The China-Russia Relationship and Its Global Implications

DOSHI: Well, good morning, everybody. Thanks very much for braving the streets of Washington, D.C., after two days of snow to make it this morning. I’m Rush Doshi, C.V. Starr senior fellow for Asia studies and director of CFR’s China Strategy Initiative here at the Council. And we’re excited to welcome you today for I think what’ll be a fantastic symposium on “The China-Russia Relationship and Its Global Implications.”

I want to start by saying that today’s two-part symposium is actually also the inaugural event of the China 360 Program, which is one of the four programs under the China Strategy Initiative that we launched just last year. The guiding questions for China 360 are what is China doing around the world and how are countries around the world responding to China’s growing global profile. And of course, one of the most important questions when you think about China’s global ambitions, its portfolio, its behavior, is its relationship with Russia, which is why that’ll be our critical focus today.

We’ve convened to discuss an important really signature special report, Council special report, by Ambassador Bob Blackwill and Richard Fontaine.

As you all know, Ambassador Blackwill is the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow here at the Council after a distinguished career across four administrations serving on the NSC, in the State Department, and as ambassador to India.

Richard Fontaine is the CEO of the Center for a New American Security. He was a longtime foreign policy advisor to John McCain, and he worked on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and at the NSC as well.

After having published their co-authored book Lost Decade last year, these two renowned strategists decided to team up again for another collaboration, this time on China-Russia. And this report is pretty significant. It’s hefty. It has 226 footnotes, and that length of footnotes is sort of a signature, I think, of any collaboration involving Ambassador Blackwill. So definitely do look at the footnotes because a lot of time went into them. A lot of RAs spent time making them just right.

Anyway, this conversation is going to begin in just a minute. It’s going to be moderated by one of our members, one of my friends, Bay Fang, the president of Radio Free Asia. Bay’s spent more than two decades in journalism, including in posts in Iraq and Afghanistan; as bureau chief in China; and was also a deputy assistant secretary at the State Department. I think it’ll be a fantastic conversation.

After that conversation, please do stay around. We have coffee. But more importantly—or, as importantly—we have a panel with CFR fellows Elliott Abrams, Liana Fix, Michelle Gavin, and our director of studies Shannon O’Neil. Together, we’re going to discuss the China-Russia relationship and its global profile: How are countries and regions around the world looking at this relationship? What are these countries—that is, China and Russia—doing in all of these regions?

So, with that, we have an excellent discussion ahead. Thank you all for joining us. I would like to welcome now Bay Fang and Richard Fontaine to the stage. Ambassador Blackwill will be on the screen. Thank you. (Applause.)

FANG: All right. Thank you all for joining us today. This will be a really interesting conversation. I have the pleasure of moderating this opening keynote session, entitled “No Limits? The China-Russia Relationship and U.S. Foreign Policy,” with my good friend Richard Fontaine here in the room and Ambassador Bob Blackwill on our screen.

So I’m just going to dive right in. We’ll have half an hour of conversation, and then you guys will be able to ask questions.

So I wanted to start, actually, with Ambassador Blackwill, if you could just lay out for us how you guys decided to write this report.

BLACKWILL: Thank you, Bay. And good to see all of you, if only remotely.

Richard and I, in the summer of 2003, were hard at work on our book on the pivot and realized that an important subject which we would not have time to address in the book was the one which is the subject of our discussion today. So we launched and co-chaired a CFR study on the subject. We had eight meetings from October 2003 (sic; 2023) to May 2004 (sic; 2024). And as soon as the book was published in June, we went to work on the writing of this report—although we and our terrific research associates at CNAS and CFR had been working on research.

You will see when you have a chance to look at it that it is data-rich, as Rush said. Mike Bloomberg’s philanthropic arm has a mantra for applications for assistance which is “In God we trust; everybody else bring data.” And there’s lots of data in here on the collaboration. We try not to discuss what China and Russia are doing unilaterally with respect to the United States and world order, but what they’re doing together. And we did try to vacuum what is available in the public domain on this subject.

But to conclude, we want to stress that although we hope you’ll find the report impressive and disturbing, it is only a shadow of all these two countries do together daily to undermine U.S. national interest. They can keep secrets. There exists no public record of most of their bilateral meetings, and only scant knowledge of their joint activities and mutual support which they discuss, plan, and carry out. In short, what the report illuminates is a faint rendering of the full scope of what these two adversaries jointly undertake to undermine the foreign policies and national interests of the United States.

FANG: Thank you.

So, Richard, we had an interesting conversation in the—in the green room just about how you actually came up with the—you know, the sort of key idea of this report, which is that this is the—this alliance is the greatest threat to U.S. national interests in sixty years. How did you come up with the sixty years? And then, what is the strategic aim of the alliance? So if they are, as you guys say, the joint architects of a—of a revisionist international order, what does this order look like?

FONTAINE: Yeah. So I think one could always offer various instances from history about what has been most dangerous. Certainly the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was about sixty years ago, was a particularly dangerous time. And this one, too, is a particularly dangerous time, so hence the sixty years since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

But if one looks at what the challenge is presented by China and Russia working together more closely, sort of the highest level of abstraction—we have a little quote in our report from Bismarck, who, you know, famously said in a world of five great powers you should try to be one of three, not two. And in a world of three great powers we’re one of one, not two, right? So what multiple administrations, certainly starting with the Nixon administration forward, tried to do is ensure that the Soviet Union—and then Russia—and China were both more distant from each other than either was from the United States. Now they are both closer to each other by far than either is with the United States.

So that’s kind of a major strategic challenge, but has very operational and concrete manifestations. I mean, Russia is more dangerous to U.S. interests and some of the things that we’re trying to accomplish in the world because of its closeness to China. Russia would not be able to conduct the war in Ukraine the way it is without Chinese material support for that war.

The same is true of China. So China’s military is highly dependent on the transfer of Russian arms and technology, and therefore makes the problem of deterrence from a U.S. standpoint in East Asia more difficult than it would be in the absence of that relationship with Russia. You can look at this on the economic side, on the technology transfer side, on the diplomatic coordination side, and so forth.

And then, you know, the fact that these two are working together and are really glued together by a shared opposition to what they believe is an anachronistic, unfairly Western- and U.S.-dominated international order that does not accord for them the space, and the status, and the influence that they believe they deserve by virtue of their history, and their civilization, and their interests, and their geography, and their weight, and their power means that there are now alternatives they’re trying to put on offer not just for Russia and China itself, but of course also for Iran and North Korea and other rejectionist powers that would not—would be much more isolated in a world where Russia and China were not working together as closely and trying to articulate alternatives to the current international order.

FANG: So, Ambassador Blackwill, Richard spoke a little bit about how China’s support of Russia has affected the Ukraine war. I was wondering if you could look ahead a little bit and if you can talk about how the military cooperation between the two might look in a conflict over, say, Taiwan.

BLACKWILL: Well, let me first say—and I will do this in a general way; it’s discussed in great detail in the report, as Richard said—China’s assistance—its diplomatic assistance to Russia, its military assistance to Russia, and its economic assistance to Russia is indispensable to the conduct of the war on Russia’s part. And we could go into the details if you all wish.

But with respect to Taiwan, one of the things, of course, that we don’t know in fact but we can speculate is that China is learning the lessons of Russia’s combat against Ukraine in Ukraine more than simply, as we do, reading the morning papers. And one would guess that China is intensively briefed by the Russians of the conclusions they draw. Of course, China will have its own view of that. But the battlefield experience that the Russian armed forces have had, especially from the Syrian civil war onward, is indispensable to an army—a military force which has not fought in decades. So lessons learned must be an important dimension of China’s interaction with Russia as the war progresses.

Just one other point about Russia and China and the war. It’s striking to us that despite the fact that China has paid a price in Europe, obviously, for the war and China’s support of Russia—despite that, Beijing’s support of Russia and the war is increasing, not decreasing, despite Europe’s penalties which it’s now exacting on European-China relations.

FANG: So you think that their influence will be in sort of the lessons learned as well as, you know, sort of support militarily? Is that—is that in the—in the game?

BLACKWILL: Well, this is a broader question and a good one, which is: If the United States and China go to war over the Taiwan Straits, for example—and that’s, obviously, the most likely contingency—it seems unlikely that Russia and Iran and North Korea will sit on the sidelines and say, well, let’s see how this turns out; we’re not involved. That doesn’t mean that they will send forces to the Taiwan Straits, but there are many things in the regions that—where they’re located, beginning with Europe, that can distract or complicate the U.S. military performance if there is such a war.

FANG: So, Richard, you actually coined the term “Axis of Upheaval,” I think, in a Foreign Affairs article earlier this year. What—oh, sorry. You know—you know, you were talking about how China and Russia are also increasingly working with Iran and North Korea, and I’m wondering if you can just tell us more about this cooperation.

FONTAINE: Sure. So my colleague at CNAS Andrea Kendall-Taylor and I wrote a long piece for Foreign Affairs that tried to look in some granular detail at this emerging set of relationships among Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. I mean, even since we wrote that article, and certainly since we started writing that article, we’ve seen this increase in pretty dramatic ways. I mean, I think if a year ago most people had said, well, you know, in 2024 you will have thousands of North Koreans fighting in Europe on Russia’s behalf against Ukraine, people would have thought, huh, well, that’s an unusual prediction. But here we are.

