China and Russia's expansionist ambitions a dual threat

It's looking more and more like Vladimir Putin wants to invade Ukraine, whether to shore up his own faltering domestic popularity, or just out of some atavistic notion of recreating the glories of the Soviet Union. Who knows what Putin thinks? He doesn't seem very sure himself sometimes.

Ukraine has been fighting off Russian incursions since the invasion of Crimea back in 2014, particularly along the border region of Donbass. In the last year or so, though, Russia has moved nearly 80,000 troops to these border regions (now closer to 150,000), and it seems quite likely that Putin is testing out new US President Joe Biden, after four years of softness and appeasement under Trump. So far, he has been strongly supportive of the Western line of backing for Ukraine's position.

At the same time, China, under the increasingly paranoid and repressive regime of President Xi Jinping, has been ratcheting up its threats to Taiwan, both verbally and in the form of flyovers by bombers and fighter jets and other military activities. Chinese spokespeople have reiterated the party line that any further Taiwanese attempts to establish independence "means war" as far as China is concerned, and there is no reason to suspect that they are bluffing.

Both China and Russia are clearly in a belligerent and expansionist mood, and it seems like no coincidence that this is occurring at the start of a new US presidency, and that it is occurring concurrently. The latest National Intelligence briefing to the US Senate Intelligence Committee makes no bones about China and Russia, and particularly their combination, being far and away the greatest threat to the USA and to the world.

Notably, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying recently went out of her way to indicate that China and Russia are to a large extent moving in lockstep with each other, and "will give strong backing to each other on issues of core interests as important partners". Most Western commentators are reasonably dismissive of China and Russia's ability to work together, the differences in their approaches being too great, and their own specific ambitions being too overriding. But it's certainly not something that analysts are ignoring, nor can they afford to.