There’s a growing intimacy between two of Asia’s big naval powers and it’s causing disquiet among regional watchers and maritime policymakers. Russia and China are growing closer in the nautical realm, much to the chagrin of Indian, American and Southeast Asian analysts who feel that their growing bilateral synergy could impact the balance of power in Asia. The trigger for the latest bout of anxiety is ‘Joint Sea-2016’— a joint Sino-Russian naval exercise featuring surface ships, submarines, fixed-wing aircraft, ship-borne helicopters and amphibious vessels navies. China has announced that its biggest naval drill with Russia will include the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s (PLA-N’s) Nanhai fleet, and will involve, among other exercises, anti-submarine and amphibious missions. This is the first time Russian and Chinese naval contingents are meeting for combat drills in the South China Sea (thoughreportedly not in a contested part of the region), however there’s been visible evidence of a growing synergy in other parts of maritime Eurasia. In August last year, the two navies carried out ‘Joint Sea 2015 II’, a high-end naval exercise in the Sea of Japan, featuring live-firing drills, anti-submarine operations and close-support combat drills. During an earlier exercise in the Mediterranean Sea and Black Sea in May the same year, senior commanders made statements challenging America’s strategic dominance of Eurasia. Russian and Chinese leaders believe that the US is the central destabilizing factor in the region’s geopolitics, and is engaged in a systemic containment of Moscow and Beijing. By staging close-combat naval exercises, they hope to warn Washington that its primacy in maritime Asia is at an end. The prospect of joint amphibious exercises near the South China Sea has alarmed regional watchers. Many fear a repeat of the August 2015 drills, when the Russian and Chinese navies simulated a mock ground assault in which 400 PLA marines landed on an island in...

  Western observers inexplicably dismiss all signs of a Russo-Chinese alliance with the argument that underlying incompatibilities between Russia and China will prevent any real cooperation. Yet while disappointments and tensions exist between them, all the evidence points to the formation of an alliance, or what the Russian analyst Alexander Gabuev calls “an asymmetric interdependence,” where Moscow depends more on Beijing than vice versa. Indeed, Russian officials have, since 2014, spoken openly in terms of an alliance and used that word. Russian President Vladimir Putin most recently stated that: As we had never reached this level of relations before, our experts have had trouble defining today’s general state of our common affairs. It turns out that to say we have strategic cooperation is not enough anymore. This is why we have started talking about a comprehensive partnership and strategic collaboration. “Comprehensive” means that we work virtually on all major avenues; “strategic” means that we attach enormous inter-governmental importance to this work. This is too close to advocacy of an alliance to be coincidental. Putin has also spoken of Russia catching the wind of China’s growth in its sails and derided the China threat theory. He also indicated that Russia and China would begin discussing a vast “Eurasia project,” presumably comprising both China’s One Belt One Road (OBOR) and Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). Presumably these talks are based upon China’s earlier assent to the idea of linking Russia’s plans for integrating Eurasia through the EEU to the OBOR project. China’s Victory over Russia This sequence actually displays China’s victory over Russia and Russia’s inability to compete with China. Russia now is merely a “junior brother” in such endeavors. Typically, China graciously but decisively punctured Russia’s grandiloquent Eurasian and great power pretensions. And Russia’s recklessness and failure to reform greatly assisted in the...