So you see this Axis of Upheaval, which we call it that because they really are seeking an upheaval of, again, this existing international order. There’s plenty of things that divide them. They have very different perspectives. They have the definition of interest that’s quite different. But they are united by this shared opposition to what they believe is this unfair Western-dominated international order, which has very concrete manifestations with respect to the long arm of the U.S. military; the alliance system around the world; the rejection of spheres of influence in places where they believe they deserve them; the imposition of sanctions; the insistence on, you know, sort of a uniform definition of democracy, which they reject; and all of these other kinds of things.

And so you see Russia’s war in Ukraine, for example—which has been the primary catalyst of this and accelerated some trends that were happening before that—you see not only North Korean ammunition and weapons and troops party to that war, but also Chinese components and diplomatic protection and support; and you see Iranian drones and missiles. And of course, the other countries that are not Russia don’t work on spec, and so they get, you know, things in return for this. And so, you know, we only know some of what they’re getting for return, but we—in return, but we know that that’s, you know, cut-rate energy supplies; it’s on North Korea’s side, for example, North Korea’s having its assets in Russian banks that were frozen under U.N. Security Council resolution direction being unfrozen, sort of a diplomatic lifeline being thrown to the North Koreans where previously China had the prerogative there. And so you see each of these countries becoming potentially more dangerous than they would be on their own because of the support they can rely on from the other members.

And then, again, in this broader sense you see a place for other sort of rejectionist countries to defect to. So if you don’t like the way the world is ordered now, for many years you could sort of shake your fist at the world or, you know, become something of a rogue state, but there wasn’t this sort of viable alternative to it. And now these four countries plus others are trying to construct what they believe to be a viable alternative to it, and that’s one to which other dissatisfied countries could add weight.

FANG: Yeah. That’s really interesting.

Ambassador Blackwill, can you speak more about the alliance on the economic front and what the implications are for U.S. policy interests there?

BLACKWILL: Well, the economic assistance that China is giving Russia has had a major part in Russia being able to manage—of course, with difficulties—the many Western sanctions that have been applied from the beginning of the war. And just to give you an example, in the first year of the war China provided Russia with about 40 percent of its total imports. In a—in a year and a half, that doubled. Many of the consumer goods that Russia would not get otherwise—for example, automobiles, telephones, and so forth—are now being supplied by China. By the end of 2023, China had become the largest importer of Russian crude oil—at, of course, discounted prices—at 2.3 million barrels per day, up from 1.6 million barrels just two years earlier. And so this is, of course, in this context we’re now discussing it, of great assistance to Russia, but the discounted oil, of course, is also of considerable benefit to China as it struggles with its current economic difficulties.

FANG: Can we talk about your—you guys’ policy prescriptions? Richard, if you could start us off, what should the U.S. and its allies do to counter this axis?

FONTAINE: Well, being completists we have no less than fourteen policy prescriptions for those who wish to see chapter and verse in here. But I won’t go through all fourteen; I’ll just hit a couple of them.

I mean, one, I think from a defense perspective we need to rise to the challenge we now face and increase defense spending in a significant way. We’re now at about 3 percent of GDP of defense spending, which is more or less where we were toward the end of the 1990s at the height of the, you know, peace dividend after the end of the Cold War. Well, the world has changed in a pretty major way, and so we need to make investments in defense that will be commensurate with the challenge that we face.

You know, another one is creating new relationships with countries that are these kind of global swing states that are in the middle here—so Brazil, India, Indonesia, Turkey, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, these countries that are neither sort of G-7 kind of Western Europe- and U.S.- and Canada-aligned nor in this, you know—this axis, this group that—of Upheaval, or China/Russia-aligned, but are multi-aligned and have different relationships. And so focusing on ways to engage more effectively with those countries in a fashion that will ultimately add on particular issues their weight to the preferences that we have rather than the other I think is important.

You know, it’s probably tilting at a windmill to say that we should have a trade policy—well, I guess we’ll have a trade policy, but sort of an affirmative, assertive trade policy, one that actually is looking for opportunities particularly with countries that see economic benefits on offer from—especially from China. You know, if we wish countries to not be as aligned as closely with Russia or China, then we have to offer something ourselves we actually have, and it’s the world’s biggest market and the world’s biggest source of investment, lots of things we can offer. So if we, you know, build on that—and that’s a set of possibilities that I think we would be wise to exploit.

And then, you know, the other is to sort of take on the challenge that is arising at home with the seriousness that, it seems to me, it deserves. So if we’re half right about the consequences down the road here of increasing China-Russia cooperation, its sort of potentially global impacts, its impacts on U.S. interests and values around the world, and the availability to either side of, you know, other countries sort of joining in these configurations, then, frankly, we should be focused on what it is we need to do with our allies and ourselves in different scenarios in order to reduce that influence in areas that matter most, which would suggest at a minimum a certain level of increased seriousness to our foreign policy discussions.

FANG: Ambassador Blackwill, do you have anything to add to the policy prescriptions?

BLACKWILL: I do. Just to reinforce what Richard said about defense spending, it’s striking that there seems to be a near-consensus—that’s a, of course, singularity these days—in Washington about the threat that China and Russia pose for the United States but that’s not translated into increased defense spending, which is absolutely necessary. So our rhetoric is fine, but the past administrations and the ones before that don’t translate that into defense budget proposals to the Congress consistent with the rhetoric and the Congress does not take the lead in trying to insist that the defense budget be substantially increased. That’s the first point I would make.

Second is we urge, despite the concern that’s reflected in the report, to intensify bilateral interaction with both Moscow and with Beijing. We think it was a mistake to cut off all interaction with Vladimir Putin for the last two-and-a-half years, and think it should be initiated as soon as possible after the inauguration.

The last point I’d make is that we address in the subject—in the report a subject that’s oft-discussed in Washington, which is whether there is an opportunity for trilateral Kissingerian diplomacy which would separate the two over time. And we call this a delusion, and explain why we think that’s the case.

FONTAINE: If I can add just maybe one thing at the risk of now maybe hitting all fourteen, as I just said—(laughter)—we wouldn’t do, but there’s also an important set of discussions to be had with our European allies on a priority basis. I mean, if, God forbid, the United States were to find itself at war with China in the Western Pacific, one, the geographical boundaries of that conflict are certainly unclear, but the resource intensity from the American side is much clearer. And this would be kind of an all-in sort of thing. It would—it would put a very significant demand on the entire global footprint of America’s military forces. That, in turn, opens the possibility of opportunistic aggression in Europe.

And so the kind of conversations we need to be having with our European allies is, if we imagine that kind of nightmare scenario, what are the kind of capabilities that Europe should be investing in now so as to deter war in that circumstance so that, you know, the nightmare scenario doesn’t become a double nightmare scenario? So that’s one.

And then just lastly, to pick up just for a second on Bob’s point about wedge-driving, you know, there’s—we’ll sometimes, you know, see think pieces or ideas, you know, we can sort of, you know, cut this deal and we’ll flip China, and together we’ll take on Russia; or we’ll flip—not many people talk any more about, you know, a reverse Kissinger, flipping Russia and taking on China, but you still hear about these things. Or more modest things, right? Well, Russia and China have this sort of competitive spirit in Central Asia, where they both have historic, you know, claims to influence, and maybe we can sort of dial that up somehow; or, you know, North Korea is potential wedge now that it’s friendly with both China and Russia. And I think we’re pretty pessimistic about even at a more tactical level the ability of the United States to try to heighten these tensions between the two in a way that would drive wedges sufficient to actually improve the balance here and improve the situation.

FANG: Can I just take my moderator’s prerogative, with my Radio Free Asia hat on, to add a fifteenth policy prescription—(laughs)—which is, you know, there is also so much insidious cooperation and mutual reinforcement on the disinformation front between China and Russia. And I think it is really important for us to push back on that and to put some resource towards it, so.

FONTAINE: That’s actually one of the fourteen, so you’ll be very happy to—

FANG: Oh, it is? OK. (Laughs.) I did read the whole thing. (Laughs.)

FONTANE: Obviously, we had a whole thing on public—but again, completists. But yes, you’re absolutely right, so.

FANG: OK. (Laughs.) Thank you very much.

So at this time I’d like to invite CFR members to join our conversation with questions. A reminder that this meeting is on the record. Please, go ahead, and please identify yourself first.

Q: Thank you very much. Guillermo Christensen. I’m a partner at K&L Gates, a law firm, and former CIA. Was a fellow here at the Council.

So a quick observation to your first question and the way—and the information that we got. I’d be more skeptical about the lessons the Chinese are learning from the Russians because in my experience the Russians don’t learn lessons very well internally—their paranoia, their secrecy. And it would be interesting to know just how much they’re sharing with the Chinese, especially given the lack of battlefield success they’ve had in many areas.

Conversely, on the U.S. side and the Europeans, this is a startup war, and it’s incredible to see how many small U.S. businesses are deeply engrained in the Ukrainian defense sector right now teaching and learning. So it’s an interesting topic and perhaps something you can look at.

My question is directed to Ambassador Blackwill. The one country we didn’t touch on yet that I’d be very curious about is the perspective from New Delhi. So this presents—this relationship between China and Russia and the conflict with the United States presents India with some very interesting challenges and opportunities which they’ve spent the last seventy years trying to navigate in a non-aligned perspective. But right now it’s both more interesting and more challenging. I’d be curious about where you see New Delhi and what it’s trying to do vis-à-vis China-Russia, and then balancing with the U.S. Thank you.

