The economies of China and Russia have run into serious trouble, battered by the global recession. That saps the confidence of their leaders, narrows their strategic options and creates opportunities for U.S. diplomacy, even as the United States itself suffers from the economic storm.

The first such opportunity is the gathering crisis of the Russian economy. The decline in the oil price from $145 a barrel to $44 has hit Russia very hard, since its state budget is predicated on the price being around $90. Unemployment has jumped 20 percent in the last three months, with at least 1.5 million unemployed registered as looking for work and another 500,000 on "forced vacations."

"We now face an unemployment increase of 20 percent compared with the level last October -- one and a half million Russians. But that's not all people. We have also seen the growth of so-called latent unemployment -- those who are on unpaid holidays or who don't work a full week," Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said last week.

In the week before the inauguration of U.S. President Barack Obama, Russia's hard currency reserves were falling at a rate of $5 billion a day, battered by a combination of capital flight and an attempt to manage an orderly decline in the ruble's tumbling exchange rate.

One result of this was that Russia suddenly became considerably more helpful to the U.S. effort to arrange an alternative supply line for its forces in Afghanistan, after a series of attacks on the vital logistics route from Pakistan up the Khyber Pass. One such victim was the convoy carrying turkeys for British troops just before Christmas, but far more serious have been the interruptions in fuel, medicine, ammunition and winter clothing supplies.

U.S. Gen. David Petraeus in the last two weeks has managed to negotiate alternative routes through Russia and Central Asia. The row between Russia and Ukraine over gas supplies has been resolved, and gas is flowing again into Europe. Moreover, grandiose Russian plans to build aircraft carriers and rebuild the armed forces have been scaled back. Russia is broke, and in consequence its capacity to cause geopolitical headaches for the United States has sharply eroded.

China, with an economy three times larger than that of Russia (but still less than a quarter the size of the U.S. economy), faces a different and in some ways more severe array of problems than Russia.

Last week the Chinese government announced that its economy grew 6.8 percent in the last quarter and 8.9 percent in the whole of 2008. This represented a sharp fall from the 12 percent growth of 2007 but still sounds pretty impressive in the context of the global recession. But whereas most countries calculate their quarterly growth figures against the previous quarter, Beijing does so by comparison with the same quarter of the previous year.

Western analysts, who long have eyed official Beijing statistics with caution, have been comparing China's growth on a quarter-by-quarter basis and have concluded that China's economy has been hit far harder than the Chinese leadership want to admit. Goldman Sachs calculates that China's economy expanded by a meager 2.6 percent in the last three months of 2008, and Morgan Stanley reckons that it actually declined by 0.5 percent.

That seems nearer the mark, since one of the few reliable statistics is the country's electricity output, which declined by 8 percent last November, an alarming indicator of falling production. A similar gloomy picture is painted by the crisis in the container shipping trade.

The authoritative shipping journal Lloyd's List reported last week that brokers in Singapore were waiving fees for containers sailing from southern China, charging only for the minimal "bunker" costs. Container fees from North Asia have fallen below operating costs, since running at a loss would be cheaper than mothballing the ships. This was paralleled by a dramatic decline in U.S. port activity, and Transport Trackers, a Hong Kong transport consultancy, reported that one-third of new ships on order for 2009 might not be built or delivered to customers.

The question is whether China will respond by being more amenable to the United States or more obstructive, and the answer seems to be that it may be more helpful on geopolitical issues like the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea, but not on straightforward economic matters. Beijing was stung by the Obama administration's charge, signaled in last week's Senate testimony by the nominee for treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, that Beijing was "manipulating" its currency to help keep its exports cheap.

If the United States makes that into a formal complaint before the World Trade Organization, or if it announces countermeasures like special tariffs on China's exports, a nasty trade war could follow that could damage world trade in general. The United States will have to be careful in how it takes advantage of the current weakness of countries like Russia and China.

After all, the United States has its own vulnerabilities, more dramatically to any Chinese threat to cut back on its purchases of America's Treasury bonds. The Federal Reserve needs to sell some $2 trillion of them over the coming year and is counting on China to be a big buyer.

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