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“They seek a new era, as they say, to replace the existing international order,” Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said in Munich on Saturday. “They prefer the rule of the strongest to the rule of law, intimidation instead of self-determination, coercion instead of cooperation.”

The strengthening China-Russia ties could herald a reconfiguring of the triangle of power that defined the Cold War and that President Richard M. Nixon exploited 50 years ago on Monday when he made a historic visit to Beijing to normalize diplomatic relations. That helped the United States and China counterbalance the Soviet Union. Ties between Beijing and Moscow had been unraveling for years over issues of ideology and foreign policy.

The opposite is happening now.

“It’s certainly concerning, and it is not a positive development from the standpoint of U.S. national security or U.S. national interests,” said Susan Shirk, the chair of the 21st Century China Center at the University of California, San Diego, and a former State Department official. “They have a kind of common perspective on the U.S. right now, and there is this affinity between the leaders.”

Ms. Shirk said President Biden nonetheless should try engaging in diplomacy with Mr. Xi to coax him to act with the United States on the Russia-created Ukraine crisis. “This seems like Diplomacy 101 given at least the history of this triangular relationship,” she added.

China and Russia are not united by ideology, and they are in a marriage of convenience that Russia needs more. While Mr. Xi appreciates Mr. Putin’s defiance of the United States, he does not want the economic uncertainty that a European war would bring. China also traditionally insists on respecting every nation’s sovereignty, as Mr. Wang made clear on Saturday.

There are limits to what China would do to help Mr. Putin if he invades Ukraine. After Washington imposes sanctions on Russia, Chinese companies could buy more oil and gas from Russia and help fill some technology gaps, but the major Chinese state-owned banks would probably refrain from overt violations of the sanctions for fear of being shut out of the global financial system.

Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin have met 38 times as national leaders. They share a drive to restore their nations to a former glory that they see as having been stripped from their homelands by Western European powers, the United States and, in China’s case, Japan. Both are obsessed with the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991: Mr. Putin seeks to forcefully wind back the clock to a pre-collapse era, while Mr. Xi aims to prevent China from meeting the same fate as the Soviet empire. They accuse Washington of fomenting mass protests and democracy movements around the world to overthrow other governments.