BLACKWILL: A good question and one that is worthy of a prolonged discussion, but let me just be epigrammatic here. Of course now India tries to profit from its—in material terms, too—from its relationship with both Washington and with Moscow, and that isn’t going to change. Just to remind the Soviet Union was India’s closest partner and supporter throughout the Cold War, and unlike Americans, Indians have very long memories. Moreover, they’re highly dependent on the Russians for spare parts for their military.

With respect to China, I have perhaps a somewhat heretical view of this. I think that there’s some evidence that India, which came in a decade ago full-bore in the U.S.-India relationship—more than a decade ago—I think is now beginning to ask itself, did we make a good bet on the Americans, for reasons having to do with our faltering foreign policy in the last ten to fifteen years and all the mistakes we’ve made. But also because they ask especially in the military balance—and China of course has had an enormous impact on that in East Asia, to America’s disadvantage—will the Americans in fact do the necessary to balance Chinese power? And I think that’s the overall strategic context of the recent quasi-agreement on borders, which is more ephemeral than perhaps it’s sometimes portrayed, but is a step forward in the bilateral relationships.

So I think they’re watching very closely what this new administration will do with respect to ensuring that the U.S. is up to the long-term China challenge, and they’re not sure.

Q: My question is to Ambassador Blackwill. You’ve emphasized the importance of data—and there is a lot of data in the report—but sometimes it’s not really scaled very well to put it in context, and the economic relationship is part of this global transformation that the report addresses. But if you look at bilateral trade between China and Russia, it’s still only half of the trade between China and the United States, and it’s only 1 percent of global trade. So I don’t see this trade relationship becoming a very important part of this global transformation that you address.

BLACKWILL: Well, I don’t quarrel with your figures, but I think more pertinent figures are what is the economic assistance that China is giving Russia? It may be tiny in terms of global trade, but it’s indispensable to Russia dealing with the sanctions that have been brought against them. At least that’s what we argue in the report.

Q: Mark Kennedy, Wilson Center.

You had mentioned that the axis of autocracies may want to gather more disaffected people to increase their weight. What role do we see BRICS playing in this? Is BRICS being set up as a counterfoil to the G-7?

FONTAINE: Yes, it is, by the sort of most ardent proponents of BRICS, although when you talk to officials from governments who have recently joined BRICS, they’ll say, well, that’s not really what this is; this is more opportunities for trade or to diversify our international relationships, and things like that.

But if you look at certainly China and Russia’s and Iran’s interest in these things, to have a visible quasi-viable alternative structure and set of preferences and priorities to point to is important now in this kind of battle of narratives, and so they’re making a lot about BRICS diplomacy and to show, for example, that, you know, you thought Russia was isolated? Well, Russia’s not as isolated as you would have thought. You would have thought that the G-7 sort of tells the world what things are going to look like; well, that’s a minority of the world’s population, and look at our combined economic weight, and things like that.

So, you know, the specifics and the concrete aspects of that are still not quite there. I mean, what is the positive agenda of the BRICS? I mean, you can find some things—BRICS Development Bank and, you know, they don’t like, you know, dollar domination of the financial—global financial infrastructure and things like that. So, you know, some of these things are pretty nascent, but as a directional move, certainly it’s being seen by China and Russia in particular as one—and probably at this point the most visible alternative to this kind of G-7, Western-led, rules-based order that we talk so much about.

BLACKWILL: Could I chime in on that, just to support what Richard said? There was last year, as you know, a BRICS summit. Thirty-four countries attended it, twenty heads of state, and if you look at the communique on the war in Ukraine, it could have been written in Moscow, and probably was written in collaboration between the Russians and the Chinese. With respect to the war, it was consistent with China’s twelve-point peace—quote/quote, “peace proposal,” and if you read it, you would have thought that, like Venus on the half-shell, the war suddenly sprung up and nobody knows why or how. And this was signed on by these thirty-four countries. So we know what the intent of Russia and China are with respect to BRICS, as Richard said, and they’re working very hard on it, and there are five or six more applicants to join it, with the result that I just described, going forward.

FANG: Yeah.

Q: Thank you. Good morning. Paul Saunders with the Center for the National Interest. I look forward very much to reading the report.

I’m very much with you on the idea that it’s delusional to try to split China and Russia, now or certainly any time in the near future. At the same time, it seems to me that that relationship is going to evolve over time. And as a non-economist, I guess I see Russia with sort of a limited stock of technology that it can provide to China. I see China in a position moving forward to generate a lot more new technology than Russia will be able to generate. And I see China kind of taking over Russia’s economy in many respects, and creating a deepening dependence. I wonder how you view that, and just more broadly how you view that relationship evolving.

BLACKWILL: Yeah. I think that—well, if you look at the percentage of trade, for example, that Russia conducts pre-war—with China and with the rest of the world pre-war or pre-invasion of Ukraine and after—dramatic difference, right, and things like that.

And you know, on the technology side, there are areas in which Russia is probably still ahead of China and has some technology China is interested in, especially on the military side—you know, air defense systems, submarine quieting technology, jet engines—you know, some things like that, although, you know, in some of these areas, China is very likely closing the gap between itself and Russia.

But even if you imagine all of the technology that China might want gets transferred to China, you know, if the question then is sort of what is the value proposition for China of being in this relationship with Russia, there are things that go beyond just adding up the numbers of the economic relationship or who is dominated by who. So for example, China has a strong interest in having its flow of hydrocarbons come over land through Russia as opposed to by sea from the Middle East where they’re potentially vulnerable to the U.S. Navy if they ever got in a conflict. So you can look at the absolute numbers, but that’s a qualitative difference that is in the interest of both countries, Russia to sell and China to buy.

You can look at—on the diplomacy side, I mean, Russia obviously has a veto in the U.N.—seat at the U.N. Security Council, and also is sort of frontally—I think the message from Russia—from Russian leaders to Chinese leaders with respect to things like the war in Ukraine is, you know, if we lose in Ukraine, there’s going to be—the West is going to try to foment a color revolution in Moscow, and guess who’s going to be next? So Russia’s got a little bit of a frontal role, and that itself is in China’s interest.

Now, again, there’s ways that—where they divide, certainly in, like, their risk tolerance and, you know, dissatisfaction with the way things are. But I think the economic relationship is—it will evolve, but I don’t know that that’s going to significantly change the glue that has these countries being drawn together.

I mean, I guess just one last point on this: one often hears—although less so these days—that, you know, Putin—you know, this is sort of inevitably going to fall apart because Putin can never psychologically accept the face that Russia will be a junior partner with China. I just don’t think there’s—one, what alternative does Putin and Russia have? And two, in some ways it’s not clear that that’s how the Russian leaders or even the Chinese leaders necessarily see this, that they’re sort of—I mean, certainly by economic weight, by population and all these other things, China is the bigger and more powerful country and Russia is dependent on China in a way that China is not dependent on Russia. But again, given the sort of frontal role—who is sort of standing up for this alternative vision and pushing back most vigorously against the West—it’s Russia, not China. And so in that respect it’s not clear to me that they see themselves as just sort of, well, we’re junior partners, and at some point Russian greatness won’t allow us to, you know, sustain that posture.

FANG: Thanks. We have a question coming in from a member online.

OPERATOR: We’ll take the next question from Robert Hormats.

Q: I’d like to follow up Richard’s point on the trade issue, because one of the most important elements in trying to contain this grouping—particularly China—and to get other countries who you mentioned might be more attracted to China because of trade relations—the United States needs to have a coherent trade policy with countries other than the G-7, OECD countries, which means a number of the emerging markets, the Global South.

The problem is that in this administration, which you would have thought might have been inclined in that direction, it has been the opposite, and they, like the previous administration, opted out of TPP. And there has really—as the Chinese and others have developed closer trade ties, not just through Belt and Road but through various other trade groupings, they have also used those for strategic collaboration as well. The problem in the United States is, A, we haven’t done that in the last eight years, and B, the general political environment in this country simply doesn’t understand—is very negative on any trade deals at all, it appears, but has never really been educated to the point that you’ve made, that if you want to have a long system of alliances and give other countries alternatives to dealing with China or other countries, you need to have some glue holding them together with the United States and others, and that is largely in the area of trade.

So my question really is not just saying that we need more and closer trade ties, but trying to make an educational case to the American people that these are not just of economic importance but are of strategic importance, and that lesson seems to be totally lost in Washington, and there seems to be virtually no one of any stature in Washington who makes that geo-economic, geo-strategic link and argues that trade is going to be important if you want to have a coherent strategy to contain what we’re seeing between China, Russia, and other countries.

FONTAINE: Yeah, I really agree with what you’re saying with one potential caveat, which is, I think sometimes those of us who see the strategic link with trade agreements overdo the strategic part and that ends up leading more casual observers to believe that the U.S. needs to take an economic hit in order to contain China or something like that. I mean, in 2016, most of the arguments—back when it looked like TPP might have a shot of getting through the Congress—made for TPP were not made on economic grounds; they were made on grounds that, you know, if we don’t set the rules, China will set the rules. You know, if we don’t solidify trade relations with these countries then China is going to be in the ascendance somehow. And you know, in retrospect I wonder if that left in some minds, including on Capitol Hill, the notion that we would actually be left behind economically when in fact the opposite was the case; it would have been a net economic benefit to the United States as well as a strategic benefit.

