When Western media pundits write about China and Russia, they’re really writing about themselves—but they don’t even realise it

'Experts' can’t stop casting Beijing as Washington, and Moscow as London: obedient, nostalgic, and fading.

There is a certain type of British pundit — attached to the think tank racket, weaned on Oxbridge seminar rooms, and spiritually tethered to the transatlantic umbilical cord — who cannot write about Russia or China without unknowingly writing about themselves. They do not analyse so much as transpose. And in doing so, they project the traumas and neuroses of their own national history onto foreign powers they do not truly understand.

Take, for example, this past Sunday’s column in The Sunday Times, where the historian Mark Galeotti declared: “Xi, not Trump, has the most power over Putin. Will he use it?” The subheading confidently suggested that “China’s influence over Russia could yet change the war in Ukraine.” In Galeotti’s telling, Beijing is now the master of Moscow’s fate; able, perhaps even obligated, to “reel in” the Russian president if only it chooses to act.

Galeotti writes: “The man best placed to make Putin change course in Ukraine is not Trump, but Xi.” He imagines a world where “China’s influence over Russia could yet change the war,” as though Xi sits at a switchboard that controls the Kremlin’s decisions.

But beneath the confidence of this analysis lies a telling tic; a reflexive echo of Britain’s own position in the world. The Britain of Suez and Kosovo, of Blair nodding beside Bush and Cameron trailing Obama; a nation that once ruled the seas but now waits for Washington to tell it where to stand. The pundits who hold forth on Putin and Xi with the confidence of men drawing maps on pub napkins aren’t charting anything new; rather they’re just redrawing what they already know. Their reference point isn’t Moscow and Beijing. It’s London and Washington. The old “special relationship;” coats carried, hats doffed, the loyal nod from across the Atlantic. That’s the script they know by heart. And so they cast it again, out east.

But they’re missing the shape of what’s really there. Or maybe they just can’t face it. Russia and China aren’t acting out some Cold War revival in Mandarin and Cyrillic. This isn’t a rerun. Russia isn’t Britain; it doesn’t do subservience with a smile. There is no Hugh Grant blinking in the glow of Julia Roberts' bigger stage. And China, whatever else it is, isn’t stepping into Washington’s shoes.

This thing between them; it doesn’t fit neatly in any column or communique. It’s messier and heavier. Two sovereign powers, bruised by history, fenced in by attempted containment, learning how to move in sync because the old world they were told to follow no longer holds the centre. And because they’ve both had enough of bowing; whether to Brussels, to Washington, or to anybody else.

Of course the imbalance is real enough. China’s economy towers over Russia’s, and the Ukraine conflict has only tightened Moscow’s dependence on Chinese technology, capital, and trade routes.

But to read that as submission is to forget what strategic depth really means. Russia gives Beijing what it can buy — vast resources, certain strands of technology — and what it cannot: hard power reach, nuclear parity with Washington, and an unbroken Eurasian buffer from Kaliningrad to Kamchatka.

In return, China brings markets, systems, and access. Which should not be confused with fealty. It’s actually leveraged; traded, tested, and measured.

The habit of seeing it otherwise isn’t just a bad analysis; it’s a reflex rooted in Britain’s imperial hangover. A country that hasn’t made a truly sovereign foreign policy call in decades struggles to picture alliances between equals. It sees a pecking order where none exists.

A few Western voices get it — that this partnership runs on necessity, not domination — but they are the rare ones.

So when President Xi meets Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and speaks of “mutual support,” the reflex is to hear orders being given. When China sends Russia fibre optics, laser components, even silent military systems, the Western reading is always the same; proof of strings being pulled, never the give-and-take of barter between partners. Even the sight of Chinese troops standing alongside Russians is marked down as obedience, not the symbolism it was meant to carry.

What’s forming here is no clean return to the old bipolar world. It’s rougher than that; a web of multipolar coordination, power shared and bargained over, not handed down from on high.

Russia and China are trying to build that landscape; slowly, awkwardly, but with intent. They are synchronising their policies in BRICS and the SCO. They are cutting the dollar out of trade settlements. They are testing parallel financial systems, aligning technological standards, and building new formats that bypass the Western gatekeepers.

It is not seamless. Nor is it without tension. China spies on Russia; Russia counters in kind. Their mutual suspicion is institutional as much as cultural, and frictions in places like Central Asia — where China’s economic reach now often outpaces Russia’s political clout — are real. But it is also not the clean-cut hierarchy Western experts keep insisting it is. It is a marriage of convenience etched into being by pressure and time, and for now, one that suits them both.

The real tragedy is not that Britain misreads this; instead it’s that it does so with such smugness. As China and Russia negotiate the architecture of a post-Western order, the EU busies itself with preparing for a notional war with Russia that nobody, in their heart of hearts, really believes will ever actually happen. The UK and much of Western Europe, preoccupied with maintaining relevance in Washington’s orbit, misjudge the shifting global order.

And so we end up with op-eds in London broadsheets explaining how Xi can “reel in” Putin; as if this were a leash, not a ledger. As if history began in 2014. As if the story of two nuclear powers reorienting world politics could be reduced to a subplot in America’s next election cycle.

It cannot. And the longer Britain clings to its outdated mental maps, the more it will mistake shadow for shape. The post-Western world is not emerging because Moscow is weak or Beijing is cruel. It is emerging because the old centres no longer hold, and new ones are tired of asking permission.

If the West wants to understand that world, it must stop assuming every alliance has a master and a servant. Some countries have no desire to follow. They’ve seen where that leads.

Whether this alignment with China is good for Russia in the long term is another question; the jury is still out. As for the broader Europe, it almost certainly isn’t. But that’s not the point. This is what’s happening. Like it or not.