Why China and Russia Will Never Be Friends - The Global Gambit - Pyotr Kurzin (with guest Paul Warburg)

Talk of a deep China–Russia alliance continues to spread — but beneath the headlines, the relationship is becoming more asymmetrical, conditional, and transactional, not more unified. What’s often presented as a strategic bloc is, in reality, a partnership shaped by leverage, mistrust, and diverging endgames.

In this conversation with Paul Warburg, we unpack why Beijing and Moscow are best understood as a marriage of convenience, not natural allies. We examine the historical tensions that still shape their thinking, how Russia’s growing energy dependence is quietly shifting power in China’s favor, and why Beijing remains unwilling to sacrifice its economic ties with the West for Moscow’s ambitions.

We also explore China’s strategic calculations as the war drags on: how much instability it can tolerate, where its patience with Russia begins to fray, and why China’s long-term priorities increasingly diverge from the Kremlin’s short-term needs.

Because beneath the rhetoric of partnership and shared opposition to the West, a more uncomfortable question is emerging — not whether China and Russia cooperate today, but how durable that cooperation really is when interests, not ideology, are doing the binding.