That said, you know, despite the fact that some of us would love to see TPP go through, I think we do have to live in the world of political reality, and that’s not going to happen anytime soon or maybe anytime at all. But that doesn’t mean you can do nothing on an affirmative trade agenda. I mean, we could have a digital trade agreement with multiple countries in East Asia tomorrow if we wanted to do so. There are other sectoral agreements that we could strike with countries around the world that neither—are neither China nor Russia in areas like critical minerals or potentially clean technology and other things like that, that probably would not really ruffle too many feathers politically. I mean, we’re not talking about ag and autos and some of these other kinds of things.

So to do something would be nice. And yet, we’ll see what happens with tariffs and everything else on day one of the new administration.

FANG: Thank you so much, Richard and Ambassador Blackwill. Thank you all for joining this meeting, and I hope you can all stay and join us for our plenary discussion at 10:30 on “Global Perspectives of the China-Russia Relationship.”

FONTAINE: Thank you.

FANG: Thank you. (Applause.)

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.

DOSHI: Well, good morning, everybody. Welcome back. We’re excited to begin our next session.

You know, during this session we’ve convened senior fellows at CFR to reflect on the China-Russia relationship and its implications around the world. I’ll introduce each of our distinguished panelists in just a moment.

I’ll ask some general questions to get us started. Then we’ll go to some specific questions for each region before turning it over to the audience in the room and online.

So starting from all the way to my left we have Shannon O’Neil, our senior vice president, director of Studies, and Maurice R. Greenberg chair here at CFR where in addition to leading our David Rockefeller Studies Program she oversees over fourteen fellowship programs, and when she’s not putting out fires at CFR or joining panels occasionally like this one she’s also wearing an academic hat as a leading authority on global trade, supply chains, Mexico, and Latin America. We’ll have questions for her about Latin America and China-Russia shortly.

Next to Shannon is Michelle Gavin, the Ralph Bunche senior fellow for Africa policy studies here at CFR. From 2011 to 2014 Michelle was the U.S. ambassador to Botswana and served concurrently as the U.S. representative to the Southern African Development Community. Before her ambassadorship Michelle was senior director for Africa on the National Security Council and staff director for the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Africa Affairs.

To my left Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies here at CFR. In addition to his time in Congress as a chief of staff to Senator Moynihan and the Reagan White House as an assistant secretary of state, Elliott also served as deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor in the George W. Bush administration and in the Trump administration, you know, he was special representative for Iran and Venezuela.

And on the screen we have Liana Fix, fellow for Europe here at CFR. An expert in European security, Liana has been a fellow at top institutions across the United States and Europe including the German Marshall Fund, the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. Liana has also been a Mercator Fellow for international affairs at the German federal office and the EU delegation in Tbilisi as well as the Carnegie Moscow Center.

So we have an incredible panel here today and I’m looking forward to a very rich discussion on, really, the global dimensions of the China-Russia relationship all building, of course, on this fantastic CSR that you saw earlier today from Richard Fontaine and Bob Blackwill. This is a printed copy that I stole from Elliott’s office—(laughter)—because they are so scarce. They are sold out and they’re free. So think about that.

So we’re going to begin with some general questions. I think, really, the big one on my mind and probably on many of yours is how, you know, is each of these regions of the world—Middle East, Latin America, Africa, Europe—seeing the China-Russia relationship. We talk about it in the U.S. but others may see it differently.

Do they see China and Russia as pursuing separate interests? Similar interests? Do they see them—do they regard those ties with concern or with apathy or, in some cases, perhaps even enthusiasm?

So I want to begin on my far left with Liana and then we’ll work our way down the line at this kind of general question.

So, Liana, if I could ask you to start us off.

FIX: Thanks so much, Rush. It’s a pleasure to be here with my colleagues and to speak at this symposium. I’m here in Berlin right now so that’s a good spot to start on the China-Russia relationship, obviously, and just a general remark.

From the beginning there is a very clear lack of analytical depth and awareness when it comes to the China-Russia relationship here in Europe. There’s a very clear sense, and you read this in newspaper articles, that there is an autocratic alliance between China and Russia, that they do pursue common goals, but there is no translation of this perception in policy making.

In conceptual terms it is very clear that Russia is perceived as a security threat. I mean, what else after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022? But China conceptually in the framework of the European Union and of its member states is seen as an economic competitor, increasingly an economic threat.

But Europe is far away from seeing China as a security threat and seeing the links between Russia and China as a linkage, as a quasi-alliance which can be a security threat in Europe, and that is surprising because, obviously, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the long year that followed after of the horrible war would not have been possible without China’s support for Russia and have from the European side an acknowledgement that China is an enabler of Russia’s war.

But that has been so much very much the rhetoric. There’s little action from the European side that tries to address either directly China’s support for Russia or directly and strategically the depth of the Russian-Chinese relationship.

Actually, Europeans and the perception of China very much stuck in the first year of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine where China is perceived as an actor who can still be useful to rein in Russia, who can still be useful on nuclear threats, on a ceasefire, and that comes together—and this will be my last point before the last point—that comes together with the perception of China as being a power that possibly you don’t even need to interfere in the alliance between Russia and China but that this alliance is short lived anyway.

I do think the special report does an incredibly good job at showing us that this is a myth, that this is an illusion. This alliance is not short lived. It will not just disappear because of internal differences. It is not an alliance that can easily be driven apart.

But this is something which very much still exists in the minds of Europeans, well, what if Russia and China just don’t get along with each other anymore? Do we really have to interfere there? Isn’t this something that is not going to last anyway?

There will not be strategic moves to break this alliance apart but this is a hope which kind of covers up the lack of European action. And the last point—and here let me go back to one of the shapers of this China and Russia approach in Europe and in Germany for a long time, to Angela Merkel.

There’s also a perception of China especially in economic circles in Europe that still sees China in pre-Xi Jinping terms, in terms that still think about China as the main economic actor, that underestimates the militarization of China, and that also underestimates the military links between Russia and China, and that is something that Angela Merkel has written about in her memoir, and just to quote her in the end, she said, “Xi Jinping has become an actor that wants to see China as a military power,” but she herself has never acted upon that conclusion.

DOSHI: Well, thank you, Liana.

And I will just say to the audience that Liana has written a number of articles recently about how China and Russia pose a significant challenge for European security and trying to wake up, I think, public awareness in Europe of that reality.

I want to just ask one quick follow-up. If you could be very brief, Liana. Then I want to turn to the next panelist. But it’s this particular dimension of the question—what is the thinking in Europe right now about the possibility of simultaneous multi-theater provocations in Asia and in Europe stressing Europe’s security?

I mean, the possibility of horizontal linkage between a Ukraine or a Baltic scenario in Europe and a Taiwan or South China Sea scenario in Asia doesn’t seem so farfetched anymore. How are Europeans thinking about that? Briefly, if you could.

FIX: Yeah. The answer will frustrate you, Rush, even if it’s a brief answer and it is that this is very much perceived as a U.S. problem—that this is not two conflicts at the same time that Europe has to address.

The problem for Europe in that scenario would be how do we prevent the United States from abandoning us, right—for going for Taiwan rather than for Estonia? So how do we keep the United States in. But there’s no own strategic European thinking on how to address these concepts.

DOSHI: Well, thank you. That’s very reassuring. (Laughter.)

And, obviously, Liana, you need to write more Foreign Affairs articles on this subject. And I think the person who can authorize that is Shannon O’Neil, so I’ll turn to her now.

O’NEIL: No, they’re editorially independent from the rest of the Council. (Laughter.)

DOSHI: That’s right. I don’t have to be so careful.

But let me ask you, Shannon, broadly, how is the region looking at the China-Russia relationship and then maybe more specifically, you know, how are Latin American countries thinking about—we heard from Richard and others—BRICS.

You know, Argentina, I think, withdrew but others have joined. How are they thinking about some of these sort of new institutional arrangements meant to challenge Western-led institutions as well?

So maybe you could start there. Thanks, Shannon.

O’NEIL: So maybe I’ll start a bit with sort of Russia and China in the region and they’ve been, you know, historically, more on sort of parallel tracks than tightly combined. And so, you know, Russia sort of came in and is predominantly on the security side. I mean, Richard brought up the Cuban missile crisis. Obviously, that’s sort of a big entry and still, you know, Russia has had long-standing ties with Cuba, with Venezuela, with Nicaragua, with many of the other authoritarian regimes supplying arms, supplying military training and the like to some of these.

There’s not a huge commercial relationship in the region. There are some. Rosneft and others have come into Venezuela into the energy sector and partly because all the companies were sanctioned; it was one place they could go.

But overall there isn’t a lot of trade. You know, probably the most significant trade is fertilizers with Brazil that you’ve seen. You know, China, on the other hand, you know, kind of has come into Latin America on a very commercial side, right? A lot of investment, a lot of sort of, you know, finding resources that they needed for their growth over the last twenty-five years and so starting in on that side a lot of investment in infrastructure and the like and then more recently moving into telecommunications, electricity grids, other kinds of things.

