As Moscow face-plants in Ukraine, relations between Washington and Beijing resemble a nuclear-barbed spat between the Plastics.

(Originally published March 14 in “What in the World‘) U.S. officials have leaked new intel to the press that Moscow asked China for military and economic aid after it invaded Ukraine. Washington won’t say exactly what Russian President Vladimir Putin asked his bestie, Chinese President Xi Jinping, in order to keep secret how they’re getting all this good dirt for U.S. President Joe Biden’s burn book. But after declaring at the Beijing Winter Olympics that their friendship had “no limits,” we’re supposed to infer that Xi’s aid to Putie is imminent. Even if it isn’t.

The unfortunate thing is that Washington seems determined to cast China as Putin’s cheerleader and imminent ally in a new World War, rather than do the smart thing and try to convince China to help defuse the crisis. Already stumbling toward war with Putin by goading him into an invasion from which there is no retreat, Washington now risks antagonizing Beijing and forcing it further into Putin’s arms—a self-fulfilled prophecy.

The New York Times’ and The Washington Post’s coverage of the leak reads as though they were cribbing from the same press release, with each following the news almost immediately with White House national security Jake Sullivan’s stern warning on CNN that the U.S. has said “privately to Beijing that there will absolutely be consequences for large-scale sanctions evasion efforts or support to Russia to backfill them.”

Washington chose to leak this info and its “private warning” on CNN just as Sullivan is headed to Rome today to meet with his Chinese counterpart. For its part, China’s embassy in Washington said it was unaware of any such request. We’re supposed to infer that China is lying and that Sullivan is marching to Rome to bang his fist on the table and scare Beijing back onto the sidelines.

Let’s hope this is just a narrative Washington is spinning for domestic consumption (look at us gittin’ tough on China!). Because if this is Sullivan’s opening diplomatic gambit in talks with Beijing, we’re in big trouble.

There’s still no reason to believe that China is ready to launch World War III any more than anyone else. True, the media made a meal out of the fact that Beijing hasn’t condemned Putin’s invasion. But Beijing has since broken ranks to call it “a war,” and called for a ceasefire and negotiations.

More damning was the revelation that Beijing had prior knowledge of the invasion and asked Putin when he came to the Olympics to delay any action against Ukraine until after the Games. But even this may not be as damning as it seems: first, Beijing had prior knowledge of the invasion because everyone did by the time Putin went to Beijing in February. Even this newsletter was writing by mid-January about the likelihood of an invasion. Washington shared its intel on Putin’s plans with Beijing as early as November. Beijing then shared the intel with Moscow, saying Washington was trying to “sow discord.” The Times portrayed this as duplicity by Beijing, but how else would an ally confront another with incriminating information from one of their mutual rivals? “You know what so-and-so says about you? I know it’s a lie, but say it ain’t so, comrade!”

As for the request by Beijing for Russia to delay the invasion, the Times makes the point that no one has seen this request to gauge its context. We don’t know whether it was “Please wait until after the Games and then “‘full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes!,’” or “Look, about your upcoming visit to the Games: don’t you dare embarrass us by launching an attack on Ukraine while the Games are on!”

So far there’s really not much in China’s behavior that suggests it’s just champing at the bit to come to Putin’s aid. It’s true China shares Russia’s unhappiness about living in a world dominated by American might and economic interests. It’s also true that China shares Russia’s dislike of what even many Americans see as U.S. hypocrisy in foreign policy, intervening militarily against weaker regimes it opposes (Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, et. al.), and censuring and sanctioning others (i.e. China) over domestic policies with which it disagrees (e.g. Tibet, Hong Kong, Xinjiang).

That hypocrisy was on full display this month as Washington lobbied autocratic foes in Caracas, Riyadh and Tehran for oil to offset lost Russian supplies. Iran scuppered any hopes for this forgive-and-forget approach on Sunday by bombing a U.S. consulate complex in northern Iraq. Combined with North Korea’s recent flurry of missile tests and renewed construction of a nuclear test site, and you have the makings of a nice Eurasian axis against the West and America’s Asian allies.

China can certainly relate to Russia’s anxiety about the eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in the past three decades since the fall of the Soviet Union. As Putin has said, if NATO wasn’t preparing for war against Russia, what was it protecting all those new members from the old Warsaw Pact from? Now NATO is supplying Ukraine with weapons to defend itself against the invasion, with Putin warning that arms convoys would be legitimate targets. Russian forces on Sunday attacked a military base less than 20 kilometers from the Polish border.

The rather surprising reaction to the attack on this base in western Ukraine seems to be one of, well, surprise that Putin would venture so far west and so close to Poland. This despite the fact that before the invasion the base was hosting joint training exercises and other cooperation between NATO and Ukraine’s military—exactly the kind of security threat Putin was complaining about. Since the invasion, The Times reports, the base has been hosting foreign mercenaries joining Ukraine’s foreign legion to fight the Russians. Given this, was there ever any doubt that this base would eventually come under Russian fire? Sullivan warned that any attacks that stray into Poland would be an act of war against NATO.

