Russia and the China-US Summit |
Flashpoints | Diplomacy | East Asia
Russia and the China-US Summit
The upcoming meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Xi will be followed by a Putin-Xi summit. Will there be scope for triangular diplomacy?
Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to meet with China’s top leader Xi Jinping in Beijing soon after the China-U.S. summit on May 14-15. Do these back-to-back visits indicate a new phase of triangular diplomacy? Unlike Nixon-era China-U.S. summits, where U.S. and Chinese leaders sought to use their rapprochement to further isolate the Soviet Union, the upcoming meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Xi is unlikely to bring pressure to bear on Russia on Iran or Ukraine.
Trump is no stranger to triangular diplomacy. In April 2017, while hosting Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago, Trump revealed that the United States had just bombed Russia-allied Syria. China later abstained on a United Nations resolution condemning Syria’s use of chemical weapons against civilians, instead of vetoing it along with Russia. At the time, a Chinese expert on the U.S. argued that Trump may have been trying to create discord between China and Russia over Syria with this move, as well as to demonstrate his own distance from Putin to domestic audiences.
As Xi and Trump prepare to meet this week, Western media have reported that Russia was shipping drones to Iran involving features upgrading the Shahed models that Iran had supplied to Russia for the war in Ukraine. The U.S. Department of the Treasury also sanctioned three Chinese firms – Meentropy Technology Co. Ltd, The Earth Eye and Chang Guang Satellite Technology Co., Ltd. – for providing satellite imagery to Iran to assist with missile targeting and another nine Chinese companies for their involvement in Iranian oil shipments to China.
Both China and Russia have partnership agreements with Iran, but both fall short of a military alliance. Moreover, despite considerable overlap in their critical statements about U.S. actions in Iran, their interests in the conflict do not always align. Although the Chinese economy has weathered the closure of the Strait of Hormuz thanks to oil reserves and a growing renewables sector, the higher energy prices and impact on trade of other commodities from the Gulf – especially chemicals needed for fertilizer and semiconductor production – create economic risks for China in a protracted conflict.
Russia, by contrast, has benefited from higher oil prices, and is much less reliant on trade from the Gulf. Nevertheless, some Russian experts argue that Russia must balance its ties with Iran with relations with other Gulf states and derives some advantage from a continued U.S. engagement in the Middle East, as long as Moscow plays a stabilizing role.
For Xi Jinping, the Iran war is yet another challenge for Sino-Russian relations. Last month China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi urged “closer and stronger strategic coordination” within the partnership, typically a signal of a perceived lack of coordinated activity (Wang made a similar statement right after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, for example). Nevertheless, it is unlikely that Xi would agree to urge Russia to pressure Iran to stand down in the war with the United States and Israel. While presenting........