But we’re seeing China begin to kind of come in on the security intelligence side, right. There have been—you know, there’s a big base in southern Argentina that is potentially dual use. It’s hard to know really what’s happening there.

The Argentines I’m not sure know because they’re not allowed in to see what’s happening. There have been reports of China coming into Cuba with intelligence surveillance and there’s questions about dual-use ports and others there.

And so you’re starting to see a little bit more, I think, you know, at least conversations if not direct coordination between the two there. And then the others, you know, as brought up in the last panel, both are pretty active in the disinformation campaign. And you know, Russia has—you know, RTV and others are quite strong in Latin America, have Spanish-language stations and social media that are picked up broadly. And China, too, many of their—above their, you know, intelligence. So you’re seeing that come in. And there’s—I think it’s looser than other places but there is some motivation and I think conversations there.

I mean, the interesting thing—let me turn to the BRICS because I think this is quite interesting and here, you know, Brazil is, obviously—they’re very proud of being one of the founders. They’re the B in BRICS and they’re very proud and I think it’s been a tough year for Brazil and Latin America in the BRICS.

You know, they were not particularly pleased about the expansion that happened of the BRICS for a couple reasons. One is it left—it brought in lots of authoritarian governments, not a lot of democracies, and Brazil is famously a democracy and has, you know, stood many tests in that in recent years, and it also brought in a lot of countries that had close ties with China but not necessarily with the other BRICS.

So becoming a little bit more of a hub and spoke where lots of people had trading ties, lots of people had diplomatic ties, but not necessarily with Brazil, not necessarily with India or South Africa or the other kind of founding members.

So beginning to see the BRICS become a more politicized and anti-West than I think Brazil would like, and Brazil holds itself out there as, you know, they want to be truly nonaligned. They want to be able to play on the global stage and work with everyone, and all of a sudden—maybe hijacked is too strong a word but they’re worried about the leanings and, you know, we saw in this last round in Sochi of the BRICS meeting both Cuba and Venezuela came and wanted to sort of apply for membership and Brazil pushed back on that and stopped that process. But they’re pretty much playing, you know, rear guard.

Now, Brazil is the next host for the BRICS in 2025 so I think they will try to sort of perhaps pull that organization back to a different agenda and a different approach. But they are seeing this coordination between China and Russia is difficult for them and sort of their ambitions on the global stage.

DOSHI: Thanks, Shannon. That’s very interesting.

And maybe just one quick follow-up question. You know, as you kind of look at China’s growing engagement in Latin America do you see any ways in which perhaps there—or do people in the region perceive any conflict between China’s ambitions and Russia’s?

Any tension? Any places where China’s influence displaces Russia’s or is it really just positive sum as they engage the region?

O’NEIL: You know, I would say I think the Russian influence has dissipated or diminished in the last couple of years as they’ve been preoccupied with other parts of the world, let’s say. You know, many Latin American countries signed on to, you know, the condemnation of, you know, the invasion of Ukraine even if they didn’t, you know, follow through with sort of more robust participation and the like.

And so I think what we’re seeing there is really China at the forefront for Latin America thinking about, you know, finances and money and investment on the one side but also, you know, the sort of worries of them pushing their sort of diplomatic weight around in the region as countries become more dependent on them in terms of debt, in terms of trade, in terms of other things.

And we’ve seen cases like that. You know, there was a case where, you know, the previous Brazilian government sort of stood up to China on various things and China slow walked sending them vaccines that they had kind of early on in the—

DOSHI: That’s correct.

O’NEIL: So there are some lessons. And then that government let China back into—or Huawei back into an auction for a telecommunications grid. So, you know, I think we are seeing them and so there’s some wariness in some of these countries.

Yes, of course, they embrace—you know, they need foreign direct investment. They need financing and the like. But there’s also some wariness of what China does once they’re—once they’re there.

DOSHI: Very interesting. Thank you so much, Shannon.

I want to turn now to Michelle, if I could, and I think the broad question, of course, how does—Africa’s got a lot of countries with different perspectives so it’s hard to say how does Africa view the China-Russia relationship.

But that is sort of the question, and I think related to that, I mean, there are some—there’s some description, I think, in the report from Ambassador Blackwill and from Richard Fontaine suggesting that we’re seeing kind of that states that benefit from Chinese assistance vote with Russia in the U.N., for example, so that we’re seeing this kind of triangular coordination across, you know, international institutions.

How do African countries in general see the China-Russia relationship? And are we seeing, you know, influence by one power benefit the other?

GAVIN: Sure. So you’re right. Of course, there’s always a diversity of view but, broadly speaking, I think for most African governments and societies these are two very distinct partners, right.

Both have long histories on the continent. The kind of China offering is much more robust in terms of what that partnership can look like with African states—obviously, the famous investments in infrastructure but it goes, you know, well beyond that to technology and smart cities investments that also help more authoritarian governments keep track of urban opposition, and a wealth of economic ties. The Chinese foreign minister is on the continent right now, again, consistently making his first trip of every year a trip to Africa.

So there are, you know, political party trainings. It is a kind of a full suite of engagements, and if you look at popular opinion China is reasonably popular throughout the continent. People see it as very influential in their own economies and tend to have a, largely, positive view. It sort of goes China, the U.S. not so far behind, and then Russia much, much lower. Of course, that varies depending on countries so that’s a very broad brush.

Whereas with Russia there are these very important historical linkages. But, really, Russia is an arms supplier and a supplier of regime security in the Central African Republic and in some of the Sahelian states that have had military coups and have military governments.

That’s what the offer is—we can keep this capital from being overrun, not we can provide security for the country or reestablish your ability to control this land within your borders. That’s not the offer, and Russia has, you know, gotten a black eye in Mozambique. Most of the continent is aware that their security offering in Mali and Burkina is not delivering. It’s more difficult actually for people within those countries.

I mean, they’re experiencing the insecurity but there’s a tremendous repression of actual information and so that brings me to the—kind of the information space where, again, very similar to what Shannon had to say. Both actors are extremely active not just with these kind of conventional media houses but paid influencers on social media who are very effective at amplifying preferred messages.

The one place where I think from the African perspective these two partners come together is in the BRICS and in this kind of broader anti-status quo sentiment, right? So if you—there’s a political framing that is used in many, many parts of the continent about how the kind of international structure is designed to disadvantage Africans and therefore the most powerful actor on the international scene for a long time, the U.S., must wish it to be so and therefore these forces pushing back through BRICS and rhetorically are forces to align with for change, and this is, I think, the real danger for the U.S.

So when it comes to these votes at the U.N. I think there are some easy ways to explain that most African missions are wildly understaffed. So they’re looking for a lead to follow, and because China and Russia have aligned themselves in this way on those votes and many African states are very concerned about maintaining their access to China we see what we see.

DOSHI: Yeah. Well, one theme I wanted to pick up on that was very interesting and something that I focused on as well when I was in government at the NSC was this idea that China is also a security provider now within Africa for regime security, along with Russia. So Russia tries to do that with Wagner but China tries to do that with counterterrorism cooperation or with direct military assistance.

But it’s interesting because China’s new to that game and Russia’s been there for a while. Do you see or is there any indication that African countries are trying to pick and choose between China and Russia when it comes to security assistance? Is there any competition between China and Russia to provide this now incredibly valuable good? Or is it not really an issue?

GAVIN: I don’t see a lot of competition. What I do see is a tension between the way they understand security and their interests, right? China’s thrives on stability. Their interests on the continent sort of depend upon it, whereas for Russia, right, the opportunity is in the chaos. And so those are two very, very different value propositions and different ideas.

DOSHI: So possibly some tension then on that particular issue.

I want to turn now to Elliott to talk about the Middle East in particular, and I think in general there’s the broad question, how does the region look at the China-Russia relationship, and the region, of course, is heterogeneous.

But I think there’s also a kind of specific question that I have been wondering about and maybe you can help us think through which is, you know, we see China and Russia work together increasingly with Iran including military exercises in the Gulf and, obviously, Gulf states should be concerned about that. Israel should be concerned about that.

Do we see this growing entente worry states in the Middle East even as they independently pursue stronger ties with China and Russia?

ABRAMS: Yes. Listening to this and through the previous session what has struck me is the Middle East is different because the partner—the local partner, Iran—is such an active force in the whole region and has been hurt badly in the last year.

So if you’re looking at that trio—Russia, China, Iran—they’re weaker than they were a year ago and I think a few years ago we would all have said this is not only a growing relationship but a very successful one in building its influence throughout the region, and then there goes Syria, Iran’s only Arab state partner, and Hezbollah, its most important proxy. So they look quite different, I think, right now.

For other countries in the region—Jordan, Egypt, the Gulf states—I think their view would be, well, we’ve got to reevaluate. I don’t think this leads them to build closer or less close relationships with Russia and China.

They’re doing it directly with Iran, and the question that I think they’re really asking is what do we need to do with respect to Iran given that Russia and China are not providers of security, and they’re not.

There’s nothing that the Russians or Chinese can really do. You might have thought, well, surely the Russians will be able to maintain their position in Syria, a position that goes back to the beginning of the Cold War.

Not so. It just collapsed overnight and, you know, the news of the last three, four days is about Russian equipment being moved out of Syrian ports, out of Latakia, perhaps to Libya, going over to you. (Laughter.)

