Russian President Vladimir Putin traveled to Beijing this week to meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, just days after US President Donald Trump left the Chinese capital. The US and China did not reach a formal deal last week, and comparing the White House and Chinese Foreign Ministry readouts makes one wonder if they’re describing the same meeting.

Even without a tangible deliverable, the Trump-Xi summit was a positive development in the bilateral relationship. It follows up on last October’s trade war truce and sets the stage for further deal-making at upcoming summits, which the US said may number as many as three.

China has myriad problems—sluggish domestic consumption, declining real estate prices, and overcapacity—but in terms of diplomatic symbolism, China is the Middle Kingdom this week, welcoming tribute from its most important neighbor (Russia) and trade partner (the US).

The Situation 

The consensus view is that China and Russia are powerful allies, a view endorsed by the first Trump administration. Its 2017 National Security Strategy singled out China and Russia as “revisionist powers” seeking “a world antithetical to US values and interests,” and conspiring together to “challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity.”

To its credit, the second Trump administration has taken a different view and contrarian stance: The two countries are not mentioned together even once in its 2025 National Security Strategy. Fears of a grand Russia-China alliance are nonsensical, devoid of grounding in history and geopolitics. Their relations are governed by a 2001 treaty of friendship, not a binding defense alliance like the US has with Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. They are partners of convenience, driven into each other’s arms by successive US administrations that justified hegemonic foreign policies by invoking the threat of this axis.

Russia and China have fought over their land border for centuries. Nationalist Chinese still discuss the 400,000 square miles of “lost territories” ceded to Russia by treaty after the Opium Wars of the 19^th century—from their point of view, Russia is just another European imperialist power that exploited China during its century of humiliation. Chairman Mao turned on the Soviets in his later years, and China turned its back on the global proletariat to make a deal with the virulently anti-Communist Richard Nixon in 1972. Today, China is supplanting Russian influence in Central Asia and enjoying access to cheap Russian commodities.

Russian chauvinism may be at an end. As recently as 2019, Russian analysts spoke about China as if it was the junior partner in the bilateral relationship. This view was borderline delusional at the time, but after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, it is facile. China’s economy is over nine times the size of Russia’s. Russia is primarily a commodity exporter; China is the world’s factory, producing critical goods and inputs without which global supply chains would break. Russia’s continued attempts to conquer Ukraine have made it a pariah to Europe (once its most important export market for energy), and Ukraine has turned the tide of the war with drones. For the first time since 2023, Russia is losing ground in Ukraine. If Putin doesn’t regret his invasion at this point, he has lost his mind.

Pressure on Putin continues to rise. He nipped the Prigozhin insurrection in the bud, but in recent months the Kremlin has arrested several top former officials with ties to the Defense Ministry on charges of embezzlement and bribery (translation: a good old-fashioned political purge). Russia’s rainy-day National Wealth Fund is worth less than half what it was when the invasion began and may be exhausted within 2–3 years at current spending rates.

Worried that Russia might reap a windfall from higher oil prices due to the closure of Hormuz, Ukraine has begun bombing Russian oil export infrastructure (previously it focused on domestic infrastructure), and Russia seems unable to stop it. Even Russia’s state-run pollsters show support for Putin declining, with VTsIOM putting it at 66.8%—exceedingly low for a modern-day Tsar.

When Putin traveled to Beijing in 2019 to mark 70 years of diplomatic relations and form a “comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era,” he was governing a different Russia and dealing with a different China. Russia was in an excellent geopolitical position: Europe had bet its energy future on Russia, and the US trade war was damaging China’s economy, pushing Beijing toward Moscow.

This week, he comes to Beijing losing his war in Ukraine and unwilling or unable to manufacture a quick exit. He faces a China that weathered the trade war, is improving ties with the US, and whose economic dynamism relative to Russia’s is night and day. Putin comes hat in hand, seeking Chinese investment in massive energy infrastructure to bring more Russian energy to Chinese markets, and perhaps he’s curious just what Xi and Trump discussed and whether this isn’t 1972 all over again. When Putin invaded Ukraine, he transformed Russia from a world power into a Chinese petrol station—and this visit is more akin to China conversing with a gas station attendant than plotting with a trusted ally.

