Don and Vlad’s makeup has Europe in tears. But it’s Beijing whose heart is broken.

(Originally published Feb. 19 in “What in the World“) All eyes are on Europe as the spurned lover in Trump’s moves to court Putin and end the war in Ukraine. The real odd man out, though, is China.

Washington’s antagonism towards China’s economic and military rise arguably pushed it more firmly toward Moscow in recent years, a relationship that Washington has characterized as an Axis of Autocracy between its comic book Hall of Doom: China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. As evidence, Western media are fond of pointing to the 2022 declaration of a “no limits” partnership between Beijing and Moscow and China’s refusal to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or to obey international sanctions against Moscow.

But Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies professor Sergey Radchenko reminds us in a piece for Foreign Affairs that China and Russia have always been frenemies, with mutual suspicion that dates back to the 1950s and is as long and winding as their 4,200km shared border. China and its President Xi Jinping simply don’t trust Russia, and they certainly don’t have any faith in their other neighbor and ally of convenience, North Korea. Beijing knows even better than Washington that Pyongyang’s leadership is as crazy as a bag of cats.

So, Moscow’s decision to accept weapons and troops from Pyongyang for use against Ukraine—and to give technical assistance to North Korea’s nuclear missile program in return—was particularly ill-advised from Beijing’s perspective. It was also completely unexpected, according to Radchenko. Moscow’s failure to consult Beijing on North Korea has undoubtedly deepened Beijing’s mistrust of Moscow and Pyongyang.

That mistrust will only be compounded by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s talks with his longtime admirer U.S. President Donald Trump. Ukraine and Europe weren’t invited to the latest talks in—fittingly for talks between autocrats—Saudi Arabia. But neither was China, despite its long efforts to cast itself as an honest broker between Moscow and Washington.

Beijing’s problem in this global confrontation, according to Radchenko, is that it isn’t interested in leading an ideological cold war to counter Washington’s fig-leaf for U.S. hegemony: democracy and self-determination. China’s sole selling point to the so-called Global South is simple yet unconvincing: end hegemony! Washington has perfected the art of deluding the world—and itself—that its foreign policy is about this high-minded ideological falderal. But China can’t seem to pull it off, probably because it isn’t selling Communism anymore, and it isn’t marketing autocracy either. China is about China’s naked self-interest, and its interest in that is nakedly apparent to everyone except the U.S.

Washington keeps misinterpreting China’s moves to defend itself from U.S. containment as part of a plot to undermine and destroy the United States. As Radchenko puts it:

Beijing’s predicament today is that it does not know how to reassure the United States that it is not seeking another cold war even as it actively prepares to wage one. China’s relentless nuclear buildup, its hostile espionage operations, its militant rhetoric, and, above all, its support for Russia suggest that Xi has already made his call and that a confrontation with the United States is inevitable.

Another of China’s great vulnerabilities is its lack of any evident successor to 71-year-old President Xi. Xi arguably established himself as “president for life” (by ending the two-term limit) in 2018 to crack entrenched corruption in China’s bureaucracy. There’s now no term limit that corrupt officials can out-wait as they did in the past.

Octogenarian leaders may be in vogue, but Xi can’t live forever. And as Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Brad Setser explains in The New York Times, Xi has put China in an economic quandary: the country has been leaning on exports to keep the economy from sinking into a deflationary spiral while the domestic construction sector festers and both consumers sit on their hands. But as Trump has shown, China can’t do that forever without its trading partners retaliating. Without painful domestic restructuring that might reduce the Communist Party’s control, China may soon run out of economic rope.

Xi’s conundrum is that his crackdown on corruption has resulted in government paralysis, as bureaucrats clean and dirty alike freeze to avoid being accused of corruption. In 2019, Xi expanded the list of corrupt offenses to include this “formalism and bureaucracy.”

If peace breaks out in Ukraine, China could be left with a more dangerous North Korea on one border, and a more assertive Russia on another. And if Putin can end the war in Ukraine and get Trump to ease sanctions, China also stands to lose its cheap Russian oil just as Trump levels his tariff bazooka at Beijing.

If Europe is considering sending troops to Ukraine to keep the war going, Beijing might just want to offer to send some of its own to help out.