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China and Russia’s "no-limits partnership"—and their deepening ties with Iran and North Korea—has become a defining challenge for the West. But is this an enduring alliance or just a strategic marriage of convenience?
Watch the critical conversation, hosted by the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and live from the Munich Security Conference 2025, here.
Belfer Center Director Meghan L. O’Sullivan set the scene at Belfer’s Munich Security Conference 2025 side event, A Conversation on Adversarial Alignment. The topic at hand: the true nature of China-Russia-Iran-North Korea ties and what they mean for the U.S. and the world.
The conversation, moderated by David Sanger, explored the panelists’ views on these countries’ relations—whether enduring bonds or mere marriages of convenience—amid the Trump Administration’s early moves. Speakers were Fiona Hill and Belfer Senior Fellows Ian Bremmer and Dmytro Kuleba.
Participants included Belfer's own Graham Allison, the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government, who shared his views on U.S.-Russia-China dynamics and the potential end of the war in Ukraine.
Dmytro Kuleba drew on his recent experience as Ukraine’s foreign minister to analyze the motivations of China and North Korea in aligning with Moscow, including in the ongoing Ukraine war.
Ian Bremmer, one of the world’s leading geopolitical analysts, argued that China has less in common with Russia, Iran, and North Korea than commonly assumed. His prediction: we will not be talking of adversarial alignment in the same way in 5 years.
Fiona Hill, among today’s most incisive experts on Vladimir Putin and Russian policies, portrayed Russia-China cooperation as primarily an alignment against the United States.
Among the questions posed by David Sanger, the New York Times correspondent and Harvard Kennedy School lecturer who moderated: if Trump forges a new relationship with Russia, will Iran and North Korea stay aligned with Moscow and Beijing?
On North Korea:
“The relationship between Russia and North Korea–and the prospect of this relationship–was clearly underestimated by everyone… When Country A sends its soldiers to die for Country B, I could not imagine a more narrow and diligent definition of an alliance."
- Dmytro Kuleba
"China, North Korea and Iran have pulled together with Russia precisely because of the war in Ukraine. And [the war] is not because of Ukraine."
- Fiona Hill
President Trump and the United States Effect:
"The precise motivation for all of these countries to come together behind Russia is, frankly, because of the United States."
- Fiona Hill
“However close Russia is with China ideologically, Russia is actually, in many ways, increasingly aligned with Trump. I mean, they both want to destroy Europe, right? They both want the European Union to be over.”
- Ian Bremmer
“Just as we're having a negotiation–or Trump thinks he's having a negotiation with Putin, over the heads of Ukraine and Europe–he's totally neglecting to think about what the dynamics might be with China, North Korea and Iran as well.”
- Fiona Hill
On China:
“China is interested specifically in Putin's Russia, because Putin is the guarantee of all the commitments and obligations that Russia undertook towards China. Putin today is the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party. They need them. They need them as icebreakers in world affairs, so that China can remain calm, avoid being a rough state, because there's someone else doing the dirty job for it. Does China want to sit at the table? I don't think so. I think China wants to sit in Beijing and wait until President Trump calls President Xi and asks him for help.”
- Dmytro Kuleba
“I think China is clearly the odd man out here, and I think it's going to become much more the odd man out as Trump has, quote unquote, success with his policies and with the global south.”
- Ian Bremmer
Ian Bremmer: President & Founder, Eurasia Group & GZERO Media; Senior Fellow, Belfer Center.
Fiona Hill: Senior Fellow, Center on the United States and Europe, Brookings Institution.
Dmytro Kuleba: Senior Fellow, Belfer Center; Former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ukraine.
David Sanger: White House and National Security Correspondent, The New York Times; Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, and Board Associate of the Belfer Center.
Moderator: Meghan O’Sullivan: Director of the Belfer Center; Jeane Kirkpatrick Professor of the Practice of International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School.