American Power Extra: The China-Russia Threat Everyone Gets Wrong

with one of our experts designed to go deeper into the energy, military, and geopolitical

stories driving the news.

“If you're looking for more context, more history, and a better understanding of forces”

shaping global events, you're in the right place. Take it away Chad. So the relationship between China and Russia has become one of those subjects where almost everything you hear is wrong in one of two directions. One camp insists the two are a single warm machine, moving is one.

The other waves it off is a doomed pair held together by nothing but mutual convenience. A new ground-breaking two-year study from the Center for European Policy Analysis, which is a Washington research institution, deconstructs both of these arguments. It's authors planned somewhere that is much more uncomfortable, but also more useful for us to understand.

They believe the partnership is real, it is lopsided, it is full of friction, whether we see it or not, and it is dangerous precisely because it refuses to behave like the way we've seen other partnerships work around the globe. I mean, let's say you are in the year 2016, and I come in back then as some modern day no stradama saying that I'm going to predict the future for you.

Would you believe what I say that China is the economic backbone of Russia that's allowing them to wage a full-scale war in Europe? You'd have been like, "You're out of your damn mind." What if I also told you that in the future China, Russia and Iran would set up joint production capability and supply chains for attack drones that they'll use against not

only Ukraine, but also the United States as the United States decides to start a war against Iran. That is a war they are for all intents and purposes, losing, at least from a strategic level. You probably would have walked off by then.

“And then what if I told you North Korea deployed troops to help Russia fight Ukraine?”

And in return, Russia has provided them with a nuclear capability that is starting to rival that of France and Great Britain. North Korean soldiers fought in the thousands on Russia side, and North Korea was supplying close to half of Russia's artillery fire on the Ukrainian front in the year 2025, mainly because Russia couldn't do it themselves.

What if I also told you Russia would be losing their war against Ukraine in the year 2025? You would have thought I was certifiably nuts, and yet this is the picture the authors in this CEPA article paint. This world we are in right now is so outlandish that we were unprepared for it. We just did not see it coming.

What we did see was the bond forming between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and frankly one of the few things that holds this whole relationship together is that bond between those two leaders. Xi Jinping took control of the Chinese Communist Party in late 2012, which was the same year of Vladimir Putin returned as Russian President after handing it over briefly to the

meetry Medvedev.

“Since then, the two have met somewhere around 70 times.”

In February of 2022, their summit in Beijing produced the phrase that has somewhat haunted the relationship ever since, that they would have a friendship with no limits, their no limits friendship. That was announced just days before the Russian army crossed into Ukraine. A year later, in Moscow, they promised to push changes the world had not witnessed in

the century. By May of 2024, they were calling it a new era. All of this was designed to be rhetoric pushing to break the alliance system developed by the United States and rearrange the world order around a Beijing Moscow Center of Gravity. And boy, do they put on a good show when they meet parades, gallows, lavish banquets,

and toasts. But if you strip away the ceremony and the pomp and circumstance, the balance of power inside this partnership clearly tips one way. The economics of this relationship runs on a single concept that Thomas mature calls

asymmetric interdependence, basically both countries need each other, but Russia needs China

far more. The Western sanctions meant to break Russia ended up shoving them right into Beijing's grip. And you can see this based on data. At the turn of the century, Chinese goods made up around 3% of Russia imported.

By 2023, they made up more than one third, roughly 3/4 of what Russia ships to China is energy and raw material sold cheaply while the goods coming back are cars, electrical appliances, and advanced machinery. Russia barely registers in China's overall trade. The United States and the European Union absolutely dwarf it by several orders of magnitude.

Meanwhile, China is the thing keeping Russia's economy on its feet. But it's not an infinitely growing economic relationship. After four consecutive years of climbing trade between the two countries actually shrank in 2025. This was the first contractions since 2020, and that contraction was because of the pandemic.

Chinese customs data puts the total trade at roughly 228 billion, which is about 7% less

than the 245 billion record that was set in 2024. Chinese exports into Russia dropped nearly 10% dragged down by a collapse in vehicle sales. Passengers cars are down by around 42% and trucks by 72% as the boom that followed the flight of Western brands caused by the Ukraine War burned itself out.

time.

“Because rebounded for obvious reasons, Trump's war and Iran, for instance.”

But economists call what is happening between China and Russia a structural plateau. The moment when you can no longer grow simply by forcing more cargo and more goods through the same pipeline. Russia just simply is not growing economically, so that trade is going to stagnate. Regardless, China gave Russia a way to keep functioning under sanctions by moving trade out

of the dollar and putting it into the yuan and rubles. And Putin claimed by 2024 more than 90% of their commerce was settled in those two currencies, but Chinese banks are pretty nervous still and Beijing is definitely wary of secondary sanctions coming out of the European Union and the United States.