But so I think from the Gulf point of view they’ve seen a real change. They have to wonder how the Russians are going to react, and maybe it’s simply by being a less important country in the Middle East because then there’s something else they have to ask is yes, but what is American policy, and that, you know, I think we don’t know yet.

DOSHI: And I guess following up on that on maybe the economic side, we’ve seen China build strong ties with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, in particular MBS and MBZ, with a focus on technology.

Of course, now the U.S. has come back with this deal on artificial intelligence with G-42 suggesting that we—in fact, the leaders in AI have a lot to offer. But still the region has this affinity for maybe China’s model of authoritarian development. Maybe that’s overstated.

So I guess my question to you would be, you know, when we think about the economic dimension we often focus on China buying Middle East oil but there’s another dimension here, too. Is there a way in which that displaces Russian influence or complements it?

ABRAMS: Well, they do have very different interests in one fundamental way. China’s an importer of oil and Russia is an exporter and so, for example, I’m just following up on what was just said, chaos versus order.

Suppose there is a dust up in the Persian Gulf—Israel-Iran, U.S.-Iran. Oil prices double. Maybe they triple. This is wonderful news for Putin. It is not wonderful news for Xi Jinping. So they have very different interests.

As of now I would say we don’t see that having much of an impact. You could for years—go back five years, ten years. Chinese-Israeli relations were quite good and China was investing a fair amount of money in Israel—high-tech stuff—and Russian-Israeli relations were good and they worked—they collaborated to make sure that they did not get in each other’s way in Syria.

The Israelis were bombing Syria all the time to try to prevent Iranian arms going to Hezbollah. They did not get in the way of the Russians in Syria. That’s changed now in 2024 and I would say it’s changed because both of them had to ask, China and Russia, that is, what’s the game here? What are we doing here? What’s the key issue here?

And the key issue is the United States. The key issue is to diminish American influence. So, for example, it’s good for China to have a high-tech relationship with Israel but it’s being destroyed, and they’re willing to take that destruction because there’s a bigger game and the bigger game is U.S. influence in the world.

DOSHI: I think that sounds right. Well, thank you very much to our panelists. I’m going to turn it now to the audience.

We have, of course, all of you in the room and several hundred online so we’ll start with questions in the room and then move to questions online.

Who’d like to kind of ask the first set of questions here? And you can direct them generally or to a particular panelist. So right here in the front. Thank you.

Q: Thank you. Kellie Meiman with McLarty Associates.

Rush, you’ve written about China’s attempts to impact the multilateral rules-based system. It sounds like from everything we’ve been hearing here today and just observing the world that we might be careening more towards Richard’s axis of upheaval than any sort of an effort to reform post-World War II rules-based institutions.

Just wondering if you might comment on—(clears throat)—excuse me, the role of or evolution of those institutions as we go forward. Thank you.

DOSHI: Well, thanks. A question to the moderator. Certainly, I appreciate it although irregular. (Laughter.)

But I’m going to ask our panelists to jump in too if they have thoughts so please just jump in when you do.

A very quick point. I was struck on the discussion of BRICS. It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about. We’ve had some interesting conversations with our Chinese friends about BRICS when I was in government and about the need for expansion.

The joke was always the U.S. was expanding all across the region—Asia, with AUKUS and the Quad—and they said these are exclusive cliques and we’re not a part of it and that’s unfair. And we’d say, well, what about BRICS? And they’d smile.

And so my question about the BRICS really is if the BRICS gets so big is it really all that different from the G-77 which, of course, is more than seventy-seven countries but has existed for a long time.

Does it undermine the efficacy of the BRICS? Because the bigger an institution gets in some ways the harder it is to kind of act in consensus. So as we consider the zeitgeist of these new institutional forms we got to ask ourselves, are they going to get anything done?

But I want to turn to our panelists to give you more erudite answers—set of answers. Since everybody wants to jump in maybe, Liana, I don’t have to put you on the spot but since you’re not in the room maybe I’ll ask you if you’d like to jump in on this one.

Anything?

FIX: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Rush.

Just very quickly, I think from a European perspective the temptation for Europe now, especially after the victory of Donald Trump, is to see themselves as the island of multilateral cooperation, the last continent who upholds the rules and the norms that were so dear to us, and this is a moral high ground that I do think would be dangerous for Europeans to end up on because that’s something that you can, well, discuss in think tank events if you want what about the law of averages. (Laughter.)

But you have to as Europeans—and I have written with colleagues—with the colleagues about this before—as Europeans you will have to get your hands dirty, right? I mean, you cannot only talk about and lament the demise of the United Nations, fear what Trump might do to multilateral institutions.

You have to shape the new environment that is emerging even if you don’t like how it looks and even if it is not the dream environment of post-1999.

DOSHI: Yes. Anyone else?

Shannon?

O’NEIL: Yeah. I guess I would just say, you know, as I look at some of the multilateral institutions or the Bretton Woods institutions and the like, you know, they were—they’re not created to deal well with great power competition, especially integrated great power competition, right?

They were created where Russia was very separate, right? The economy was separate. It was in its own block. It was its own—and so it was for the rest of the world and that’s sort of when they worked and deepened and developed and became sort of more powerful.

But now we’re back in a time of great power competition where, you know, the commercial rules—China doesn’t follow the commercial rules that these follow, you know. And so I don’t think they’re fit for purpose and so I think the question we’re all sort of grappling with is can we make them fit for purpose. Do we keep these ones? Do we search for other ones?

And I think the—you know, what’s happening with the BRICS which, in my view, is, you know, there’s a lot of meetings and photo ops but not a lot of stuff there, just as how hard it is to do. In a world of great power competition how do you actually create something that is much more comprehensive in terms of multilateral institutions?

DOSHI: That’s such an interesting point because it’s not just the postwar institutions that aren’t fit for purpose but the new institutions aren’t fit for purpose—

O’NEIL: Not take the risk, yeah.

DOSHI: —either because there’s also great power rivalry within them, China and India, for example, in BRICS or in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which was quite helpfully stalled in part by any participation, which is a mistake that China should have probably thought about.

Michelle, anything you want to add here?

GAVIN: Yeah, I do, just really quickly.

There’s this interesting sort of paradox where there’s a tremendous amount of real resentment at the Bretton Woods institutions as so many African countries struggle with, you know, a total absence of physical space and frustrations around debt relief and how slow it is, and the U.N. itself because there’s a lot of U.N. activity very visible on the African continent and when it doesn’t deliver it breeds a tremendous amount of resentment. It’s why you see, you know, people demanding peacekeepers go home.

So there’s all this anger and resentment. At the same time, a lot of enthusiasm for multilateralism because that’s where African voice gains power, right, and because there are so many African states it becomes a draw for other powers then to engage diplomatically and really think about African interests if they’re worried about those votes in multilateral fora.

So this is I think one reason why BRICS has a lot of appeal on the continent, and, yes, it’s a kind of nonsensical grouping of countries but this idea that, yes, we want to be multilateral and we’re pushing back against any idea of a unipolar world. But none of these institutions, you know, were made—designed with our equities in mind and they have failed us.

ABRAMS: Just one—

DOSHI: Elliott?

ABRAMS: Very briefly.

DOSHI: Yeah.

ABRAMS: Listening to all of this, it does not bode well for the effectiveness of either the General Assembly or the Security Council in New York. (Laughter.)

DOSHI: I think that sounds about right.

We’re going to go online, I think, for a question. We’ll come back to them in just a moment. So, Carrie, what do we have online?

OPERATOR: We’ll take the next question from Tara Hariharan.

DOSHI: OK. Tara?

Q: Thank you so much. My name is Tara Hariharan. I’m from NWI.

My question, which is perhaps directed to both Shannon and Rush, is about the status of China’s ambitions towards internationalization of the renminbi, and Russia has notably leaded the way as a big adopter of the yuan and most of China-Russia bilateral trade is now skirting the use of the dollar.

But I would argue that even if their de-dollarizing intent remains the general primacy of the dollar still remains uncontested, especially given China’s domestic struggles right now which will probably bring down the renminbi.

But what are the prospects, according to the panelists, for further adoption of the yuan in global trade, particularly in developing nations? Thank you.

DOSHI: Shannon?

O’NEIL: I mean, I think that, you know—and Tara, I know you’ve thought a lot about this yourself—is, you know, you have to replace something with something. You can’t replace something with nothing, and if you’re not going to let the yuan float and you’re not going to sort of provide, you know, the fluidity and the flexibility then you just can’t be the reserve currency.

And so I think, you know, yes, there’s a lot of talk about this. This has been, you know, the subject of the BRICS, and it’s not just China that wants to do this. You know, Brazil for twenty-five years has talked about replacing or finding alternatives. But it’s very hard to do if no one else wants to step up.

And, you know, we found, you know, the euro at one point was—you know, people thought maybe that would replace it in, you know, the early 2000s. It did not because it doesn’t have the flow. It doesn’t have sort of the deepness of capital markets and the like.

And so, so far until we see something come up, that somebody is willing and able to deepen those capital markets to provide that flow, to provide that to the world, I think we’re—it’s going to be—the dollar is going to be the reserve currency.

DOSHI: Yeah, that’s—I think that’s exactly right.

I’d just add one interesting factor here which is that what we have seen China and Russia do is work together on building alternative, parallel infrastructure, particularly for payments. So the reserve currency question is one question but the payments question is another one, and the two end up being related down the road.

