As they deepen their strategic partnership, Russia and China hope that exploiting the divisions within the West will help them transform the global order. The Sino-Russian dream of building a post-Western order has resonance in many parts of the world, including in Delhi. But the Indian strategic community should not hold its breath. The faultlines within the West are real, but they are by no means fatal.
This is not the first time that Moscow and Beijing have talked of upending the world order. The history of international communism in the 20th century was about building a post-Western order. But those dreams came to nought as Russia and China got at each other’s throats and made separate compromises with the West.
Might it be different this time? As he bid goodbye to Vladimir Putin in Moscow last month, Xi Jinping talked of “once-in-a-century changes” that the two leaders were jointly heralding. Moscow and Beijing are convinced that by pooling their strengths — the former’s military/nuclear power and vast natural resources and the latter’s growing economic weight — they can put the West on the defensive. They also bet that with geopolitical coordination of their policies in Europe and Asia, Russia and China can bury 400 years of western hegemony. The success of this strategy rests on the Moscow-Beijing axis successfully leveraging America’s internal fissures and divisions between the US and Europe.
A few days ago, the two top contenders for presidential nomination from the US Republican Party — former president Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis openly challenged Washington’s unlimited military support for Ukraine. What US leaders say in the campaign and from the White House is rarely the same. It was the Trump Administration that named, for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia as a major threat to the US. And it took little time for DeSantis to recant his critique of America’s Ukraine policy. In trying to follow America’s noisy debates, it is easy to forget that there is a strategic core — the deep state if you will — that can develop and sustain long-term policies.
If Moscow’s focus is on America’s political fractures, Beijing is deploying China’s market power to undermine Washington’s strategy. After all, China is the world’s second-biggest economy and has massive economic interdependence with the US. Even as Beijing takes a hard political line towards the Biden Administration, it is teasing Wall Street and US industry to come back and make money in China. Last week at the Boao Forum, the so-called “Davos of China”, the new premier Li Qiang was promising a large audience of CEOs, including Apple’s Tim Cook, to further open its economy. That large sections of the US capital want to return to the “good old days” with China is not in doubt. But political Washington has moved on from “business as usual” with Beijing.
What about dividing America from Europe? Russia’s latest version of its foreign policy doctrine issued last week singles out the US as “the main instigator, organiser and executor of the aggressive anti-Russian policy of the collective West”. Putin often criticises Europe for abandoning its strategic autonomy, but it is the Russian aggression against Ukraine that has pushed Europe back into US protection. China’s love for Europe’s “strategic autonomy” is equally passionate (much like Beijing’s enthusiasm for Delhi’s “non-alignment”).
Beijing has been hoping that the parade of European leaders in China this week would allow it to separate Brussels from Washington. Last week saw Prime Minister of Spain Pedro Sanchez join the Boao forum. This week, French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen are travelling together to China.
The Sino-European engagement circles around two issues. Europe wants Xi to put pressure on Putin to end the war in Ukraine. Beijing would like Europe to distance itself from the US on its China policy. It is unlikely there will be a decisive movement on either issue, but both sides see the diplomatic dance as a valuable exercise. Europe is not ready to buy China’s so-called peace initiative on Ukraine. As EU foreign policy chief Josef Borrell put it last Friday, China can’t be a mediator in the Ukraine war because, “China does not distinguish between the aggressor and the victim”.
Europe, however, has convinced itself that Xi is the only leader who can nudge Putin towards peace. It is by no means clear if Xi can deliver. But keeping up European hope is a major driver of Xi’s Ukraine diplomacy. On the face of it, Europe does have real incentives to develop a China policy different from the American one. If the Ukraine war has compelled it to reduce its commercial ties with Russia, Europe is loath to lose access to the massive Chinese market because of the deepening Sino-US conflict. After all, total trade between the two economic giants was close to $850 billion in 2022.
Last week, in a major speech von der Leyen said Europe does not want to “decouple” from China because of the massive economic relationship. But at the same time, she said Europe must “de-risk” its commercial ties with China. She argued that EU-China relations had become “more distant and more difficult” as Beijing becomes “repressive at home and assertive abroad”. She outlined several steps to do this: Increasing European competitiveness, reducing dependence on China for critical minerals, greater scrutiny of outbound investment into China, more effective controls on the export of sensitive technologies, and greater collaboration with like-minded countries. Beijing’s ambassador to the EU, Fu Cong slammed the speech as full of “distortions” and accused von der Leyen of pandering to the “China hawks” in Europe and the US.
Beijing might yet hope that the individual countries in the EU might focus more on their business interests with China. Macron, who champions Europe’s “strategic autonomy” from the US, is in China this week with a large business delegation. He will talk commerce but is unlikely to give up on Europe’s Ukraine position.
The new diplomatic jockeying between Europe and China will be of great interest to other powers, including India. Realists in Delhi do note the many differences between the US and Europe but are aware that Western strategic unity has endured since World War II. Delhi knows that Russia and China have now presented existential challenges — military, economic, political, and ideological — to western primacy. It can see that the Russian and Chinese over-reach has cemented broad western unity rather than separating Europe from the US.
The writer is a senior fellow with the Asia Society Policy Institute, Delhi and a contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express