These are very powerful penalties that Washington can drop on any foreign firm that handles

business with blacklisted entities such as Russia. It's also why Beijing has kept its capital markets shut to Russian borrowing, which means Moscow can't raise any real money from China when it needs it. And that strain is showing, liquid reserves in Russia's national wealth fund, which is the

“cushion, their rainy day fund meant for emergencies, have fallen to somewhere near 4% of”

the country's economic output, which is less than half of where it stood in 2022. Some analysts believe that fund could be exhausted by this time next year. The official 2025 Russian deficit of a mere 2.6% of gross domestic product sounds survivable, but when you're cut off from foreign lenders, Russia really only has one of two options to close that gap, and that gap is going to grow exponentially, either it can tax and

squeeze the private sector that is already struggling within its own country, or it can just print more money, which is what's going to cause inflation to skyrocket yet again. At some point, military spending with Russia is going to have to be a casualty. It will be because above all Putin has to ensure his people remain, at least unwilling to overthrow him, whether the Russian people are happier or not, is irrelevant.

Now for China's part, they're doing just enough to keep Russia breathing, but deliberately not enough to make it healthy. They want a weak Russia forward leverage, and the Kremlin knows this, but they can't do anything about it.

“As Western firms departed Russia because of the war Russia started against Ukraine, Chinese”

firms were expected to backfill the holes. They never did. In fact, Chinese investment in Russia actually went into reverse, averaging 400 million a year in 2022 and 2023, which sounds like a lot, but it's actually way less than the 1.2 billion year in Chinese investment in Russia that took place from 2011 to 2018.

By the end of 2023, Russia accounted for a mere 0.4 percent of all Chinese investment abroad, which is a smaller share than 20 years ago when China was still just a burgeoning economy. Despite the rhetoric of the no-limits friendship, China is not acting in a manner that reflects the way it speaks.

They are hedging against Russia, but also Beijing already buys Russian resources cheaply and sells into Russian markets freely. Russia owns no brands worth acquiring. They aren't a leader in anything, so investing in them is a losing proposition when you can invest in countries that actually are producing things people want.

Plus any high profile investment likely would invite sanctions. So Chinese companies that were already invested in Russia dug in, hoping in the next few years that they can recoup some of their investments, and all of the new money dried up. Now, one aspect of the partnership that remains is the dual use goods, which are products

that serve both civilian life and have a use on the battlefield as well. After Western controls cut Russia off, China stepped in as the primary source for the components that keep Russian missiles, drones, and every other weapon rolling off the line. By 2023, Chinese suppliers were estimated to cover somewhere between 70 and 90 percent

of Russian imports in critical categories such as machine tools, bearings, navigation gear,

basic chips, and other technical components. Unfortunately, a portion of that was Western technology that should not be in Russian weaponry being rerouted through China, and finding its way into missiles and drones. Nonetheless, Beijing has been careful not to ship finished weapons, pointing to its own export rules and not the fact that they're scared of drawing the iron of the United States in

Europe. But make no mistake, it is a lifeline that helps Russia fight in Ukraine. And while in the near-term it may seem good for Russia, in the long-term it is not. As Russia deepens its reliance on Chinese supply chains, it likely will never be able to climb out of the hole it dug itself into with China even after the war in Ukraine ends.

Now, as far as the military relationship, there is this weird dichotomy that takes place where neither country is never as close or as far apart as they look.

It's kind of the interesting play on a previous take where you always say the Soviet Union

is never as strong or as weak as they appear. Chinese and Russian cooperation hinges on two things, exercises and arm sales. The drills have grown steadily since the first drill took place a little over 20 years ago and now incorporate pretty much every domain of warfare, naval, air, missile defense, and so on.

Usually they conduct these in places that are geopolitically sensitive like the waters near Japan in the South China Sea or in the Mediterranean. But unlike NATO exercises where NATO countries try to find better ways to integrate weapons,

And therefore they never function as one body together like you would see in NATO.

“It's because there's this undercurrent of mistrust between their militaries.”

Their exercises have no joint war planning. They have no shared command structure. They have no permanent integrated headquarters. They have no common encrypted communication. Basically, the coordination is that they both show up in a specific location and stage a

performative exercise in the same zone. They're basically just operating in parallel but not together. They rehearse side by side rather than integrated it together. But like everything Chinese and Russian in the military realm, when it comes to exercises, they're not actually designed to bolster capability.

They're designed to impress and intimidate. Nonetheless, China is the beneficiary of this military relationship. Anything that is gained from the drills flows towards Beijing. China's military has not fought in a serious war since 1979. And Russia has been fighting on and off since the 1990s.

