Pursuit of US hegemony motivates a Sino-Russian alliance by giving them a common enemy.
Cox 22 [Michael Cox is Professor Emeritus of International Relations at the LSE and a Founding Director of LSE IDEAS. He helped establish the Cold War Studies Centre in 2004 and later co-founded LSE IDEAS. He served as Chair of the United States Discussion Group at Chatham House, Senior Fellow at the Nobel Institute in Oslo; as Visiting Professor at the Centre for Defence and Strategic Studies in Canberra, Australia, and as Chair of the European Consortium for Political Research. He is the author, editor and co-editor of several works on the Cold War, US foreign policy, the former Soviet Union, “Best and Bosom Friends”: Putin, Xi and the Challenge to the West. LSE IDEAS, 2022. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep45334. accessed 7-27-2023, HKR-SWY]
Moreover, even though both Russia and China claimed that nothing they were doing was directed against any ‘third party’, implicitly it would be possible. As both made clear in 1997, while insisting they were not hostile to the US—China after all needed US support to join the World Trade Organization—they were determined to move the world away from a unipolar system, which did not suit their interests, towards a ‘multipolar’ order which did; Putin made this point clearer still ten years later, in a famous speech delivered in Munich. As Russian President Boris Yeltsin declared at one of his long meetings with Chinese premier Jiang Zemin in the 1990s, there were some (unnamed) powers who were pushing for a world with one centre. This was simply unacceptable to either Russia or China, who from now on would be working together to create a ‘new world order…with several focal points’.16
In of itself, this may not have led to conflict with the United States and the West. Nothing was set in stone. However, as soon became clear, unipolarity was not just a theoretical construct but created conditions on the ground which allowed the US to act with a degree of impunity without much fear of the consequences. How else, according to policymakers in both Russia and China, could one explain the many unilateral decisions taken by the US, from the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in May 1999, through NATO’s continuing war against Russia’s ally Serbia, and finally—and most importantly, according to Putin writing on the eve of his war against Ukraine—to Bush’s war against Iraq in 2003? These were not accidents of history in their view, but rather expressions of an underlying power imbalance in the wider international system. Some in the West may have insisted that unipolarity engendered stability. Others insist that it did not really matter This, however, was not the view in either Beijing or Moscow.
Russia and China may have been hoping that they could still work with the US on key issues. They did, after all, share Washington’s views on the danger posed by international terrorism and nuclear proliferation. China and Russia also saw their future within pre-existing international institutions, such as the UN. From a purely economic point of view, Russia and China clearly needed the markets and the investment which only the West could provide. Yet, the logic of economics would never be enough to overcome the logic of power politics, and, slowly but surely, what had begun as an attempt by all sides of finding a way of working together in the end came to nothing.