Beijing's Diplomatic Overreach Exposes Strategic Fragility

A week of high-profile summits reveals the fragile contradictions in China's foreign policy

There is an enduring truth in geopolitics, one that Thucydides understood and that statesmen have periodically relearned at great cost. The most dangerous position in international affairs is neither weakness nor strength. It is the position of a power that must be all things to all rivals simultaneously, one that cannot afford to lose any relationship and therefore cannot control any of them. It is also, as this particular week has made vivid, the precise position currently animating the foreign policy of the People's Republic of China.

Within the span of a single week, Donald Trump arrived in Beijing on 14 May. He was flattered and sent home with a few concessions to feel he had won something. Vladimir Putin followed on the 20th to receive what the Kremlin announced would include the signing of some 40 separate agreements, spanning everything from energy pipelines to tourism.

The world looked at the succession of motorcades and state dinners and concluded that Beijing had become the indispensable address of global power. The obvious interpretation was that Xi sits at the centre of a new world order, orbited by Washington and Moscow like twin moons around an exceptionally patient planet.

It is a compelling image. It is also a misleading one.

The BRICS revelation and the Indo-Pacific

While Wang Yi, China's Foreign Minister, was in Beijing attending to Trump, India was hosting the BRICS foreign ministers' meeting in New Delhi. It was a gathering of some consequence, given that India holds the 2026 chairmanship and that the full summit follows in September. The Iran-UAE confrontation, the Gaza war, and the question of whether a bloc spanning such incompatible interests can produce unified positions on anything; all of this hung over the New Delhi meeting.

Russia sent Sergey Lavrov. Brazil sent its minister. South Africa sent its minister. Indonesia sent its minister. Iran and the UAE, which are, at this precise moment, engaged in what can charitably be described as an extremely hostile diplomatic relationship, both sent ministers. China sent an ambassador.

The ambassador, Xu Feihong, is a perfectly capable diplomat. He dutifully posted on social media, quoting President Xi on the sacred importance of Global South solidarity. The Ministry in Beijing cited scheduling reasons. The scheduling conflict was, in fact, Donald Trump. Beijing's Foreign Ministry even issued a statement reiterating that China attaches great importance to BRICS cooperation. But statements reiterating commitment to something are issued precisely when the commitment in question has just been visibly compromised.

BRICS is not a peripheral engagement for China. It is the cornerstone of Beijing's claim to moral leadership of the developing world, the institutional chassis upon which Xi Jinping has constructed an entire alternative narrative about who speaks for humanity's majority.

Downgrading its representation at a BRICS ministerial, hosted by a country Beijing has spent two years carefully re-engaging after the Galwan Valley rupture, in order to accommodate an American president who has repeatedly threatened the very multilateral architecture BRICS represents, is a revelation of hierarchy. For Indo-Pacific nations watching closely, it raises questions about Beijing's reliability as a regional partner when its global ambitions conflict with its immediate neighbourhood.

The European Union Institute for Security Studies captured the deeper irony: Trump is seen in Beijing as erratic, capable of reversing any concession within days. China's leaders remain deeply distrustful of Washington. And yet Washington commands the Chinese foreign minister's presence in Beijing.

Two patrons, one insoluble problem

To understand China's position, one must begin not with summits but with maps. China sits at the convergence of two worlds that its foreign policy must simultaneously serve: the maritime, export-driven world that connects it to American consumers, Western technology, and the global financial architecture dominated by the dollar; and the continental, energy-dependent world that connects it to Russian pipelines, Central Asian supply routes, and the Eurasian landmass. The same landmass which Halford Mackinder once said would decide the dominion of the world.

Russia and the United States are both, from Beijing's perspective, indispensable relationships that cannot be allowed to deteriorate. China benefits from discounted Russian energy, and the proposed Power of Siberia 2 pipeline, which is still stalled in the brackish waters of pricing negotiations, would deepen that dependency considerably.

Since the Ukraine war severed Moscow's access to European gas revenues, Beijing has become Russia's economic oxygen. That creates leverage, yes. But leverage is inseparable from obligation. The more indispensable you become to someone's survival, the less freedom you have to disappoint them.

America, meanwhile, matters for everything else. Trump changed course on China within a single afternoon in May 2025, after acknowledging the extent of Beijing's leverage through rare earth export controls, only for Beijing subsequently to suspend those same controls once an agreement had been reached. Both sides retreated. Neither wants collapse. But the underlying relationship remains what it has always been under Trump: transactional, volatile, and almost entirely dependent on the personal mood of one man who is notoriously susceptible to feeling upstaged.

A lavish reception for Putin could play into Trump's sensitivity to being upstaged, and unsettle whatever modest stabilisation the summit had managed to produce. For Australia and its regional partners, this volatility underscores the importance of a stable US presence in the Indo-Pacific.

The economy nobody mentions at the dinner

There is a third guest at this table, seated quietly in the corner and doing its best not to draw attention. The Chinese economy. Beijing set its growth target for 2026 at 4.5 to 5 per cent, its most modest ambition since the early 1990s. Retail sales growth across all of 2025 came in at 3.7 per cent, down from 6.5 per cent the previous year. Youth unemployment among those aged 18 to 24 was 16.9 per cent.

The property market continues its protracted decline. Consumer confidence has not recovered. Exports remain the primary engine of growth, which means that any serious rupture with Washington, any moment at which Trump decides the transactional calculus has shifted, would strike at the worst possible time for Beijing.

The IMF has observed that China cannot rely on ever-higher exports to sustain durable growth, and that a pivot to consumption-led expansion is overdue. Beijing's 15th Five-Year Plan acknowledges that changes are needed, but for them to work, it requires predictable trade relationships, restrained geopolitical competition, and functioning multilateral institutions. These are things that China's current foreign policy is simultaneously trying to preserve and undermine.

Endorsing Russia's war economy while courting American trade relief, championing Global South multilateralism while downgrading its own engagement at BRICS, and presenting itself as a stabilising force while managing alliances that pull in opposite directions.

Xi cannot afford to lose Trump. He cannot afford to lose Putin. He cannot afford an energy shock, a supply-chain disruption, or a renewed tariff assault. The result is a foreign policy of permanent accommodation, in which everyone important is kept barely satisfied, and anyone who can be deprioritised without immediate consequence is quietly placed on hold.

Managing contradictions without resolving them

Beijing is not weak. It has leverage, rare earths, manufacturing scale, energy infrastructure, and a foreign policy establishment that operates with a discipline Washington can only envy. But leverage and dominance are not the same thing, and the diplomatic calendar of this particular week illustrates the difference.

What Xi Jinping is doing requires exceptional skill and nerve. Managing contradictions at this scale, with this level of composure, is impressive. But managing contradictions is not the same as resolving them. And somewhere in New Delhi, at a BRICS foreign ministers' table that had everyone present except representation from the leader who most loudly champions it, the contradictions were on display for everyone to see.