So the exercises and officer exchanges that do happen mostly let the Chinese learn from the Russian experience under fire.

“But more often than not, they're learning what not to do as we can see in Ukraine.”

Armed sales follows the same arc but in reverse. Through the 1990s and 2000s, China was an eager customer for Russian air defense systems, fighters and submarines, which they quickly learned were massively obsolete compared to Western technology. But once China caught up to Russia technologically, partly by disassembling Russian hardware

to copy it and make it better, all while stealing the intellectual property of the Russians and other countries, including the United States along the way, China overtook Russia's military capability.

So when Chinese military buying slowed, that is when we started to see the first hints of resentment

in Moscow. And so now, China is a competitor to Russia, selling its own arms to countries that used to buy Russian. Basically the better China's military gets, the less Russia has to offer. But one thing is clear, neither government actually wants a formal alliance.

And it's not because they don't like each other, they do. It's just that there's a lot of structural obstacles.

“Each country guards its own sovereignty and its own room to maneuver.”

Russia's strategic habits lean toward a constant stream of outright invasion of other countries going back to Georgia in 2008, meanwhile China leans on pressure tactics and coercion that stop short of open war. Russia keeps its eye on NATO while China focuses on the Pacific. They even hold different theories of nuclear weapons and refuse to fold their arsenals together

as we see with the United States' France, the United Kingdom, all integrating under one nuclear umbrella despite the fact that they all say they're their own. They all somewhat integrate and coordinate, especially when it comes to countries that hold US nuclear weapons such as Germany, for instance. Plus, Moscow and Beijing know a formal alliance between China and Russia would almost certainly

cause an immediate reaction where the West would start to bolster in this new multinational alliance Cold War. So rather than sign anything binding that you have reinvented what alliances mean for their own purposes, they capture most of the benefits while dodging the obligations.

But the obligations are pretty critical, especially when it comes to war.

Basically, neither one of these countries is prepared to fight a war for the other. And that friction reaches all the way up to how the two imagine the future. Both sides promote what scholars have started calling authoritarian international law, which is a world view that elevates state sovereignty and regime survival while quietly pushing democracy and human rights off to the side.

But they even disagree with in that framework. Russia preaches multiplicity a world where the United States is just one poll among several and in practice, Moscow wants to dodge or wreck the existing order. China is a bit more patient, though. They want the gradual reshaping of the system from the inside with Beijing, eventually

being at the top, steering the order, but not destroying it. Largerly because China is too interwoven into Western markets to want the whole structure to fail. It would cause immense pain for the Chinese. And you can tell that there is friction here between Russia and China when Xi Jinping

rolled out his global governance initiative in 2025 at a summit in Tianjin that he was having with Putin. Putin only managed a few polite words in Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov admitted that Moscow didn't even know that the plan was in existence. They were not shown it ahead of time.

That's not how partnerships work. Essentially, it was the junior member learning about something in real time and clapping and smiling after he was handed a document saying, "This is what we're doing moving forward." And what was Russia going to do to rip it up? No.

They are the junior partner now and they will do what they are told from China. Now, this report from the Center for European Policy Analysis costumes, as though. I may have been talking about all of the cracks and riffs that are present between Russian and China, but it would be a massive error to let our guard down. Sure, the relationship is unbalanced and quarrelsome, but none of that should comfort Western

governments. Thousands of Chinese firms keep Russia's war machine supplied and even their showy parallel play war games would complicate a merit disability to fight, deter, and win in the Pacific, which is something military planners have to truly factor in.

Now, this second error is, as I said in the beginning, blowing this partnership up into something grander than it is saying, that it is this new end-all BL axis that is going

to have to be destroyed because they're going to be extraordinarily powerful.

That type of thinking actually plays into China's and Russia's strategy. Both Moscow and Beijing actively want the West to overestimate their unity as a form of psychological pressure.

“The key here is, as I said, not to think that Russia and China are too weak, but also”

don't think they're too strong. How do we do that? Well, we have to observe the things to watch that would tell you the relationship is genuinely hardening, they're integrating, getting better together, and that would be problematic. This includes the rapid deployment of forces from both military stationed at the same

location. That has not happened yet. Perhaps a standing agreement letting each other use each other's bases. That has not happened yet either. Maybe their exercises turn away from a dog and pony show to actual rehearsals for things

that enable combined warfare or shared logistics, as well as building a unified command that's leading to actual interoperability. Again, that has not happened yet. Now, another concerning thing is perhaps Beijing leans on Moscow to surrender its last technical crown jewels.

It's quite a submarine design, nuclear missile propulsion, undersea detection, anti-satellite

“technology and electronic warfare capabilities.”

