Chairman Xi to the rescue? With President Putin’s Ukraine war complicating Russia’s dreams of grandeur, the two America-averse leaders are due to meet in Kazakhstan next week. 

That is, if Mr. Xi even shows up. He is yet to even confirm the meeting, which was announced at the Kremlin yesterday. Asked about it, a Beijing foreign ministry spokesman said, “On your question, I have nothing to offer.”

Mr. Putin’s Ukraine war is forcing him, at least temporarily, to lower his expectation of replacing America as global leader. A world-leading power does not go hat in hand to secondary players in his camp, but that is exactly what Russia is doing with Pyongyang and Tehran. Not long ago they relied heavily on Russian technology and arms sales to beef up their armies; now the roles are reversed. 

To replenish his dwindling resources, Mr. Putin is buying “literally millions” of artillery shells and rockets from North Korea, according to the Pentagon. The Biden administration also reported that Moscow is buying Iranian drones to help with its military’s hapless air war in Ukraine. 

That role reversal — a client turned supplier — has also trended for quite a while in Rus-Chinese relations. After peaking at more than $3 billion in the middle of this century’s first decade, Russia’s arms sales to Red China dwindled to a little more than $500 million in 2020. Now they are even lower. 

Beijing meanwhile is now spending nearly $250 billion a year on expanding its military while Moscow can afford only $75 billion — and that was before the war. Its current military is as depleted as Russia’s economy, which is reeling under global sanctions and battle expenditures. 

Not to be outdone, Mr. Xi seems intent on harming his Chinese economy by insisting on a wrong-headed Covid policy. Incorrectly believing that a country of a billion and a half people can reach “zero covid” by imposing endless quarantines and lockdowns, Beijing is once again this week intensifying the suffering of Chinese citizens who are incarcerated in their own homes, risking arrest or worse if they even think of venturing out.

No system can withstand such harsh lockdowns forever, yet for now Communist China relishes its role as the globe’s second-largest economy. It also still harbors the aspiration of passing America and upending the world order Washington has dominated for a century. Mr. Putin has nursed that dream ever since he assumed power in 2012, and likely throughout his entire adult life. 

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization was established in 2001 by Red China, Russia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan for the purpose of uniting powers that harbor that revisionist ideal and ending the liberal world order dominated by democracies and led by America. That organization’s September 15-16 meeting at the Uzbek city of Samarkand is where Messrs. Xi and Putin intend to display their unity of purpose to the rest of the world. The meeting could help both leaders shore up their claims to world leadership — at least for their respective constituents. 

History shows that even at the height of the Cold War, when the two countries shared Marxist ideologies, their relationship was never warm. A foreign policy craftsman, Henry Kissinger as secretary of state famously utilized the friction between the two communist regimes to lure Beijing — or Peking, as it was known at the time — out of Moscow’s realm in the 1970s. 

President Zelensky is attempting to repeat that trick now. China is a “very powerful state,” he said last week, telling the South China Morning Post that he was attempting to talk directly to Mr. Xi. Beijing’s economy is “powerful,” he said, so it “can politically, economically influence Russia.”

Mr. Xi has been elusive in the past about Mr. Putin’s war, saying at one point that the Ukraine invasion “sounded the alarm for humanity.” Concerns about rising food and energy prices may have led to some trepidation at Beijing about full-throat backing of Mr. Putin. 

Yet, Mr. Xi soon turned to a favorite theme — sovereignty. He selectively invokes it to bolster Communist China’s claim to lands in places like Tibet and Taiwan. Similarly, Mr. Xi is now backing Russia’s claim of sovereignty over Ukraine. Nevertheless, he has asked “all parties” to end the hostilities “in a responsible manner.”

Next week, Mr. Xi will likely be more supportive than that, attempting to bolster his weakening ally. After all, true alpha dogs can allow their underlings to bark and pretend that they are the ones leading the pack.