There is an emerging consensus among geopolitical experts that the contemporary world’s most consequential bilateral relationship ~ between the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China ~ is likely to be disproportionately impacted by policy shifts and tactical moves undertaken by Washington and Beijing in coming months due to the Ukraine crisis.

In fact, says veteran China watcher Ryan Hass in a recent article, these decisions could have an outsized influence over the trajectory of the entire international system over the coming decades. At its core, the question confronting the countries is whether the relationship is amenable to be restricted to an (albeit intense) interests-driven competition.

The view from Washington seems to be that the more China clings to Russia following President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the stronger the calls will grow in the USA and the Western world to treat China and Russia as interchangeable enemies bent on imposing their vision of a new world order.

The working assumption in the West is that President Xi Jinping made China’s choice when he jointly issued a communique for reordering the international order with Mr Putin on 4 February in Beijing where both leaders asserted that the Sino-Russian relationship knows “no boundaries.”

For influential East Coast liberals, policy makers, and think-tanks leaning towards the Democrats in the USA, the joint statement validated the “authoritarian alliance” thesis, and confirmed their fears that the China-Russia axis is both undemocratic and premised on the might-is-right strategic approach. But Beijing sees it differently. It’s outreach to Russia and, it is often overlooked, Iran, is part of a coherent strategy which Western analysts often describe as hardline and/or coercive, to ensure a less hostile environment abroad as it works on building socio-economic stability at home.

Given the West’s hostility towards China, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership clearly believes it leaves them with no other choice to prevent an American-run international order inimical to its interests. The challenge for US diplomacy, therefore, is the most significant since the Cold War years. A section of Washington policy circles is in favour of underlining the closeness of the China-Russia partnership and making Beijing pay a reputational price for its support for Moscow.

“This is the diplomatic equivalent of arm-waving at an impending train wreck,” says Hass. To think that China can be “shamed” into parting ways with Russia is to live in cloud-cuckoo-land. The CCP has exhibited in no uncertain terms over the century of its existence its single-minded focus on furthering what it understands to be China’s national interest; democracy, human rights, and rules-based world order are clearly dispensable in this endeavour.

A more mature approach would be for America to test whether China’s relationship with Russia is set in stone and, as a corollary, whether Beijing believes its interests, especially economic, would be advanced by a bipolar world order with China-Russia-Iran on one side and the US and its European and Asian allies on the other.