This would show that China is overwhelming and overriding Russia gaining far more power, and that would be problematic. As of right now, that certainly has not happened either, but if it does, it would represent a real change of state that could directly carry consequences for the United States, NATO, and its allies.

Now, one thing I want to talk about, though, is this study takes a look at China and Russia largely in isolation, which can't be misleading because the real shape of things is for cornered here, and in my belief, this Moscow Beijing relationship is now a web that pulls Iran and North Korea in. The report keeps those two at the margins, but the connective tissue that is missing between

Russia and China is being assembled out at the edges of the network. Pyongyang gets satellite missile assistance from Moscow. Tehran gets air defenses and intelligence. Beijing quietly underrides the finances for the whole arrangement. No single thread here looks like any kind of treaty or really any kind of formal long

term agreement, but the combined effect of all of this starts to function like one of those.

“Another thing to keep in mind is some of the most valuable trade between China and Russia”

is not cargo. It is information. Russia is operating the largest live testing ground for drone warfare, electronic warfare, sanctions evasion, and ways to defeat Western weapons that the world has ever seen. And the Chinese military is taking notes on every page.

They're also taking notes from Iran.

It doesn't have to fire a shot in anger to learn an incredible amount about the United

States and its partners. But as the relationship goes, China will watch Russia keeps bleeding, but also is grateful for all the information they send back. The reality of this whole situation, whether it is Iran or Ukraine, is that a Chinese officer that is planning a war against Taiwan has gathered more real knowledge about American

rocket artillery cruise missiles and surveillance from the wars in Ukraine and Iran than any exercise could have ever provided. Plus we kind of scoff or joke about Russia's dependence on China, but that's not a good problem to have globally. A Russia financially owned by Beijing is a Russia whose Arctic, whose energy, whose raw materials

are available to China the moment the Pacific erupts into war. China would likely turn Russia into a fuel tank and a backup arsenal against the United States. But there are other bigger concerns, but there are much quieter than things like tank columns or fighter jets.

The first is the supply chain, China controls the processing of rare earth elements and

critical minerals like gallium and germanium.

The inputs behind everything from combat aircraft to the power grid. The decisive question in a confrontation is not whether China can out shoot the United States. It is whether China can choke American weapons production off by closing a choke point. The United States spent 30 years handing over. That was a weakness that was unfortunately self-inflicted.

Now the second is information warfare. Deep as research points to China and Russia converging in how they manipulate foreign audiences. The threat is not an armored advance. It is the corrosion of any shared sense of what is true, the way that to amplify each other stories, metal around in elections and inflate the menace of their own access to leave

you feeling like resistance to their efforts is pointless. The exhaustion and fatalism that creep in are not side effects to this. They are a product of a very strong campaign that they built and manufactured to ensure that American opinions and Europeans are formed in a manner that they see fit. Now the third area is the most practical and it comes down to attention as something finite.

The United States has one military and a limited stock of munitions, ships, and focus. The authoritarian strategies to multiply the number of places Washington has to watch at once. You crane the Middle East, the Pacific, the Caribbean, the Arctic until none can be covered properly. That takes no treaty between Russia and China.

And we can kind of see this Iran becomes a problem, Russia becomes a problem.

South America becomes a problem. The Korean Peninsula becomes a problem and then we have our own self-inflicted problems with Europe when Trump wants to do dumb things like look at Greenland. This scattering of American attention is the real threat and it is unfolding right now and it is not even China and Russia's fault.

And so there are a few questions that we have to keep asking.

“What single event would convert parallel play between Russia and China into a true alliance?”

And if China moved on Taiwan would Russia open a second front and say the Baltics or the Arctic

to split Washington's focus into what would it cost to pride China loose from Russia? It is the United States willing to sanction a major Chinese bank and eat the fallout that comes in trade because if not, the leverage is just talk. A bigger concern, why are American and European ships still turning up in Russian missiles

“four years into this war when we should be able to leverage against the companies and those”

organizations to enforce these rules? And under Donald Trump or even in the post-Trump world is the United States still a steady enough partner to count on them when all of this goes to hell. Because the alignment among the autocrats is only half of the equation and the cohesion of democracies is the other half and Trump puts that in jeopardy.

“Now the takeaway is not that China and Russia have grown stronger than us.”

They have not. And the report maps out every imbalance and coral between them. The worry is that the competition is moving on to ground where America has been living off advantages.

It stopped maintaining its industrial capacity, its supply chains, basically the plumbing

of global finance, tension and the unity of alliances. The alignment among the autocracies is real, but it has limits. The vulnerabilities America is frankly inflicting on itself are still within our power to fix. It just doesn't look like we're fixing them and it's making China and Russia look exponentially

more difficult to deal with. As the authors of this CEPA article put it, free societies can no longer afford another failure of imagination.