And what we’re seeing is that, you know, certainly beginning in 2009 with the global financial crisis accelerating after Russia’s seizure of Crimea and then, really, after 2022 those two countries have worked together to build out and multilateralize that alternative infrastructure.

So there’s a Russian effort that’s underway, but the Chinese effort with CHIPS, essentially—is the acronym—is particularly advanced. It’s able to do messaging, settlement. It’s able to do it all. And so, again, that doesn’t get you a reserve currency but it gets you a way around potentially the U.S. ability to track certain kinds of payments and, therefore, kind of weakens one critical pillar of American power.

So in the past I’ve written—this as an example of blunting—America has this great advantage. You can’t completely dislodge it but you can gradually undermine it through infrastructure investment.

Maybe a question now from the room, if I could. So up here at this table on the right.

Q: Hi. Matt Merighi, Evolution Space.

I had a quick question, one each for Shannon and Michelle. For Shannon, particularly with President Trump getting inaugurated soon and President Sheinbaum just starting her term how do you see Mexico from a diplomatic and economic perspective approaching the China-Russia duopoly vis-à-vis the United States?

And then for Michelle, you know, usually we hear about how the U.S. is not doing well in Africa and how, you know, China and Russia are eating our lunch, particularly in West Africa most recently.

Is there anywhere where the U.S. is doing a good job that could be a model for other ways to approach other parts of the continent, or is it just more of a wholesale—(inaudible)—policy or—(inaudible)?

ABRAMS: Canada. (Laughter.)

DOSHI: Greenland, Canada, Panama. Yeah.

O’NEIL: On Mexico and the United States and China, I mean, it’s interesting. So Claudia Sheinbaum, her party—the political coalition does have a segment which is quite, you know, left and is somewhat sympathetic to Russia, to China, and the like. So you definitely have that within the political realm.

But that said, every signal from this administration is and the one previously is that they will—they’re throwing their lot in with the United States and particularly seeing that on the commercial space so over the course of this last year plus you have seen Mexico put up, you know, upwards of 500 different tariffs on Chinese, you know, steel and aluminum from countries with not—without trade agreements with Mexico, i.e., China.

You saw them just recently. They just put a tax on all sort of e-commerce small packages. So the, you know, the Temus and the Sheins and the like coming into Mexico just this last week.

You are seeing them do that and you actually are seeing the economy ministry there go around to various companies that import a lot from China because you’ve seen Chinese imports come up by about $50 billion over the last couple of years.

You’ve seen them going around to other companies, many of them car companies, and sort of, you know, what are you importing—could we find alternatives here in Mexico or the United States.

They’re starting to think about sort of China and supply chains, I would argue, as they think about gearing up for what is technically a review of USMCA but which I think will become a pretty deep renegotiation once we get both governments in place.

DOSHI: Michelle?

GAVIN: Yeah. So great question—where are things going right. I struggle, and it’s not because everything we do is wrong. It’s because we don’t do nearly enough, right? There’s this sort of very anachronistic set of ideas about what kind of engagement matters on the continent and, you know, a high level visit does nothing—does nothing for that except, you know, mess up their traffic for a few days.

And so much of our foreign assistance budget is very tightly proscribed, right? We don’t have a lot of flexibility there, and even when we aren’t the creditors who are the problem on debt relief we will absolutely continue to get a lot of the blame.

I would say, you know, one place where things—a piece of the agenda was moving really well was Kenya. Hence, the state visit and the, you know, major non-NATO ally. We were on the right track with much more vigorous commercial diplomacy.

But where things kind of went off the rails was a real failure to reckon with the issues of corruption that so infuriate Kenyans and it’s—so it’s just a—(laughs)—even where there was this tremendous push, and I give Ambassador Whitman a lot of credit for that, it’s a—all of these relationships are complex and it just takes more attention, more effort, more resources, both financial and human capital resources, right?

But if the—if the signals being sent from the highest levels continue to be just kind of keep a lid on it there, Africans, just—and we’ll do some high-level visits and maybe once every, I don’t know, eight years we’ll do a summit—you know, these summits are resented on the continent, these Africa-plus-one summits. This is an idea that’s well past its sell-by date, and I get how much work it takes to do and I have tremendous respect for the people who did all that work.

But we just still have this sort of Africa as extra credit project approach to our policy whereas Africa is strategically incredibly important to China. It’s very important to Russia. It’s super important to a bunch of Gulf states as well. They are—Africa figures prominently in their long-term foreign policy strategies and we’re just still not there.

DOSHI: Just maybe one follow-up question, if I could, and then we’ll go online and take another question from in the room. We’ll take two.

Michelle, I had one question for you, which is you said something very interesting, which is that these kinds of U.S.-plus-forty summits with African countries are not—you know, they’re not really appreciated, maybe because they prefer a bilateral summit.

China does them as well.

GAVIN: Yes.

DOSHI: Does Russia do them, too?

GAVIN: Oh, yeah.

DOSHI: And how do these countries feel? I mean, China brings more to the table, perhaps.

GAVIN: And Indonesia does them and Saudi Arabia does them—

DOSHI: And is there resentment?

GAVIN: —and now all these African heads of state are running around all year to all these Africa-plus-one summits where they sit in a plenary and maybe the head of state comes for that, and then they’re loaded onto a bus and what is the point? And it feels demeaning.

DOSHI: And do they feel that way about the Chinese too and—

GAVIN: Well, China usually comes with a check, right?

DOSHI: That’s right. OK.

GAVIN: So they’ve seen some results.

DOSHI: So it makes you feel better. OK. That’s—and the Russians do they also do this?

GAVIN: Oh, yes, they do. Yes, they do, and you can peruse some of their military equipment while you’re at the summit and—

DOSHI: So, really, the Chinese and Russians should do it together—

GAVIN: —kick the tires on that tank.

DOSHI: —and they get a two for one deal from all these African countries. That’s right.

Well, thank you. Let’s take two questions, one from online and one from in the room. So online first and then we’ll come back here for the room.

OPERATOR: We’ll take the next question from Jim Gilmore.

Q: Great. Thank you very much. I’m Jim Gilmore. I’m the former governor of Virginia and former United States ambassador to OSCE in Vienna, Austria, and in that capacity I had a chance to interact with fifty-six other ambassadors in countries in that European security organization.

This is my question. I think that everything in the previous panel and in this panel agrees that China and Russia and by extension North Korea and Iran are committed to a change in the world order. That seems to be the policy that the U.S. is confronting today.

I think we also should maybe see that containment and deterrence has failed. The Ukrainian incursion demonstrates that. So my question to the panel is this. It looks to me like we’re—the United States is being confronted with a choice and that choice is either appeasement or war.

My question to you as a panel is, is the United States—does the United States have any other options besides those two choices which I think are being forced upon the United States?

DOSHI: Well, thank you. Before we answer that we’ll take one more question from the room and then turn to the panel.

Here in the back.

Q: I’m Jack Janes from the German Marshall Fund.

My question is for Liana Fix. You’ve also in not only today given some reality checks on Europe but also in your article in September that you co-wrote in Foreign Affairs.

Would you mind speculating about where the leadership is going to come from those reality checks that you think need to be dealt with and does—and specifically that come from the next administration in Berlin?

DOSHI: Thank you. And these are complementary questions. Maybe we’ll start with you, Liana, and then if anybody would like to jump in on either of the questions we’ll turn to you.

Liana?

FIX: Thanks so much. It’s true that there is a leadership vacuum in Europe, right? I mean, you cannot come to any other conclusion if you see it—if you look at the domestic turbulences in France and in Germany.

But there are some bright—there’s some reason for optimism and that is in Brussels we have Ursula von der Leyen that has a policy entrepreneurship and a leadership position which is unrivaled. She’s probably the most powerful president of any European Commission since the founding years of the European Commission.

I mean, she has pushed macros with (EU mech ?), so agreement as one of the instruments to push back against China, which she has had in her landmark speech on China in 2023 even though not all EU member states have been on board. She has been very creative when it comes to defense investments in Europe. So she’s really a source of leadership.

And then also we have a pretty promising situation in Poland where, after the—(inaudible)—government we have Donald Tusk with a lot of experience as prime minister in the European Union. We will have presidential elections in Poland upcoming, too. But the context looks pretty good.

So who needs to deliver? It’s Germany. You’re absolutely right there, and there I’m also more optimistic looking at the next government because a conservative-led government by Friedrich Merz, who’s the archenemy of Angela Merkel which may unite him with Donald Trump, it’ll be easier to have a good relationship with Donald Trump on that question.

But not only on that point, also on the relationship with Brussels, the relationship with Paris, the engagement for Ukraine, the relationship with Warsaw, Friedrich Merz has been strong and outspoken and he might have the backing in the German parliament with, for example, a ground coalition with the Social Democrats to provide leadership and to secure himself based in the history books of Europe that puts him on the same level with Angela Merkel.

So I’m quite optimistic about Germany after February.

O’NEIL: Yeah. Let me just say—let me take Jim’s question, not because I disagree with you but I just want to disagree with you because I’m more of a glass half full person and the choice between appeasement and war, and I’m assuming more war than we are today, you know, I think as I look at what’s happening and, look, we can spend—we can spend a whole panel talking about the woes here in the United States and in Europe and the challenges.

