Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to meet with China’s top leader Xi Jinping in Beijing soon after the China-U.S. summit on May 14-15. Do these back-to-back visits indicate a new phase of triangular diplomacy? Unlike Nixon-era China-U.S. summits, where U.S. and Chinese leaders sought to use their rapprochement to further isolate the Soviet Union, the upcoming meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Xi is unlikely to bring pressure to bear on Russia on Iran or Ukraine.
Trump is no stranger to triangular diplomacy. In April 2017, while hosting Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago, Trump revealed that the United States had just bombed Russia-allied Syria. China later abstained on a United Nations resolution condemning Syria’s use of chemical weapons against civilians, instead of vetoing it along with Russia. At the time, a Chinese expert on the U.S. argued that Trump may have been trying to create discord between China and Russia over Syria with this move, as well as to demonstrate his own distance from Putin to domestic audiences.
As Xi and Trump prepare to meet this week, Western media have reported that Russia was shipping drones to Iran involving features upgrading the Shahed models that Iran had supplied to Russia for the war in Ukraine. The U.S. Department of the Treasury also sanctioned three Chinese firms – Meentropy Technology Co. Ltd, The Earth Eye and Chang Guang Satellite Technology Co., Ltd. – for providing satellite imagery to Iran to assist with missile targeting and another nine Chinese companies for their involvement in Iranian oil shipments to China.
Both China and Russia have partnership agreements with Iran, but both fall short of a military alliance. Moreover, despite considerable overlap in their critical statements about U.S. actions in Iran, their interests in the conflict do not always align. Although the Chinese economy has weathered the closure of the Strait of Hormuz thanks to oil reserves and a growing renewables sector, the higher energy prices and impact on trade of other commodities from the Gulf – especially chemicals needed for fertilizer and semiconductor production – create economic risks for China in a protracted conflict.
Russia, by contrast, has benefited from higher oil prices, and is much less reliant on trade from the Gulf. Nevertheless, some Russian experts argue that Russia must balance its ties with Iran with relations with other Gulf states and derives some advantage from a continued U.S. engagement in the Middle East, as long as Moscow plays a stabilizing role.
For Xi Jinping, the Iran war is yet another challenge for Sino-Russian relations. Last month China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi urged “closer and stronger strategic coordination” within the partnership, typically a signal of a perceived lack of coordinated activity (Wang made a similar statement right after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, for example). Nevertheless, it is unlikely that Xi would agree to urge Russia to pressure Iran to stand down in the war with the United States and Israel. While presenting itself as a potential interlocutor on the conflict, China has yet to play a direct role in the talks, now mediated by Pakistan.
Like many European leaders, Trump has also urged China to prod Russia to end the war in Ukraine, to no avail. As with the war in Iran, China has floated various peace plans for Ukraine but has not been central to negotiations. With China reportedly supplying 90 percent of Russia’s dual-use technology in the war as of May 2026, Ukraine does not view China as a neutral party. In addition to material support, China has parroted Russian language about its legitimate interests, further tarnishing any prospective mediation role among Europeans. In April 2026, for the first time the European Union imposed sanctions on several Chinese entities for their role in this dual-use trade.
Many of the other likely topics of discussion at the China-U.S. summit – trade and investment, Taiwan, critical minerals, AI – do not directly impact Russia or China-Russia relations. Nevertheless, a major trade or investment agreement between China and the United States would highlight the considerable discrepancy in China-U.S. and China-Russia economic relations. In 2025, trade between the United States and China reached $414.7 billion, nearly double the Sino-Russian volume of $234 billion. Although education has been designated a priority area for Sino-Russian cooperation in 2026-27, the number of Chinese students in the U.S. (265,919), while declining in recent years, still far outpaces the number of Chinese students opting to go to Russian universities (56,000).
Even if the China-U.S. summit achieves some notable results in trade, investment and other key issues, by comparison the upcoming Xi-Putin meeting – one of more than 40 such interactions – is likely to portray the Sino-Russian partnership as a key force for global stability. The strategic context of the Israel-U.S. war in Iran will provide a welcome opportunity for Xi and Putin to highlight their areas of agreement and downplay the differences between them over Iran, North Korea, and many other issues.
Although an authoritative article in People’s Daily referred to economic ties as “the ballast” of the China-U.S. relationship, Chinese officials often characterized the Sino-Russian partnership itself as a “ballast stone for safeguarding peace and stability.” Wu Dahui, deputy director of the Russian Research Institute at Tsinghua University, who has worked for the People’s Liberation Army, recently spoke of the more than 60,000 lines of communication between the two countries, connecting the two like blood vessels in one body.
The China-U.S. summit represents an important step in stabilizing relations, but the Sino-Russian summit will come across as more robust, at least in terms of the frequency and scope of bilateral dialogue. In this context, the prospects for U.S. triangular diplomacy in Beijing do not seem promising.
