While they resent US dominance, Russia and China have a seat at the table in the current US-led world order as junior members. They have permanent seats at the UN Security Council and are members of core international organizations like the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, etc.

Further, China and Russia are the only countries with sophisticated enough nuclear arsenals to go toe-to-toe with the US up to the top of the military escalation ladder, a concept to describe how the severity of a military conflict can increase.

In other words, the US military can't attack Russia and China with impunity because they can match each move up to all-out nuclear war—the very top of the military escalation ladder.

For this reason, Russia, China, and the US are deterred from entering a direct military conflict with each other. They all understand that "The only winning move is not to play."

That's also why, at this point, it doesn't seem that Russia and China want to flip the board and create their own new world order—as Germany and Japan tried to do during World War 2. Doing so could invite nuclear Armageddon.

Instead, Russia, China, and their allies want to transform the current world order from unipolar to multipolar and give themselves a bigger seat at the table in the process.

The US and its allies want the unipolar status quo to prevail.

The conflict is being played out below the threshold of direct kinetic warfare—proxy wars, economic wars, financial wars, cyber wars, biological wars, deniable sabotage, information wars, and other domains.