The conventional wisdom appears to be that Russia and China are essentially impotent, and their disapproval irrelevant, which is not accurate. Even if neither they nor any other state is likely to engage the US in an arms race today, they have other options. Professor Robert A. Pape of the University of Chicago recently wrote in the journal International Security about “soft balancing.” Where traditional “hard balancing” in balance of power politics centered on the use or threatened use of military force to counter the power of a threatening state, “soft balancing” involves the use of nonmilitary tools to delay, frustrate, and undermine moves by a state seen as aggressive. The denial of United Nations Security Council approval for the invasion of Iraq by France, Russia, and China, and the refusal of Saudi Arabia and Turkey to provide US forces complete access to their territory, are examples of such soft balancing against the United States prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Even were the cooperation of other countries not needed generally, soft balancing has been occurring in space for decades in the form of other states seeking their own launch capabilities and satellite services to break up what was originally a superpower monopoly. The most dramatic instance of this in recent years is the European Union’s Galileo constellation of navigation satellites, a project intended to reduce its reliance on the Global Positioning System under US Defense Department control, and undertaken despite such strong US disapproval that this alone was thought to have killed it at one point. More vocal than most, President Jacques Chirac of France declared Galileo a necessity to keep Europe from becoming America’s “vassal.” Seeing the usefulness of Galileo’s existence several spacefaring nations outside the EU, including Russia, China, and India, have all supported the project.

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Elhefnawy, Nader. "The National Space Policy and space arms control." The Space Review. November 27, 2006.