The US dividing Russia from China? Forget about it

2430 Group’s Director, Glenn Chafetz explains in this article in The Strategist why splitting Russia and China is wishful thinking. Russia has many more key interests in common with China than it does with the United States. Glenn Chafetz is a retired US diplomat and intelligence officer. He currently directs the research organization, 2430 Group.

This article was first published in the Australian’s Strategic Policy Institute’s The Strategist in March 2025.

The Trump administration’s effort to divide Russia from China is doomed to fail. This means that the United States is destroying security relationships based on a delusion.

To succeed, Russia would need to overcome more than a century of hostility and distrust. Both Russia and the US would have to reorient their relationships with allies and adversaries; and the US would need to replace China’s economic support to Russia. Russia would also have to be sure that the US would fully abandon its commitment to democracy and human rights for the long term. None of this will happen.

Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, Keith Kellogg, said at the Munich Security Conference on 15 February that the US would try to break Putin’s alliances, including those with China, Iran and North Korea.

Just nine days later Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping explicitly reaffirmed their ‘no-limits partnership’. That should have come as no surprise: the new US policy does nothing to change the reasons underlying Moscow’s political alignment with Beijing.

These reasons include: a shared commitment to autocracy and opposition to democracy; more than a century of distrust and conflict with the US; historical commitments to partners such as North Korea, Iran and Cuba; and Russia’s economic dependence on China.

Most significantly, the bond between Russia and China is firmly rooted in a shared fear of the US and a mutual commitment to autocracy. Putin will never trade China for the US as long as the latter remains a law-governed, multi-party democracy. One could argue that the Trump administration’s authoritarian tendencies change this calculation, but for Putin, Xi’s dedication to despotism is a much safer bet than a full and long-term collapse of US democracy.

Similarly, Putin cannot safely trust that the US’s new pro-Russia turn will endure. This administration appears inclined to set aside Russia’s campaigns of assassination, espionage, cyber-attacks, economic sabotage, nuclear sabre rattling, hostage taking and information operations against the US. But this new pro-Russia policy is not guaranteed to continue under future administrations or even survive this one’s full term.

On the other side, few Russians have a positive view of the US. Indeed, Russians’ antipathy to the US is entrenched and persistent. Indeed, except for a brief honeymoon in the 1990s, US-Russian (and US-Soviet) relations have been characterised almost entirely by suspicion, tension and conflict, even including when they were (reluctant) allies during two world wars.

In addition, for the US to pull Russia away from China, either Putin or Donald Trump would have to agree to abandon multiple foreign commitments in which both have invested personal and domestic political capital.

It is difficult to imagine that Putin would give up his political support for Kim Jong-un, given that North Korea is providing both troops and supplies for Putin’s war against Ukraine. Putin is far less dependent on Iran, but it is not likely that he would back President Trump’s maximum pressure campaign against the Islamic Republic.

It is equally improbable that the US would soften its hostility to Russia’s ally, Cuba, since Trump immediately reversed the Biden administration’s slightly more moderate policies. Putin, especially, is unlikely to abandon long standing relationships and policies based on a new, uncertain US-Russian friendship.

Finally, economics offers the most immediate basis for Russia’s preference for China over the US. China funds Russia. China is a net energy importer; Russia is an energy exporter. China bought $237 billion worth of Russian goods in 2024, almost all of it gas, oil and coal.

By contrast, US-Russia trade was $3.5 billion in the same period, not even 1.5 percent the value of China-Russia trade. The economies of Russia and China are complementary; the economies of the US and Russia barely touch at all. The US cannot and will not replace China as Russia’s best energy customer, and Russia has nowhere else to turn. Europe will not make up that difference, and Russia’s unbalanced economy depends on hydrocarbon exports.

The US’s about-face on Ukraine was a gift Russia happily accepted, but it is not enough to divide Russia from China. Playing Russia and China against each other seems tempting to those who recall Richard Nixon’s overture to China in 1972, but historical analogies are superficial and in 2025, Russia’s interests lay clearly in alliance with China.

Image: "Putin-Xi press conference (2023)" by Presidential Executive Office of Russia is licensed under CC BY 4.0.