Balancing or backscratching? Sino-Russian logrolling during US decline

Abstract

How will American relative decline impact security cooperation between Russia and China? The conventional wisdom holds that the Sino-Russian “strategic partnership” is largely a “marriage of convenience” held together only\xa0by shared antipathy toward the US-led international order. From a traditional balance of power perspective, given their lack of a shared vision for global and regional order, we should expect Sino-Russian cooperation to deteriorate as US relative power recedes. I suggest, to the contrary, that Sino-Russian cooperation could remain quite durable throughout a prolonged period of American decline and retrenchment. I apply theories of bureaucratic and legislative “logrolling” to demonstrate how China and Russia each have incentives to support one another’s revisionist actions in their respective home regions. An underlying asymmetry of regional importance—China’s prioritization of East Asia, and Russia’s prioritization of Europe—enables this logrolling dynamic. Thus, I argue that while there are few shared interests between them, Russia and China could well maintain a limited but highly consequential cooperative relationship over the medium to long term. As such, the Sino-Russian threat to US-led order comes not from a coordinated balancing effort, but from reciprocal support of one another’s region-specific revisionist actions.