly frustrate Chinese power projection, providing a backchannel for nuclear talks with North Korea that do not have to directly involve China, further deepening its relationship with India to the chagrin of Chinese observers, and blocking the evolution of the BRICS as a bloc oriented against the West. None of these developments is a silver bullet in isolation, but together they add up to a more propitious climate for engaging China by itself rather than confronting a unified anti-Western, Sino-Russian bloc.  

McFaul and likeminded voices have insisted for years that any effort to draw Russia away from China is a fool’s errand because the Moscow-Beijing axis is an ideologically ordained entente between autocracies against democracies. This is a kind of self-fulfilling geopolitical prophecy that tries to obfuscate the consequences of concrete policy decisions made by successive neoconservative policymakers since 1991 behind a contrived metaphysical narrative that has nothing to do with actual Russian or Chinese strategic objectives. As with much of the post–Cold War Atlanticist canon, it’s a story we tell ourselves to justify a failing and unsustainable status quo. Part of adapting to a multipolar world is to work toward a renewed sense of foreign policy agency, of America as a geopolitically nimble actor capable of pragmatically engaging allies and competitors alike. There are few better or more pressing places to apply this skill than the U.S.–Russia–China strategic triangle.