This paints a grim future of Putin’s future, but his demise is not imminent. In 1904–1905, Tsar Nicholas II picked a fight with Japan and lost big. But Nicholas II weathered the storm and remained in power for another 12 years. Health permitting, Putin and the Kremlin can go on like this for years, perhaps even decades—but the pressure inside Russia will continue to build and, absent a top-down intervention from the military or other political forces, may eventually explode like a powder keg.

All of which to say: The great 20^th-century geopolitical theorist Halford Mackinder might have been wrong that the nation controlling the “world island” controls the world, but he was not wrong about the importance of political stability in this part of the world for global interests.

Xi Jinping is very concerned because China doesn’t want instability on its borders—Beijing has enough to manage without the chaos of a Russian state breakdown. So, Xi will prop up Putin; give him his pomp and circumstance; promise to build his pipelines; listen to Putin wax philosophical about harvesting children’s organs for longevity (you think I’m kidding? I’m not); buy his commodities; and assure him China is taking advantage of, not aligning with, Trump.

Not because Russia and China are allies, but because if China turns its back on Russia now, Russia might come apart at the seams, and that is decidedly not in China’s interests.

Map/Chart of the Week

Ignore the threats and back-and-forth between Iran and the US. The only thing that matters is the number of ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz—and they have more than doubled since last week.

Blind Spot

What’s not on people’s radar but should be… 

On April 29, the US Department of Justice indicted Rubén Rocha Moya, the sitting governor of Sinaloa and a member of President Sheinbaum’s ruling MORENA party, alongside nine current and former Mexican officials on cartel conspiracy charges. On May 12, DEA Administrator Terrance Cole told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee that the indictment was “just the beginning” and that “narcotraffickers and high-ranking government officials in Mexico have been in bed for years.” That same day, CNN reported that CIA Ground Branch operatives have participated in deadly anti-cartel operations inside Mexico since 2024, including a March car bombing outside Mexico City. Mexico Secretary of Security Omar García Harfuch rejected the report within 24 hours; Sheinbaum personally called it “fabrication and lies.” On Friday, May 15, Sheinbaum spoke with Trump by phone, describing the call as “cordial and excellent.”

What makes the story interesting is that Sheinbaum has been Washington’s most reliable hemispheric partner. She has bowed to Washington’s wishes on issue after issue: Nearly a hundred cartel members transferred to US custody in the last year, alignment with the American line on Chinese trade, and a public posture that there should be no daylight between the two governments on security cooperation. The reward is an indictment cascade against her own party, an openly reported CIA campaign on Mexican soil, and an administration that treats her cooperation as cover for further escalation rather than a basis for the relationship. The US can assert anything. Mexico can only deny. As the former Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz is reputed to have said: Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States.

The subtext is the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) joint review, which begins in July. (Also, the World Cup is just weeks away.) Every indictment, every Treasury sanctions rumor against a major Mexican bank, and every claim of US enforcement on Mexican soil is a chip on Washington’s side of the table before the review opens.

Sheinbaum’s denial register is the only public posture available, since publicly accepting a CIA presence on Mexican territory is politically impossible. Her call with Trump on Friday did the work that was available: cordial in tone, conceding nothing in substance, buying time. Her bet is that Mexico’s structural value to the American economy is large enough that the relationship survives this phase of theater. She is probably right, but I confess surprise at the extent to which the US is creating leverage over a neighbor already doing everything it wanted.

And even if Sheinbaum’s diplomatic side holds, the operational side carries its own risk. The 2008 Mérida Initiative, the ~$3.3 billion US effort that pushed enforcement deep into Mexican territory, was followed in the 2010s by an uptick in violence as cartels fractured and began fighting brutal turf wars. Taking out mid-level cartel figures destabilizes the existing equilibrium. It does not end it. Has the US learned that lesson? One would hope.

Reader Question

Finally…

What I’m watching: Widow’s Bay, Apple TV (the first true horror-comedy I think I’ve ever watched)

What I’m reading: War and Wheat: Navigating markets during global conflict, Dennis Voznesenski

What I’m listening to: Everything You Want, Vertical Horizon