Less than a week after the closely watched summit between Presidents Xi Jinping and Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin was invited to China. For Beijing, which has always placed great weight on diplomatic protocol and is adept at using timing and ceremonial detail to send policy signals, the scheduling is hard to dismiss as coincidence. It looked more like a political message: after the Trump-Xi meeting, two like-minded partners moved quickly to compare notes, coordinate positions, and assess the direction of U.S. policy and the changing international landscape.
The symbolism was especially striking because Beijing arranged the Putin-Xi talks for May 20, a date that carries the homophonic meaning of “I love you” in Chinese. That choice was bound to be read as a gesture in its own right. The depth of the Beijing-Moscow relationship, and the strength of the personal political trust between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, now appear to stand in sharp contrast to the Trump-Xi summit held only days earlier. The message from the Putin-Xi meeting may force Washington to confront an uncomfortable reality: the idea of making friends with both China and Russia is likely little more than wishful thinking.
An Empty Trump-Xi Summit, a Substantive Putin-Xi Meeting
The Trump-Xi summit was grand in appearance. China offered a high-level reception and gave Trump all the face he could have wanted. But judged by concrete outcomes, the meeting was more thunder than rain. As many commentators have noted, it produced few substantive results and mainly served to create the political atmosphere of two powers seeking to reduce conflict and stabilize relations.
After the talks, the two sides held no joint press conference and issued no joint statement. Even their official readouts were released at different times and emphasized markedly different points. The U.S. readout highlighted the denuclearization of Iran and North Korea, while the Chinese side gave that issue relatively little attention and instead stressed Taiwan. The gap between the two sides on core issues clearly did not narrow in any meaningful way.
By contrast, the Putin-Xi meeting was not only equally ceremonial but also far more concrete in its deliverables. During their meeting, Xi and Putin signed a joint statement on further deepening the comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination and good-neighborly friendship and cooperation, and they jointly witnessed the signing of 20 important bilateral cooperation documents. These covered trade and economic ties, cultural exchanges, science and technology, education, infrastructure, and other areas. The two leaders also met the press together and attended and addressed the opening ceremony of the China-Russia Years of Education.
In its official language, Beijing lavished praise on China-Russia relations, noting that 2025 marks the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the China-Russia strategic partnership of coordination and the 25th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation Between the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation. It described the relationship as having reached its highest level in history as a comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era, and as a model for a new type of major country relations. The two sides also agreed to extend the Treaty of Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation Between the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation. These arrangements and formulations plainly carried more policy weight than the symbolic choreography of the Trump-Xi summit.
Beyond the official announcements, it is reasonable to assume that Putin’s visit also touched on the policy signals Washington had conveyed during the Trump-Xi talks. In other words, the Putin-Xi meeting was not merely a bilateral diplomatic event. It also looked like a rapid post-summit alignment exercise, through which the two leaders coordinated how to respond jointly to the United States. The agenda may well have included how to blunt U.S. pressure over Iran, how to continue supporting Russia as it has suffered its first sustained net territorial loss in Ukraine since October 2023, and how to reinforce each other’s diplomatic narratives on the wider international stage.
Washington Is Isolated, While China and Russia Point in the Same Direction
Since the start of Trump’s second term, Washington has tried to pull Putin closer, even at the cost of Ukrainian interests and the alienation of traditional European allies, in the hope of driving a wedge between Beijing and Moscow. That strategy has failed. The reason is not complicated. Russia, trapped in the war in Ukraine, depends heavily on China’s economic support and supplies of dual-use goods. More fundamentally, Beijing and Moscow share the same long-term strategic objective: to weaken the Western international order centered on the United States and to erode U.S. global influence.
Trump’s second-term trade war against China sought to continue the hardline approach of his first term. Yet it underestimated how much Beijing had prepared, after the first round of trade conflict, for a renewed confrontation with Washington. At the same time, Trump’s indiscriminate tariff war against allies deepened their resentment and gave China more confidence to stand firm against the United States. The result was that Beijing’s countermeasures caught Washington off guard. Trump eventually had to step back from the tough-on-China posture he had long cultivated and seek a thaw with Beijing. In a sense, that amounted to an implicit recognition that China now possesses the international status and influence to deal with Washington on something approaching equal terms.
Unlike Washington, which has insulted and alienated allies, and increasingly found itself fighting alone in the war against Iran, Beijing and Moscow have remained clear-eyed about who is their enemy and who is their friend. They have stood firmly together against the United States and have consistently sought to weaken the U.S.-led international order. The unilateralist foreign policy of Trump’s second term has handed Xi and Putin a moral high ground they never previously enjoyed.
During the Xi-Putin meeting, the two sides also issued a “joint statement on advocating a multipolar world and a new type of international relations.” Although the statement did not name the United States, it clearly criticized “unilateralism” and “hegemonism” for pushing the world back toward the law of the jungle. It also stressed that China and Russia would firmly fulfill their responsibilities as major powers and defend the authority of the United Nations as well as international fairness and justice.
This language is obviously strategic propaganda, but its political effect should not be underestimated. When the United States weakens the credibility of its own alliances and undermines multilateral mechanisms, China and Russia find it much easier to present themselves as defenders of international order.
Conclusion
The failure of Trump’s China and Russia strategies exposes Washington’s most serious strategic misjudgment: it no longer seems able to distinguish friends from enemies. On the one hand, the United States is exhausting, humiliating, and even abandoning its supposed friends – its traditional alliance network, which is perhaps its most important strategic asset against China or Russia. On the other hand, the Trump administration harbors unrealistic illusions about its strategic rivals, imagining that personal diplomacy and short-term transactions can alter the deeper strategic convergence between China and Russia.
Compared with Beijing and Moscow, Washington’s greatest advantage should be its vast alliance network. For decades, U.S. allies have provided military bases, intelligence sharing, and diplomatic support, while also aligning with Washington’s security policies to constrain Beijing and Moscow. Yet Trump’s foreign policy is damaging allied trust and putting the U.S. alliance system at risk of fracturing. At the same time, Beijing and Moscow remain determined, aligned, and clear in treating the United States as their common adversary. Faced with an increasingly isolated Washington, China and Russia will naturally grow more confident and more willing to work together to challenge the U.S.-led international order.
