ast week Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly demanded that the U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization bar Ukraine from its military alliance, move troops, weapons and installations from its eastern flank and issue “security guarantees” about the future of the region.
“The ball is in their court,” Putin said at a news conference last week. “They need to respond to us with something.”
While Western officials responded with indignation, saying Putin would not tell NATO what to do, Chinese President Xi Jinping applauded Putin’s brinkmanship. At a video summit last week with Putin, Xi denounced the U.S. and NATO for “interfering in the internal affairs of China and Russia,” according to China’s state-run news agency Xinhua.
The increasingly warm relations between China and Russia are raising eyebrows, as well as the potential stakes, across the Western world, but the tensions with Washington have been building for months.
When the U.S. became the first nation earlier this month to announce that its government officials would boycott February’s Olympic Games in Beijing in response to China’s treatment of Uyghur Muslims and its steamrolling of Hong Kong’s democracy movement, Putin rose to Xi’s defense, calling the diplomatic protest “pointless” and saying he planned to attend.
In October, in between Chinese sorties in violation of Taiwan’s airspace, China played war games in the waters off the contested island and was joined in its impressive naval and aeronautical display of force by the Russian military.
“Whether one calls it a marriage of convenience, a bromance or a strategic cooperation, the relationship between Putin and Xi is definitely intensifying,” Roland Freudenstein, vice president and head of Globsec Brussels, a nonpartisan think tank, told Yahoo News. If Russia instigates a military invasion of Ukraine, he added, “the temptation for the Chinese to do something about Taiwan increases exponentially — and vice versa.”© Provided by Yahoo! NewsAn alliance between Russia and China poses challenges for the Biden administration, analysts say. (Illustration: Yahoo News; images: Getty Images)
“A two-front war would, in principle, be gravely challenging,” Nigel Gould-Davies, senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, told Yahoo News, adding that he believes such an outcome is currently unlikely. “However, [China and Russia] each watch the West’s responses to the other. So if the West is seen to lack resolve against one adversary, the other may be emboldened to act.”
Answering a question posed by Yahoo News, Heather A. Conley, senior vice president for Europe, Eurasia and the Arctic at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., told an Atlantic Council webinar that the double-theater scenario would put the Biden administration in a precarious position. “What would stretch the U.S. military capabilities the most?” she asked. “Making a choice between having to respond to a challenge on NATO’s eastern flank [while] making sure Taiwan is protected.”
That scenario, said Markus Ziener, Helmut Schmidt fellow at the German Marshall Fund, is “being debated quite a bit here in Washington. What’s going to happen if we have two theaters of war, two theaters of tension, at the same time? Can the United States handle that?”
Having moved to the U.S. for a research project involving Russia, China and the U.S., Ziener sees growing concern about the Russia-China relationship ramp-up in recent weeks. Putin has amassed some 100,000 troops and military equipment near Ukraine’s border, while China keeps sending warplanes into Taiwanese airspace and loudly objecting to Taiwan’s moves to be recognized as independent, including having its own seat at the United Nations.