Xi and Putin Think They’re Winning — and Maybe They Are

With hindsight, the last time Vladimir Putin visited Xi Jinping in China, just three weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine, was a moment of hubris — two supremely confident leaders marking their bid to shake up a world organized by and for the US and its allies. Well, they certainly shook it up, even if not in the way they intended.

Putin’s catastrophic error in attempting to invade a neighbor the size of France as though it were a glorified training exercise has, by some estimates, resulted in halving Russia’s military strength. The supercar that was China’s economy, meanwhile, has sputtered into the slow lane, with forecasts of when it will overtake the US in current dollar terms pushed into the future. So, it’s tempting to imagine Xi and an increasingly dependent Putin humbled at their reunion, the sinews of their “unlimited’’ bond already tearing. But that, to borrow a wonderful phrase from Sarah Paine, a professor of history and grand strategy at the US Naval War College, would be playing “half-court tennis” — the kind where you never see the next ball coming because you aren’t paying attention to the other side’s game.

Paine says that to understand why China and Russia do what they do, you need to see them for what they are: continental powers in a global order that was organized over centuries by successive maritime powers, first British and then American. The difference is big. Maritime nations ultimately are about trade, and that in turn tends to attract allies and encourage the development of international rules because they enable wealth creation. The territorial wars that a continental world order based on spheres of influence implies are, by contrast, huge destroyers of wealth and value. Ukraine is a clear example.

Sea powers do attack and subdue other countries, as the US did in Iraq and the British Empire in its many colonies. They also break the rules when it suits them. Yet the expeditionary wars they fight are necessarily smaller and overseas, taking a far lower toll on lives and wealth at home. Rarely do they conquer territory for its own sake, focusing more on containment and regime change to assert their interests. They also prefer stable to unstable neighbors because failed states tend not to do much trade.

Continental powers, by contrast, care a lot about territory and will, at times, pursue its acquisition to their own economic detriment. Historically, continental powers also are prone to destabilizing neighbors if they can, either to later absorb them or ensure that no powerful threat emerges on their doorstep. That habitual, sometimes justified and, at other times, self-fulfilling paranoia also weakens their most likely trading partners.