The official reaction of the Russian Federation and of the People's Republic of China to the announcement made by the United States in December 2001 to abrogate the almost thirty years old Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty has been remarkably weak, given their sustained and coordinated opposition to the deployment of strategic defences against ballistic missiles (BMD). Because the existing literature, particularly balance of power theory, under-explored this puzzle and fails to provide a satisfactory explanation to it, a neoclassical realist model building on structural and unit-level variables is proposed to supplement this caveat. It is argued that Russia, as a stagnant great power experiencing trouble at the domestic level, bandwagons with the United States because it discounts the medium- and long-term threat posed by BMD. China, a rising developmental state, is soft balancing because it resents the project and the threat it poses to its security. It has not hard balanced so far because there is an acknowledgement that this could jeopardize its power base, as the telling example of the USSR collapse illustrated.

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