China faces a similar and understandable sense of anxiety about the U.S.-led Quad (The United States, Australia, India, and Japan) alliance, and the even more recent and culturally tone-deaf, Anglo-Saxon AUKUS alliance (Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States). Both are meant to counter China’s growing influence in the Indo-Pacific region despite the fact that two key members aren’t in the Indo-Pacific. No such alliance, furthermore, exists to defend the Americas from the influence of their hemisphere’s largest economy and most populous nation. But China is an up-and-coming, economic and military rival to the U.S., competing for technological and economic primacy in the world and for military influence in the Pacific Rim, where the U.S. has dominated for almost 80 years.

This isn’t to say that Beijing is right, just that Beijing’s Communist leaders believe they are right just as much as Washington’s Democrats and Republicans believe they are right and just. This isn’t about who’s right. It’s about avoiding a war over the answer.

Despite its rivalry with Washington, China has more to lose from siding with Russia than it stands to gain. Wang Huiyao, who advises Chian’s government as head of the Beijing-based Center for China and Globalization, a nongovernmental think tank, points out in a piece in The Times that China is both Russia and Ukraine’s largest trade partner. And both are vital links between China and Europe. They are not potential replacements for the West economically or financially. China’s total trade with Russia is still only a tenth its trade with Europe and the U.S.

It might, however, be tempting to think Beijing is eager to use Russia as a catalyst to reduce the West’s dominance in Asia and over China’s access to trade routes and resources in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa, thus accelerating the return of China to its Ming dynasty greatness and replacing Pax Americana. After all, restoring their bygone imperial glory is what drives both Putin and Xi. Putin longs for the Soviet-era influence in which he came of age. But China’s zenith was largely mercantile, a system toppled by British gunboat diplomacy in the mid-19th century (resulting in Hong Kong’s predicament), that can’t be restored by destroying its largest trading partners.

So China won’t want to side with Russia. But it also can’t be reasonably expected to switch sides right away, if ever. For starters, there’s the whole blood brothers pact Xi made with Putin just before the invasion. And given that Beijing’s anti-U.S. rhetoric has created a jingoistic obsession among its own domestic nationalists, suddenly switching sides would incur their wrath just as Xi navigates the delicate dance of winning a third term at this month’s National People’s Congress. Then there’s that whole long-term rivalry for global economic and regional military primacy thing. China has its pride, after all.

And pride is where Washington usually makes it biggest blunders. Much of the acrimony between Beijing and Washington stems from the tone of their discussions. Washington typically likes to lecture condescendingly to foreign powers. Smaller nations that need the U.S. put up with this. The U.S. is big and powerful, so arrogance is to be expected. But for up-and-comers like Japan in the 1980s and China more recently, Washington’s attitude achieves very little. That’s especially true when negotiating with a country that’s not only the world’s most populous, but also has convinced itself (rightly or wrongly) that it’s on the verge of reversing almost 400 years of foreign domination to retake its rightful place in the world.

A little mutual respect would go a long way. But that’s difficult for Washington. U.S. foreign policy tends to be blindly absolutist even when its best interests require compartmentalization. Talking with China about avoiding a world war, after all, does mean negotiating with Communists and tacitly accommodating their human rights policies, not to mention their trade policies.

The best Washington can likely expect from Beijing is for it to be a go-between, an honest broker. It’s a role that not only allows Beijing to avoid betraying an ally for a rival, but plays to Beijing’s desperate desire to be seen as a global diplomatic player.

Whether Washington can stomach asking Beijing for its help, however, remains to be seen. We’ll have to see what Sullivan says in Rome. Americans like a stacked deck and Beijing may not be willing to give them one in Ukraine. As Wang writes:

Beijing’s goal would be to find a solution that gives Mr. Putin sufficient security assurances that can be presented as a win to his domestic audience while protecting Ukraine’s core sovereignty and NATO’s open-door policy. Finding a landing zone for such an agreement is challenging but not impossible. Some creative diplomacy could solve this, such as a formula for NATO expansion that rules out Ukrainian membership in practice while preserving its sovereignty and NATO principles in theory.

This is a solution this newsletter has been advocating from the beginning, but it may be too late now that Putin’s invasion is underway. Washington many now be satisfied with nothing less than Putin’s defeat in Ukraine and eventual ouster, something Putin may already realize.

So far, America’s tactics have been so wrongfooted that one might think it’s Washington aching to start World War III. The Biden Administration’s strategy of leaking Putin’s buildup in hopes of preventing invasion failed miserably. If Putin was planning to invade regardless, the intel leaks failed to stop it. And if he wasn’t, they arguably goaded him into acting out what might have been a bluff.