Making China An Outsider In The Global Order Could Backfire

Both Russia’s scorched-earth invasion of Ukraine and the swift fury of the US and European Union-led global response seem to have come as a shock to Beijing.

Photo Insert: The resurgence of an economic and strategically unified West, and the risk of the financial and political liability of protecting a dependent, wrecked petrostate, should lead Chinese President Xi Jinping to see the wisdom of cooperating with the global economic order.

China’s ambiguous stance—clearly anti-American but not explicitly pro-Russian or anti-Ukrainian—in part comes because the West’s surprisingly strong response has frustrated Chinese ambitions, Robert A. Manning, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and its New American Engagement Initiative, wrote for Foreign Policy late on May 9, 2022.

It may not have fully sunk in yet in Beijing, but the resurgence of an economic and strategically unified West, and the risk of the financial and political liability of protecting a dependent, wrecked petrostate, should lead Chinese President Xi Jinping to see the wisdom of cooperating with the global economic order, albeit with a larger Chinese voice and modest distancing from its partner in Moscow.

Despite its echoing of Russian disinformation, Beijing has cautiously cut off Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank loans and trade financing to Moscow, and China’s state-run Sinopec halted gas and petrochemical projects in Russia.

With $3 trillion in mostly dollar and euro assets and watching the US disappear Russian Central Bank assets overnight, Beijing’s caution is understandable.

But would the US accept the inclusion of a more cooperative China if Beijing changed course and used its leverage to help resolve the Ukraine question? Given the relentless US indictment of Chinese behavior on Ukraine, even before China has taken any actual moves to aid Moscow, Xi could be forgiven for thinking that the answer is: Probably not.

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