Since 2012, when Putin announced his “pivot to the East” and Xi Jinping ascended to the top of Beijing’s leadership, China and Russia have uneasily accommodated each other.

With these closer relations, a school of thought – which has found support in the White House – has emerged that there is a single theatre of strategic competition: liberal democracies versus autocracies. It is easy to see the appeal of this formulation, both in its simplicity and its powerful invocation of the binary ideological struggle of the Cold War.