A major outcome of President Donald Trump’s Beijing summit this week with Chinese President Xi Jinping had little to do with semiconductors or rare earths. According to the White House readout, Xi Jinping made clear China’s opposition to any Iranian effort to militarize the Strait of Hormuz or charge a toll on its use. Beijing’s own readout said nothing about Iran or the strait—and pointedly did not dispute the American account. That tacit acceptance exposed the so-called “axis” of China, Russia and Iran for what it actually is: a partnership of convenience that fractures the moment one partner’s interests get in the way.
The natural question is, what comes next? If Beijing can be pried loose from Tehran, can it be pried loose from Moscow, too? The answer requires understanding something Western policymakers have been slow to internalize: Russia already fears China far more than it lets on.
Since the end of World War II—with a brief, hopeful interlude after the Soviet collapse—Moscow has framed the West as its principal adversary. NATO enlargement, European Union accession, color revolutions and “Western values” have dominated Kremlin discourse. But this fixation avoids the real long-term threat to Russian power, which is, and always has been, to the south.
That threat has accelerated dramatically since the invasion of Ukraine. As Moscow poured men and capital into keeping Kyiv in its orbit, Beijing quietly absorbed the rest of the post-Soviet space into its own. In 2023, China surpassed Russia as Central Asia’s largest trading partner. By 2025, China-Central Asia trade had hit a record $106 billion—more than double Moscow’s regional turnover. Chinese capital now finances Uzbek car factories, Kazakh logistics hubs and Tajik infrastructure that Beijing often happens to hold the debt on.
The South Caucasus tells the same story. In the last few years, China has signed strategic partnerships with Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, while Chinese railway and infrastructure firms have become increasingly involved in Middle Corridor logistics. Beijing has prioritized the Middle Corridor, which runs from western China through Central Asia, across the Caspian, and through the South Caucasus into Turkey and Europe. Cargo volume along that route jumped roughly 70 percent in 2024 alone. Every kilometer of it bypasses Russia and Iran.
This is the part that should focus minds in Washington. The Middle Corridor is the rare geography where Chinese economic logic and American strategic logic point the same way—both want a trade route to Europe that bypasses Russia and Iran. The Trump administration’s TRIPP corridor and Beijing’s Trans-Caspian investments sit on the same map.
Inside Russia itself, the dependency is now structural. Chinese goods account for around 40 percent of Russian imports, up from roughly 20 percent before the war. China supplies between 60 and 90 percent of goods in key sectors that keep Russia’s sanctioned war economy running, such as machinery, vehicles, telecommunications and dual-use technology. Beijing has become Moscow’s largest creditor and largest energy customer—relationships that have repeatedly forced Russia to accept steep discounts on its oil and gas. China is Russia’s number one trading partner. Russia accounts for a bit more than three percent of China’s trade. The asymmetry is not subtle.
Moscow understands the danger. It simply refuses to say so out loud. Leaked Russian military files reviewed by the Financial Times in 2024—war-game scenarios from 2008 to 2014, still regarded by Western analysts as reflective of current doctrine—show the general staff rehearsing tactical nuclear strikes against China in the event of a southern invasion. One scenario imagines Beijing paying protesters to clash with police in the Russian Far East, deploying saboteurs against Russian infrastructure, and then massing the People’s Liberation Army on the border under the pretext of “genocide.” Russian planners have war-gamed nuclear strikes on Chinese cities. They simply prefer the West not know they think this way.
This is not a new pattern. Americans today have largely forgotten that the “red scare” of the 1950s assumed an unshakable Sino-Soviet bloc, codified in the 1950 friendship treaty between Stalin and Mao. Within a decade, the partnership had curdled—into ideological recrimination, border clashes over Xinjiang, and Mao’s open contempt for Khrushchev’s “weakness.” By 1972, Nixon and Kissinger had walked through the opening and reshaped the Cold War. The two communist giants discovered, as great powers always do, that proximity breeds rivalry.
The roles today are reversed. Russia is now the belligerent, declining junior partner; China is the cautious, ascendant one that prefers stability and trade flows over adventurism. That is precisely why the Hormuz line landed where it did. Iran’s regional belligerence had already collapsed it into near-total dependence on Beijing—China was, until Operation Epic Fury, the destination for roughly 90 percent of Iranian oil exports. When Tehran’s mining and tolling of the strait began to bite into Chinese energy security, Xi’s calculation was straightforward: a junior partner is not worth a tanker route. According to Trump, Xi went further, pledging that Beijing would not supply Iran with military equipment—a “big statement,” in the president’s words, and a devastating one for Tehran.
Beijing’s Eurasian strategy is not alliance-building but asymmetric dependence—leverage to use partners when convenient and to coerce them when necessary. Iran was the purest version of the model: useful while Tehran’s belligerence pressured Western adversaries, expendable the moment it pressured Chinese supply chains. Russia is on the same road, only larger and slower.
The Kremlin’s value to Beijing has always been instrumental: cheap energy, a useful distraction for Washington and a buffer to the north. The moment Russian behavior begins to threaten Chinese economic stability—through wrecked European trade routes, the secondary sanctions risk to Chinese banks, or a broader confrontation that drags in Beijing’s customers in the Gulf—China will recalibrate, just as it did with Tehran.
For Washington, the implication is not a grand reset with Moscow. Russia remains a hostile, revisionist power, and pretending otherwise would be strategic malpractice. But the Hormuz moment is a reminder that the “axis” is held together by Western pressure as much as by genuine alignment. Tighten the right screws—on sanctioned tech, on the Middle Corridor, on Gulf energy architecture—and the seams begin to show.
Joseph Epstein is director of the Turan Research Center and senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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