President Donald Trump adopts different strategies in dealing with the leaders of America’s two greatest adversaries. Where Trump embraces risky escalation regarding Xi Jinping’s China, he tends to apply great deference toward America’s less powerful adversary, Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

China and Russia stand apart from all other nations in their shared intent and means of threatening the United States, its allies, and the advance of human freedom that has broadly defined international relations since 1945. However, the two nations cannot leverage their threat equally.