But, you know, it hasn’t really been a great year, I would say, either for the axis of upheaval, right. Iran, as Elliott well knows and then mentioned here, has been on the back foot and challenges, you know, coming more from an economic point of view.

You know, Russia’s economy, yes, it’s a war economy but it has huge dislocations and problems and they—you know, they don’t seem to mind just putting, you know, 1,500 people into coffins every day on the front. But how long can you—and the sort of brain drain that’s happened and the like. So that doesn’t look great.

And, you know, we all know China is—this has not been a great couple of years for China and where it’s headed and it’s about to, you know, go into a demographic cliff, and all kinds of things that are not just short term, you know, challenges for the economy but real longer-term challenges there.

So, you know, I guess as I look right here—and the other thing I would say is—and, you know, partly looking at Latin America—I don’t know if, Michelle, that you have a similar experience in the work you do—but there is not—it’s not as if the whole, you know, quote/unquote, “Global South” is rah-rah.

I mean, they have very complicated relationships with both of these countries and particularly China, and I think the next twelve months will become even more complicated as China seems to be the way they’re going to get out of their economic doldrums is exporting everything that they make and undermining the manufacturing sectors of all these countries.

You’re seeing it already in countries like Brazil that’s pushing back in all kinds of ways. You’re seeing it in Mexico. You’re seeing it in other—all kinds of middle powers and countries, India and the like, that have aspirations to also be manufacturing, you know, players in the world.

So I think there—you know, I would like to think, you know, what is this third path? Well, we know multilateralism is very difficult but there’s a lot of enthusiasm about it in various parts of the world. So maybe there are, you know, groups that can come together around particular issues and the like that, you know, we can form there.

We do know, you know, the United States actually for all of our challenges has one of the best, most robust and balanced economies in the world today and is a place that, you know, people want to come. They want to invest, you know, back to the dollar. Like, people are flocking to the dollar. It’s very strong because, you know, they’re looking for safety in the world.

Well, here’s the place, right? And so I guess what I would say there is I think there probably is a very messy middle path that hopefully doesn’t lead us into World War III but doesn’t necessarily mean appeasement. It actually means standing up to some of this and I would just go back to, you know, Richard and Bob’s report.

There’s a lot of how to stand up to this as well in there. So I would, you know, encourage you to read that. But I think there is a space there that doesn’t leave us on the two sides.

DOSHI: Michelle?

GAVIN: Yeah. I have similar thoughts, that between kind of war and appeasement there’s also, you know, as opposed to defensive crouch an evolution where we recognize that, yes, the world order has to change. Some of these institutions clearly don’t work anymore. They’re not working for us either and, you know, be willing to get serious about some reforms that—some of which may mean a little loss here or there for the U.S. but gains over here, or an ability to build a much broader coalition of like-minded states over there.

And so I think that’s real. You know, African populations need jobs more than anything else. The continent needs jobs and none of these external powers can solve that problem for Africans.

So, you know, it’s not a kind of foregone conclusion that everyone—that this desire to change the status quo means alignment with powers that are, you know, increasingly antagonistic to the U.S. But it is the case that the change people seek they will want to see reflected in some of the efforts of the U.S. as we go forward to try and, you know, recreate an international institutional architecture that is fit for purpose.

ABRAMS: I would only go back to the beginning to what Bob Blackwill said. I think an ingredient to this is raw power and what troubles me—what worries me is that the United States is absolutely not making the needed investment in straight military power.

DOSHI: Well, thanks, Elliott.

I would just add, if I could take the moderators prerogative, that, you know, the question of whether we’re between accommodation and war is sort of a perennial question in politics for anybody and, you know, war happens because a country wants to achieve a certain aim through the threat of or use of military force and appeasement is what they’re looking for. They don’t always get it.

And for us—I mean, in the entire Cold War—Elliott could speak to it better than us—it was fought between those extremes, you could argue, and so the question is if we’re in an era of extremely intense peacetime great power competition how do we win that peacetime great power competition?

And I do think I agree with Elliott, the foundations are American strength and here at CFR on the China question we have a China policy accelerator focused on what has to happen at home to make the U.S. more competitive.

How do you fix your defense industrial base? How do you make sure your critical infrastructure can’t get hacked, as all of us are seeing in the news right now. It’s not new but it’s news today. And also how do you fix your economy so that you can actually generate productive capacity, which we all know matter in international politics.

I think if you’re able to do those things you can shape that piece in the direction that you want it to go, securing enduring competitive edge. That’s the question. Now, we—the adversary gets a vote on whether they use force and that’s why Elliott’s point about military spending is critical, I think.

We have time for more questions. So here in the center one of my CFR colleagues, and maybe if anyone else has a question we’ll come to you next. We’ll take two.

Q: First, good morning. Thank you for this outstanding panel. There’s so many interesting ideas to pick up. Esther Brimmer, James H. Binger Senior Fellow in global governance here at CFR.

If I may raise three points. So many other things I would like to raise but three points in particular. The first is just to note, of course, in addition to the competition we see in the countries that you all are experts on we also see a competition in our global regions as well and I particularly flag the Arctic where we see one of the greatest changes.

The Russian Federation traditionally said Arctic should be managed by Arctic countries and now, of course, there’s cooperation between the Chinese and Russian coast guard. So that’s one area of interest because, obviously, the United States has a 12,000-mile coastline with Alaska in the Arctic. So that’s one area.

The second is to ask you do you think we have enough of a diplomatic investment. We need an investment in our military. We also need an investment in our diplomatic services. Do we have enough people in Kenya? Brazil? Indonesia? I would suggest that we need to have sustained engagement in those areas.

Finally, as we look at the different types of international structures out there one we haven’t talked a lot about today is the G-20. It includes many of the countries we’ve talked about, Russia, China as well.

What do you expect and what should we do as the host? In 2026 the United States will host the G-20. Can we use this as an opportunity?

DOSHI: Terrific. So to our panel anyone want to jump in on these questions?

GAVIN: I’ll just really quickly say yes, we need much more diplomatic investment, and no, we don’t have it. I mean, our embassies on the continent are famously understaffed and people see that. They also see the very robust staffing at the Chinese mission, and it looks like an indicator of what we think is important.

So it’s not that I think just throwing bodies out into the field fixes everything but, yes, we need a much more—a much more serious diplomatic investment.

And then on the G-20 I would just say it’s a really interesting question. Obviously, this is South Africa’s year to host, and I was recently in South Africa and spending some time trying to understand the degree to which their views of the U.S. have and haven’t evolved over time and, you know, as far as the ANC is concerned—and the ANC continues to insist that it will dominate on foreign policy in the G-20—the U.S. is the kind of counterrevolutionary enemy.

And so I think in addition to thinking about how to frame 2026 we should be thinking very carefully about what’s going to unfold this year.

DOSHI: Thanks. Anyone else?

ABRAMS: Just one point. I think the point about diplomacy is a good one and it’s not only the embassies. It’s the State Department and, I mean, between, you know, Elon Musk and Marco Rubio we’ll see how that turns out.

But just as an example, I met yesterday with the U.S. ambassador to a European country who was here for a few weeks—you know, Christmas at home and consultations and all—and I asked this ambassador, you’ve been in the building a lot. How many people are there? Twenty-five percent. That’s not going to work. The State Department populated by 25 percent of its employees, no, not going to work.

So I would ask another question that I know Russia has thought about—is the State Department organized for the challenge of China? You know, you’ve got a China desk and you’ve got the East Asia bureau and should there be a China bureau and should—there’s no, you know, perfect answer here.

But I think there should be a lot more thinking also about how the department is—modernized maybe is the word for the challenges we now face.

DOSHI: Yeah. I’ll just take the prerogative again to say I think, Elliott, you’re right.

There’s an interesting question now about how the U.S. government will restructure on economic instruments, too. You know, what will the Department of Commerce look like? Will elements of it be shared with USTR?

So there’s all these questions not just for how the State Department is organized, and I don’t think it’s organized completely for the challenge of China competition. I think there’s an effort underway with China House but there’s a long way to go.

I also think the larger USG constellation of agencies is not quite suited to the economic statecraft challenges that we have as well.

We have time, actually—I think we have time for one question if everyone can give ten-second answers. (Laughter.) (Inaudible)—and then we’ll close out. So if there’s a final question in the room, now is the time.

I see with that caveat people didn’t—

O’NEIL: Wait. I have one—

DOSHI: Shannon?

O’NEIL: —shameless CFR plug here.

DOSHI: OK. And then I’ll end with another one.

ABRAMS: That’s a good one.

O’NEIL: So Esther brought up that, you know, one of the places of great power competition is the Arctic, which it is. There is another one that is a place of great power competition and that is space.

DOSHI: Space.

O’NEIL: And CFR, under the able hands of Esther as the project director, has a task force coming out on space where we delve into this issue. It will be coming out in the next month. So much to be done there.

DOSHI: That’s right. The space task force has done fantastic work. I think people will be excited about the report.

We’re basically out of time now so I’m sorry about that. I’ll just end by saying this discussion shows the regional breadth that CFR fellows have. We have had serious conversations about multiple regions of the world in the context of Bob and Richard’s report on China-Russia. This is what we endeavor to do as part of China 360.

Thank you very much for joining us today. (Applause.)

(END)

This is an uncorrected transcript.