China, Russia and the Battle for Eurasia | Ryan Perkins

## The strategic prize in the middle: why Eurasia matters now The geopolitical center of gravity is shifting away from the Atlantic toward the vast interior of Eurasia. What once read as isolated regional projects now read as moves in a continental game: transport corridors, waterworks, and digital links that would bind economies — and security environments — together. The conversation with Ryan Perkins frames a clear thesis: the new core of the 21st century is the space between Europe and East Asia, and control of routes through the Caucasus, the Caspian basin and the Russian steppe is as consequential as control of chokepoints once was. Competing corridor proposals, from the U.S.-backed TRIPP route to renewed Russian canal schemes, are more than engineering exercises; they are instruments of influence, designed to reconfigure the strategic map across Eurasia. ## The contest for the Caucasus: TRIPP and the push to bypass Moscow At the heart of the current contest lies the newly promoted TRIPP corridor (the so-called Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity), a multimodal land and digital link connecting the EU and Turkey through the South Caucasus, with direct adjacency to Iran’s northern frontier. Perkins identifies TRIPP as a deliberate attempt to create an alternative axis of influence through Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia — effectively inserting a Western-supported infrastructure footprint into a region traditionally under Moscow’s orbit. The reaction has been predictable: Tehran perceives a corridor skirting its border as a strategic stranglehold, and Moscow has revived long-dormant ideas, including grand canal schemes, as countermeasures. What makes TRIPP geopolitically potent is not simply the rail or road; it is the digital and surveillance architecture that would accompany it. Perkins highlights that the corridor envisages not only tracks and highways, but also an infrastructure of observation and control that would afford external powers visibility and presence directly north of Iran. That combination — transport and persistent monitoring — transforms a trade route into a form of sustained geopolitical leverage. Whether TRIPP can be implemented faces political and practical hurdles, not least the unresolved bilateral issues inside the South Caucasus and scepticism about Western capacity to manage such long-term, capital-intensive projects. ## Engineering the Eurasian Canal: scale, feasibility and political logic Russia’s response has been equally striking: a revival of possibilities to link the Sea of Azov and the Caspian through the Kuma-Manych depression, and proposals to modernize the Wolga-Don connection. Perkins outlines the engineering contours: roughly 700 kilometers of infrastructure through Russian territory, choices between lock systems catering to 10,000-ton versus 26,000-ton vessels, and the central hydrological challenge that the Caspian sits several meters below the Azov. The hard facts — excavation, lock construction, water management, and operating regime — make clear that this is a serious infrastructural undertaking but not an apocalyptic mega-project on the scale of the Panama Canal. It is nonetheless ambitious enough to change regional transport economics. Beyond engineering, the canal idea serves multiple political ends: it asserts Russian control over Caspian maritime routes, offers a bargaining chip to attract Central Asian trade flows, and provides a tangible counternarrative to corridors pushed by external actors. Perkins stresses how the Kremlin’s preference for the Eurasian Canal has a strategic logic beyond immediate commercial returns: a domestically sited waterway would be a sovereign alternative to a corridor that places foreign military-adjacent infrastructure along the Iranian frontier. The feasibility of the canal thus intertwines construction costs, hydrology and winners-and-losers geopolitics in one package. ## Belt and Road retooled: reserve management, setbacks and selective engagement China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a backdrop to all of this, but Perkins is careful to separate the program’s founding logic from the narrative that has accreted around it. The BRI began as a mechanism for China to invest its huge foreign-exchange reserves in productive assets abroad while knitting alternative overland routes to guard against maritime chokepoints. Early iterations relied heavily on dollar-denominated financing for big, visible infrastructure. But after overextension, debt renegotiations and reputational blowback around the early 2020s, Beijing recalibrated. Perkins points out two crucial shifts. First, Chinese financing became more selective and cautious after problematic loans to fragile states required restructurings that exposed Beijing to political and financial risk. Second, the PR costs of “debt diplomacy” made Beijing aware that the optics of lending mattered almost as much as the balance sheet. The result is a more restrained and pragmatic BRI, focused on projects that produce tangible utility for China — security of supply chains, industrial linkages, and opportunities for Chinese contractors — while avoiding headline-grabbing overreach. This recalibration explains why Chinese interest in any Eurasian project is measured: Beijing will back what secures its long-term trade and industrial needs, but it will do so with an eye to risk, return and reputational cost. ## Moscow and Beijing: strategic partners, not treaty allies A recurring theme in Perkins’ observations is the character of the Sino-Russian relationship. The two capitals have deepened cooperation — particularly in energy, defense sales, and coordinated diplomatic postures — but that should not be mistaken for a binding alliance. Perkins emphasizes that their relationship is a partnership of convenience and convergent interests rather than a formal security pact. Each side retains independent strategic calculations: Russia must weigh territorial and domestic implications of mega-infrastructure; China must consider how any visible presence in the Caucasus or Central Asia affects its broader relationships with Iran, Turkey, and European buyers. This nuance matters because both states act from a calculus of mutual gain rather than mutual obligation. China’s enormous construction capacity is available as a balancing force to Moscow, but only insofar as Beijing perceives the returns to be clear and manageable. For Russia, the option of Chinese capital and technical know-how is attractive, but it must be balanced against sovereignty concerns and the domestic political optics of ceding too much control over strategic transport nodes. The Sino-Russian axis is therefore a catalytic force for Eurasian integration, but not an engine that automatically drives unified policy across the entire space. ## Finance, industrial capacity and the lost art of long-term investment Perkins’ comments on Western finance and the limits of current capital markets merit special attention. He argues that Western financial institutions have grown oriented to short horizons and quick returns, making them ill-suited to fund the generational infrastructure projects that Eurasian integration requires. That structural orientation explains why large-scale road, rail and canal work is increasingly funded by state-backed institutions with patient capital — precisely the kind of financing model China has historically employed. The broader implication is a political-economic shift: nations that retain or rebuild the ability to plan, finance and construct industrial-scale projects will shape the geography of trade for decades. Perkins links this to the phenomenon of deindustrialization and financialization in the West: when capital prefers financial arbitrage over brick-and-mortar industrial investment, the strategic capacity to underwrite infrastructure at scale atrophies. Eurasian corridors thus become a test of whether states can still marshal