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

American Power

This American Power Extra episode explores the complex and often misunderstood partnership between China and Russia, challenging common narratives that portray them as either a unified war machine or a fragile alliance held together by convenience. Drawing on a two-year study from the Center for European Policy Analysis, the episode reveals a lopsided,

Key takeaways

• China and Russia's partnership is asymmetric: Russia depends heavily on China economically, but China does not rely on Russia in return.
• The 'no limits' friendship rhetoric masks a relationship marked by friction, strategic hedging, and mutual exploitation rather than true alliance.

Main topics

• China-Russia economic interdependence
• Asymmetric partnership dynamics

Notable quotes

"The relationship 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."

Conclusion

While China and Russia are not forming a unified superpower, their asymmetric partnership creates strategic pressure through economic

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:02) This is your host, Nat Towson. You're listening to an American Power Extra, a bonus episode 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. Speaker 1 (0:22) 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 war machine moving as one. The other waves it off as a doomed pair held together by nothing but mutual convenience. A new groundbreaking two-year study from the Center for European Policy Analysis, which is a Washington research institution, deconstructs both of these arguments. Its authors land 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 Nostradamus saying that I'm going to predict the future for you. Would you believe, would I say, that China is the economic backbone of Russia, thus 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. And 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's 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 2026? You would have thought I was certifiably nuts. And yet this is the picture the authors in this SIPA 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 Vladimir Putin returned as Russian president after handing it over briefly to Dmitry 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 a 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, galas. 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 Matura 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 what Russia imported. By 2023, they made up more than one-third. Roughly three-quarters of what Russia ships to China is energy and raw materials sold cheaply, while the goods coming back are cars, electric 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 contraction 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 it down by a collapse in vehicle sales. Passenger 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. Russian exports to China slipped by about 3%, mostly because oil sold for less at that time. That has rebounded for obvious reasons, Trump's war in 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