Moscow and Beijing are also facing quandaries, if not greater, as their alliance is based on necessity and not convictions. However, Washington is not alone in facing dilemmas. The situation escalated further when the Biden administration announced its intention to sell advanced weapons to the island worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The China’s large-scale military maneuvers around Taiwan ensued as a response. This represented, and continues to be, a dilemma for Washington, especially since the Biden administration, according to the ‘Interim Strategic Directives’ document issued by the White House in March 2021, considers China ‘the only potential competitor able to combine its economic, diplomatic, military and technological strength to form a sustainable challenge to achieve stability and an open international order.’ After that, what China considers the US harassment in the Taiwan file, which reached its climax last month, after the visit of the US House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, to the island. However, the strict and stifling sanctions the administration imposed on Moscow, especially in the energy sector, left it no choice but to knock on the doors of Beijing. Although the Biden administration was careful during the year and a half of its tenure, only the Russian invasion of Ukraine, not to pressure Russia to the point of pushing it into the Chinese embrace. At that time, China found itself in a critical situation, as it could not abandon its Russian ally, nor did it want to risk angering the US, in a way that might necessitate imposing economic sanctions on it. Only three weeks after the Putin-Xi summit, Russia was invading Ukraine, but Washington and its allies succeeded in turning the invasion into a very costly war of attrition for Moscow, economically, militarily, and politically. However, if the last century was characterized by intense competition and great sensitivity between the two communist countries, in a way that enabled the United States to strike each other, the reality today seems more different, and more complex, without any similarities. This strategy was adopted by Washington in the early seventies of the last century, that is, at the height of the Cold War, as part of its efforts to take advantage of the sharp ideological division that occurred, in the late fifties of the last century, between the Soviet Union and China. In the face of these geopolitical developments, which may lead to the reconfiguration of the international order, the United States, Russia and China find themselves facing complex calculations that recall the ‘triangular diplomacy’ approach. This was followed, a few days ago, by the Russian energy giant Gazprom’s announcement that China would start paying for Russian gas shipments in the two countries’ national currencies, the Ruble and the Yuan, instead of the dollar, as part of Moscow’s efforts to ease the impact of Western sanctions imposed on it due to its invasion of Ukraine. In early September, China, along with other countries, participated in large-scale Russian military maneuvers in the Russian Far East, which lasted for a week. Indeed, the past few days have witnessed substantial steps in this regard. As well as launching a camp led them to counterbalance the camp led by the United States. At the time, both Moscow and Beijing did not hide that their main goal was to break the US hegemony in the world and to reshape the rules of the international system that favored it.
At their summit in Beijing on February 4, 2022, the two presidents, Russian Vladimir Putin, and Chinese President Xi Jinping, affirmed in Beijing that the relationship between their countries is based on ‘friendship without borders’ and that there are no ‘prohibited areas of cooperation in the context of their strategic partnership.
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