Asian alliance

A bright September sun shone over Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, illuminating the full strength of China’s military. Men and machinery marched past a who’s who of global autocrats: Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

The parade—held ostensibly to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II—was China’s largest-ever show of military might. Xi used the event to showcase new types of nuclear weapons for the first time. Perhaps more alarmingly, the parade’s attendees offered an updated vision of dictatorial unity.

Two days earlier, Xi and Putin met with Indian President Narendra Modi at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) conference in the Chinese port city of Tianjin. (SCO was founded in 2001 to advance Eurasian economic goals.) During the event, the leaders affirmed a rising global paradigm—what Xi called “true multilateralism”—to counter U.S. and European control of world affairs. Russia and Asian countries broadly share a view that Western rules, including the economic policies of U.S. President Donald Trump, stand against the interests of their own ascendant power.

Analysts now caution that a new era of Russian-Asian cooperation is in the works. And that has potentially dangerous implications for America’s interests and allies around the world, and for flash points like Taiwan and Ukraine.

Jack Burnham, a China military analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, says the ongoing trend of non-­Western cohesion isn’t new. But he warned further development of an autocratic axis warrants serious concern.

“Russia and China in particular, as well as North Korea to a lesser extent, are in for far more than just a dalliance,” Burnham said, and are in fact “setting the foundations for a long-term strategic relationship” with economic, military, and political dimensions.

The West, Burnham suggested, should do more to dissuade would-be aggressors from challenging the current world order. This strategic posture is known, in professional defense circles, under the broad term of deterrence.

After September, that approach feels more necessary than ever. For the first time, China publicly showcased its ability to launch airborne nuclear weapons, confirming long-known capabilities. It also demonstrated its atomic launch technology from land, sea, and air, sometimes called a “nuclear triad.” China, India, North Korea, and Russia all possess nuclear weapons, as does the United States and a few mostly European countries. But the atomic arsenals vary widely in quality and quantity of weapons.

Should deterrence fail, the West must be ready to win a war in the Indo-Pacific region, Burnham said. He believes the United States should prepare itself, and help prepare its allies and partners, for such a possibility.

“Not everyone needs to do the same thing, but everyone needs to do something,” he said.

Michael Sobolik, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, shares Burnham’s sense of the seriousness of an autocratic threat, for Taiwan and other U.S. interests in the region.

Sobolik urged Americans to watch the events in Asia carefully—and to demand accountability from officials handling challenges coming from the region.

U.S. officials working with Beijing on a new, comprehensive trade deal should not barter promises of peace for new economic advantages, Sobolik said. Doing so could jeopardize the security of U.S. allies and partners, including Taiwan.

Sobolik put China’s assurances not to attack Taiwan into the same category as Putin’s repeated rhetoric about ending the war in Ukraine.

“What the American public should expect of their leaders is to not be taken for fools, to not be deceived,” Sobolik said. He faulted federal policymakers for not enforcing certain laws, like the U.S. ban on TikTok, the Chinese social media platform whose parent company maintains ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Spotty enforcement sends the wrong signals to ambitious autocrats, he said.

More generally, Sobolik cautioned against American complacency toward U.S. interests abroad. In his view, the best deterrence against new challengers is a stronger status quo.

“Americans need to understand that the world is just getting really dangerous, and very unstable,” Sobolik continued. “Strength matters more than anything else right now.”

China’s liquid-fueled intercontinental strategic nuclear missiles pass through Tiananmen Square during the military parade in Beijing. Sheng Jiapeng / China News Service / VCG via Getty Images

WITH A FAR SMALLER ECONOMY than either China or India, Russia has much to gain from tighter relations with its Eastern partners. During the SCO meeting, Russia and China inked a deal to finish a long-­stalled pipeline delivering Russian natural gas to Chinese buyers.

Those benefits also mean military advantages. As the war in Ukraine grinds toward the four-year mark, Russia needs weapons, manpower, and money to keep its economy and military machine running. Even without foreign support, Russia’s economy is more than 10 times larger than that of Ukraine, according to data from the World Bank. European countries fret that the war could eventually lead to a direct confrontation between Russia and NATO, the Western-led alliance Putin has long described as a threat to Russia.

Speaking in Beijing, Putin said Russia’s ties with China are at “unprecedentedly high levels.”

Russia has relied on Chinese help, from weapons technologies to Chinese troops on the ground, since the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Russia has marshaled further assistance from other autocrats, mustering North Korean troops and Iran-provided Shahed drones that have killed Ukrainian soldiers and civilians. Several news reports have noted a yearslong pattern of Chinese inputs, from chemicals to component parts, found in Russian weapons used in Ukraine.

Together, that array of battle assets has formed a deadly threat for Ukraine—and for the United States, NATO, and other democratic partners.

“Ukraine is not only up against Russia, but is up against the combined weight of Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China in a very substantial way,” Burnham said.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged that imbalance when he called the fight in Ukraine a “proxy war between nuclear powers,” meaning Russia and the United States. But other competitions are unfolding at the margins of global security, especially when it comes to cross-border arms sales.

Lyle Morris, a defense expert at the Washington-based Asia Society, said September’s events in China have increased the stakes in the global weapons trade. Often a country’s arms manufacturing takes place with active government partnership, such as the U.S. government’s purchases and collaboration with the national defense-industrial base. Now as ever, countries with the ability to produce arms can sell them to smaller countries, deepening military and political ties in the process.

The Beijing parade served as a “coming-out party for China,” while mimicking Russian, North Korean, and other autocracies’ habits of giant military processions. The spectacle offered the “biggest advertisement for Chinese arms in the world,” Morris said. And the show of force sent a chilling message to Taiwan: Resistance is futile.

“It was a signal to Taiwan that they should just give up, essentially,” Morris added. “But the most important audience was the U.S., because the U.S. is the key factor in whether China would win or lose in a conflict over Taiwan.”

Both Morris and Sobolik compared China’s arms escalation with patterns from the Cold War, when the planet’s two major power blocs, led by the United States and the Soviet Union, worked for military primacy—while trying to avoid a world-­destroying atomic conflict.

Xi meets with Putin in Moscow on May 8. Associated Press / Photo by Pavel Bednyakov

The 21st century has its own race toward bigger, stronger weapons and a broader, East-West alignment of military strategies, Morris said.

“The reality is that we’re living in the midst of a second Cold War,” Sobolik said.

But Thomas Duesterberg, another senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, believes the growing alliance in the East is a matter of gradual change, not a structural shift—more evolution than revolution. Duesterberg, an expert in global trade and manufacturing, notes that a host of economic problems crowd Asia’s path to global dominance, including China’s trade imbalance and rising debt.

In global security, Duesterberg noted a connection between today’s war in Ukraine—and a conflict over Taiwan tomorrow. The West’s solidarity with Ukraine will guide Xi’s thinking on the costliness of occupying Taiwan, which the Chinese government has long sought through what it calls “reunification” under a broad policy known as the “One China” principle. Taiwan has been politically separate from China since 1949, when Mao Zedong and his Communist forces seized the Chinese mainland and Nationalist forces under Chang Kai-shek fled to the island of Taiwan.

Any Western disunity on Ukraine may embolden Xi and his partners toward greater aggression against Taiwan. But the recent events in China were “more theater than substance,” according to Duesterberg, who described announcements of a new, Asia-first world order as “wildly overstated.”

“We’re not even at the third inning of a transition to a new world order,” he said.