When Donald Trump declared that Joe Biden had made the “unthinkable” mistake of pushing Moscow into Beijing’s arms, the US president suggested their partnership was inherently fragile.

“Biden did something that was unthinkable. He drove China and Russia together. It's the one thing you didn't want to do because they're basically natural enemies,” Trump said in a recent interview with Fox News after the Alaska summit on August 15. “They’re basically natural enemies.”

Yet Russian President Vladimir Putin’s latest meeting with Xi Jinping at the SCO summit in Tianjin in China tells a different story. What binds the two powers is resentment toward the West, not mutual cooperation for economic benefit, and the relationship is only set to deepen — largely on Beijing’s terms.

As bne IntelliNews has argued, despite being “frenemies”, the needs of the rising BRICS bloc has created an emerging anti-West shared ideology between Putin and Xi and the other leading emerging markets leaders. They are hard at work setting up a slew of non-aligned institutions to coordinate their actions to create what Xi described at the SCO summit as an “equitable multipolar world order” leveraging Global South “mega-markets power.”

Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, argues that Trump’s view is misplaced in a note published on September 8 . “In Trump’s telling, the partnership between China and Russia is unnatural, which may enable the US to drive a wedge between the two. A key source of distrust is supposedly demography,” he notes.

The contrast between Russia’s sparsely populated Far East — just 7.9mn people — and China’s 1.4bn has long troubled Moscow. But with China’s population now in decline, those anxieties “have been mostly alleviated”.

The real friction lies elsewhere. “It’s root is not demography, but growing economic and technological asymmetry,” Gabuev says. China has become a manufacturing and technological powerhouse of the 21st century, while “Putin’s Russia is a pale shadow of its former self”. Western sanctions have only increased Beijing’s leverage.

The shift is stark. “Before 2014, 80% of Russia’s trade was with the West, and just 10% with China,” Gabuev notes. Since the annexation of Crimea, and even more so after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the balance has flipped. Today Beijing accounts for more than 30% of Russia’s export revenues and supplies over 40% of its imports, including components vital for Russia’s war machine. By contrast, Russia makes up just 3% of China’s exports and 5% of imports — “smaller and thus replaceable,” says Gabuev.

For Moscow, there is no way back. Putin consciously made this choice when he decided to cross the border into Ukraine in February 2022; he made a big bet on the Global South Century, hoping that trade formerly done with Europe could be replaced by trade in the burgeoning markets of Asia, Africa and Latin America. And to a large extent it has worked, with oil exports in particular, for now at least.

“When Putin turned his back on the West a decade ago, he had China to fill the void. But now, even if for some reason he chose to pivot away from Beijing, there is no credible alternative,” Gabuev warns. No other partner offers markets, technology, logistics, and sanctions-busting finance — all without questions about Ukraine.

Xi is well aware of the dependence and has built non-interference into domestic affairs into the heart of his multipolar world view. In the new economic paradigm of Trump’s transaction world order and his aggressive tariffs policy, this non-interference is the cornerstone of the emerging Global South cooperation and has allowed other frenemies like China and India to patch over their long-standing difference and come together to protect themselves from what they now see as the greater threat posed by the US.

Putin has been working hard to mitigate some of his dependence on Beijing by actively courting the other members of the Global South. He has been on trips to Vietnam and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is constantly on the road in South America and Africa, deepening ties and handing out energy and arms deals willy nilly to tie Global South leaders to the Kremlin. But while this further cements relations in the emerging BRICS bloc, no amount of good relations with other emerging markets can offset the sheer power and size of the Chinese economy.

Moscow’s dependency on Beijing should alarm Russia’s elite, says Gabuev. “In theory, this should be deeply unsettling for any pragmatic decision-maker in the Kremlin,” Gabuev observes. But Putin, he says, “is no pragmatic decision-maker, and the deepening vassalage to China is his own choice. This is the price Putin is making the country pay for chasing his dream of dominating Ukraine.”

Washington has little leverage to reverse the drift. Some have suggested that Trump could pull off a “reverse Nixon” and split Russia off from China by forming a business partnership with Putin. But even if the US reopens trade with Moscow, “it still won’t be able to substitute the $245bn trade with China,” Gabuev argues. Current US-Russia trade stands at just $3.5bn, far below the $45bn record in 2011. Europe, meanwhile, has neither the appetite nor the political space to restore pre-war economic ties where trade also used to be north of €300bn a year, including energy exports. The new EU-US trade deal leaves no role for Russian hydrocarbons, after European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen agreed to increase Europe’s energy imports from the US to $250bn a year – a deal some analysts have called delusional.

The only partial counterweight to Russia’s growing addiction to China is India, which now buys about 40% of Russia’s oil exports. But here too the US may be undermining its own strategy, after the US doubled tariffs on India in August to 50% for buying Russian oil. “Ironically, if the Trump administration ultimately succeeds in forcing New Delhi to decrease its reliance on Russian oil imports, it will only boost the Kremlin’s reliance on China even further,” Gabuev warns.

For Beijing, the trajectory is favourable. Russia’s dependence comes wrapped in diplomatic ceremony, flattering rhetoric, and shared hostility to American leadership. “The Kremlin’s growing dependency on Beijing is here to stay — at least, as long as Putin’s obsession with Ukraine and his grudges against the West are a placeholder for a pragmatic grand strategy for Russia,” Gabuev concludes.