Putin and Xi Are Holding the West Together

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/09/china-russia-putin-xi-beijing/684075/?utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_medium=social&utm_content=edit-promo

Posted by theatlantic

5 comments

  1. Michael Schuman: “At their meeting in Beijing today, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin made a show of how close they’ve become. Putin and Xi, referring to each other as friends, praised the strength of their relationship as their two countries advanced an agreement to build a gas pipeline that would bind their economies even more tightly together.

    “The continued friendship between the two leaders is a stark reminder that Donald Trump, despite his attempted outreach to Russia and talk of ‘ununiting’ America’s two major rivals, hasn’t redrawn the global map of strategic alliances to his advantage. But here’s the curious thing: Neither has China.

    “Within weeks of the inauguration, many observers—I was one of them—warned that by courting Russia and punishing Europe, Trump might be handing the world and, most alarmingly, Washington’s traditional allies to China. That Beijing would welcome such an opportunity seemed obvious: China had often sought to drive a wedge between the U.S. and its friends, but lately Xi had strained China’s relations with Europe by supporting Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Now Beijing could patch things up by presenting itself as a more reliable partner than Washington.

    “But to the extent that Beijing has made any such effort so far, it was short-lived. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi reportedly told the European Union’s top diplomat in July that China could not accept a Russian loss in Ukraine, because that might lead the United States to focus its energies on containing China’s rise. This position on Ukraine, combined with a hard stance on trade issues, has left China unable to improve its ties with Europe, as was evident at a Beijing summit with EU leaders in July, during which the two sides found hardly any common ground.”

    Read more: [https://theatln.tc/IvvTMdn5](https://theatln.tc/IvvTMdn5)

  2. This is a response to how fast the EU bent their knee to Trump and how NATO keeps calling him their daddy.

  4. You can’t just swap the US for China, doesn’t work that way

  5. Three decades of increasing economic and security interdependence are holding the West together. Trump is rightfully exploiting Europe’s reluctance to let go of that system. 

    The Atlantic continues to be the platform for the most shallow and ideologically stunted opinions on foreign relations. 

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