In February 2020, Wikistrat ran a simulation that examined future scenarios for the expected state of the relationship between the two powers in 2025 and their impact on the United States
While China-Russia relations have known many ups and downs in the past fifty years, relations between the two powers have grown increasingly closer in the past decade.
A January 2019 threat assessment by the then-US Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats claimed that “China and Russia are more aligned than at any point since the mid- 1950s.” The Chinese and the Russians seem to agree with this assessment; Andrey Denisov, the Russian ambassador to China, said “Particularly over the past decade,
Russian-Chinese relations and pragmatic cooperation in various sectors made great
headway,” and China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi claimed that the bilateral ties between
the two powers are “at their best in history.”
Moscow and Beijing are also increasingly taking steps in tandem at the Security Council in responding to US actions and, most recently, coordinated their response to the US strike on Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in Iraq in January 2020 at the United Nations.
To assess the impact of changes in the China-Russia relationship on the United States,
Wikistrat ran a simulation in February 2020 which examined future scenarios for the
expected state of the relationship between the two powers in 2025 and their impact
on the United States. The simulation included three rounds, which featured different
scenarios, simulating different levels of cooperation between Russia and China to which
the United States will have to respond. Below are the findings from the simulation.