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’s a certain type of British pundit who can’t write about Russia or China without unknowingly writing about themselves. They’re usually attached to the think tank racket, weaned on Oxbridge seminar rooms, spiritually tethered to the transatlantic umbilical cord and they don’t analyse so much as transpose. And in doing so, they project the traumas and neuroses of their own national history onto foreign powers they don’t 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 and it’s a reflexive echo of Britain’s own position in the world. It’s 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, instead it’s London and Washington. The old “special relationship” with coats carried, hats doffed and the loyal nod from across the Atlantic .

Of course, 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 and this isn’t some rerun of an old show. Russia isn’t Britain, it doesn’t do subservience with a smile and there’s no Hugh Grant blinking in the glow of Julia Roberts' bigger stage. Meanwhile, China, whatever else it is, isn’t stepping into Washington’s shoes.

This thing between them, well it doesn’t fit neatly in any column or communique because it’s messier and heavier. We have two sovereign powers, bruised by history and 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 it’s because they’ve both had enough of bowing; whether that’s to Brussels, or to Washington, or to anybody else.

Of course the imbalance is real enough because 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. And all this should not be confused with fealty because 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 where a country that hasn’t made a truly sovereign foreign policy call in decades struggles to picture alliances between equals. Thus, its expert class see a pecking order where none exists.

A few Western voices understand 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, or even silent military systems, the Western reading is always the same; proof of strings being pulled and never the give-and-take of barter between partners. Even the sight of Chinese troops standing alongside Russians is marked down as obedience, in contrast to the symbolism it was meant to carry.

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

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

It’s not seamless and nor is it without tension: China spies on Russia and 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’s also not the clean-cut hierarchy Western experts keep insisting it is. Rather, it’s 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 British pundits misread this; instead it’s that they do it with such smugness. As China and Russia negotiate the architecture of a post-Western order and 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 misjudges the shifting global order. Most likely because it’s preoccupied with maintaining relevance in Washington’s orbit,

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

Well, it can’t, and the longer Britain clings to its outdated mental maps, the more it will remain deluded. The post-Western world is not emerging because Moscow is weak or Beijing is cruel. It’s happening because the old centres no longer hold, and new ones are tired of asking permission.

If the West wants to understand this reality, it must stop assuming every alliance has a master and a servant. Some countries have no desire to follow because they’ve seen where that has led others

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