Right now, there are three superpowers in the world, America, China, and Russia. America is the strongest, but must choose one of the others to ally with, lest they ally with each other and perhaps overmatch us.

Neither of our options are exactly wonderful, but Russia is the clear lesser evil, from a moral perspective, while Putin is a low-key dictator who does dictator shit like murdering political opponents and dissident journos, he's not even in the same league of terrible as Xi Jinping, who's literally holocausting people and chopping them up for spare parts right now. Like it takes a lot to get this board to side with muslims, I remember when it was like "yeah, China makes them assimilate, good for China!", and then we found out what they were really doing and the whole mood changed to "wait you're...oh....holy shit too far dude!" That's how bad the CCP is. And on a more practical level, Russia just wants to rule over their corner of the map, while China wants to take the whole pie and turn every culture into their culture.

And even though the choice we SHOULD make here is obvious, China has basically bought half our political and corporate system to make it a partisan divide, hoping we'll side with them, and then they can subvert and control us as well.