For years, international-affairs watchers have scoffed at the idea that Beijing’s and Moscow’s interests would align so closely, or that they were scared enough of the United States and its allies, that they would become either formal or informal partners in crime.

Thanks to the war in Ukraine, that day has arrived, and we should be worried about what that means for the New World Order.

First, this won’t exactly be an alliance. It’s more like Moscow is set to become the biggest vassal state in modern history — the price Russian President Vladimir Putin will have to pay for his disastrous war in Ukraine.

Putin needs China’s cash, investments, military purchases, market for commodities and overall general support to survive in the months and years ahead.

Otherwise, with trillions of dollars of economic sanctions about to come down on Putin’s head, Russia as we know it today may simply cease to exist.

And, of course, China will be there — don’t listen to any vague statements that seem to suggest Beijing is balking — to provide whatever support Putin needs over the long term.

The Chinese Communist Party looks at its new partnership with Russia, which will surely be a level of support in the tens of billions of dollars per year — if not more — as the greatest geopolitical victory it has ever secured.

No matter what happens with the war in Ukraine, clearly, China will be the only victor.
For Beijing, the greatest threat to its regime, the idea that the US Navy and its allies could cut off China from natural resources coming from the Middle East in a war, has likely vanished.

Chinese President Xi Jinping will quickly move into Siberia and scoop up as much oil, natural gas and raw materials as he can get his hands on. China will no longer be dependent on the sea for survival — and that is huge.

Xi will also be able to transform China into a real military superpower, one that can compete and defeat the United States on the future battlefields of Asia. As no nation will likely buy Russian arms for years, Putin will drop any worries about selling such arms to Beijing. China could have access to Russia’s most powerful hypersonic technology, stealth submarine research, missile weaponry and much more.

And then there is the not-so-sexy but transformative stuff. China will surely want to get its hands on the millions of unused acres of land to farm and develop an alternative food source, again, so it will not have to depend on sources of food over sea routes the US Navy could block.

Yet, as history shows, no alliance lasts forever, and a shotgun wedding between these two great powers — considering the terms China will demand — won’t be easy for Russia to swallow.

Over time, the Russian people — who will still feel the bite of sanctions — will surely grow to understand that China will soon become a sort of imperial overlord. Chinese merchants, traders and labor will come to Russia in droves, doing what they have done to countless African nations: trade Chinese cash to prop up an evil regime in exchange for the looting of the country.

In some respects, the coming Chinese-Russian axis is perhaps the greatest political-science experiment of all time. No nation has fallen so far, so fast, that it will need to be saved in such a manner. And knowing that China and Russia have been many times rivals in the past — they nearly went to war in 1969; so much for communist solidarity — such an arrangement may not last the test of time.

Harry J. Kazianis is the senior director at the Center for the National Interest. Twitter: @Grecianformula