Sino-Russian axis holds firm as superpower America implodes

As the coronavirus crisis momentarily recedes, one of the stocktaking calculations essayed by policymakers will be to estimate how the pandemic has affected the global balance of power. China, where the virus originated, and where a second wave may be developing, seems to have emerged relatively less scathed than might have been expected. Russia has been badly hit, but it remains to be seen how adversely that will impact its economy.

It seems incontrovertible, however, that America has not come out of this well. The world’s leading superpower, a high-tech society that can send scientific probes to the far reaches of the universe and revolutionise communications technology every year, has succumbed dramatically to a microscopic enemy that has killed extravagant numbers of its citizens and devastated its economy. In tandem, its civil society, since the late eighteenth century the template for aspiring democracies, is crumbling into anarchy.

For America’s enemies, and they are legion, the spectacle of the United States being reduced to impotence in the face of disease and insurgency can only offer huge encouragement. America’s hard power is too morally inhibited to suppress insurrection in its own cities, and as a consequence its soft power is visibly dissolving on the world’s television screens.

This situation has significant geopolitical implications. The Cold War may belong to history, but it has now been replaced by a triangular contest among China, Russia and America. The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy defines China and Russia as seeking to “challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity. They are determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and to repress their societies and expand their influence.”

The administration sums up its competitors objectives thus: “China and Russia want to shape a world antithetical to US values and interests”. That goes to the nub of the matter. The question that preoccupies geopolitical commentators is: how deep-rooted and enduring is the current alliance between China and Russia?

The answer is self-evident: there are, in the long term, major obstacles to cooperation between the two powers, but in the medium term their shared priority is to end American global hegemony. That overriding objective could be sufficient to cement collaboration between America’s two chief rivals for the coming decade.

The courtship has been intense. Speaking in the Kremlin last year, Chinese president Xi Jinping said of Putin: “In the past six years, we have met nearly 30 times. Russia is the country that I have visited the most times, and President Putin is my best friend and colleague.”

Words are cheap but, in terms of nuance, that goes beyond the polite platitudes Xi would lavish on other foreign hosts. It is reciprocal, too. Russia is seriously determined to cultivate this alliance to the utmost, at least in the medium term.

In pursuit of closer ties, Russia has not only tolerated but facilitated Chinese activity in the Arctic, obviously a more natural sphere of influence for Moscow than for Beijing. Russia wants to develop its Siberian coastal Northern Sea Route in view of the retreat of Arctic ice. China, despite its geography, is interested in the Arctic too, and for the past seven years has been one of the 13 observer states of the Arctic Council.

It is chiefly in the Arctic that Russia’s 70% of continental shelf oil and gas reserves are located – its interests are self-evident. Likewise, it wants to exploit new shipping lanes that could be opened up by the reconfiguration of Arctic ice, with economic benefits for Siberia. China, with less obvious justification, has proclaimed itself a “near-Arctic state” and created the Polar Silk Road as an element of its Belt and Road project. It is also using scientific surveys as a means of insinuating a presence into the Arctic.

Russia does not view this advance with total equanimity. In 2012 it excluded Chinese vessels from the Northern Sea Route and it opposed granting China observer status at the Arctic Council. Things looked slightly frosty between Moscow and Beijing, but the West, with its usual obliging stupidity, came to the rescue.

When Russia annexed the Crimea – a territory that had been part of Russia since 1783 until Nikita Khruschev detached it in 1954, and whose population wants to be governed from Moscow – sanctions were enforced against it in 2014. This scuppered a major Russian liquefied natural gas project, until China increased its stake to 29.9%, securing three million metric tonnes of liquefied gas a year and cementing an alliance with Russia that has further developed in the ensuing years.

In another contested sphere of influence, the Ukraine, Western intervention was even more cack-handed. The blame for provoking a war there rests chiefly upon the European Union. If the pro-Russian government had lost the confidence of the Ukrainian electorate, then its days were numbered, since an election was mandated within 11 months.

Clearly, the EU and complicit agencies recognised the electorate would reiterate its verdict, robbing the EU of a potential member state. Disgracefully, Western elements encouraged a violent revolution on Putin’s doorstep to overthrow a democratically elected government. Nothing could better have played into Russia’s hands. Putin was able to weaponise eastern Ukraine’s Russophile tendency, denounce the violent overthrow of a democratic government, and annex the Crimea.

“It is worse than a crime, it is a mistake,” as Talleyrand said of Bonaparte’s judicial murder of the Duc d’Enghien. Expect many more such mistakes as the poor men’s Talleyrands in Brussels further impede American foreign policy and compromise Western interests, seeking the global limelight with “Congress of Vienna II” pretensions.

The only country to come out of Syria with any kind of gains has been Russia. Serial incompetence in America’s Middle Eastern policy, beginning with the Iraq war, has led to Russia becoming the new arbiter in the Middle Eas. In Africa, China has developed a full-blooded neo-colonial enterprise, skilfully camouflaged to assuage local sensibilities.

Chinese naval power is deployed in unending mission creep in the South China Sea; as time passes, the US Navy will increasingly find its soft power challenged.

Russia’s most important contribution to its ally is its exportation of sophisticated weaponry. Russia is unmistakably the junior partner, but its advantages are considerable. In 2018 trade between the allies increased by 27.1%, to $107 billion. Russia believes the figure could quickly double.

China does less well out of the alliance commercially. In 2017 Russia accounted for only $44 billion, or 1.8%, of China’s exports, compared with $477 billion, or 20%, in exports to America. Donald Trump, whatever other criticisms may be levelled at him, called out China on its exploitative trade policies, of which world opinion is now cognisant. Deteriorating relations with China are a low price for America to pay, considering the United States was in China’s cross-hairs anyway.

Despite its underlying tensions and contradictions, the evidence suggests the Sino-Russian alliance will endure for the foreseeable future. The unifying goal is to oust the United States from its global leadership position. A decade ago, that ambition might have seemed delusional. Today, however, the spectacle of America’s malaise is terrifying the free world and delighting the governments of unfree states.

What overseas leaders watching the internal chaos America is undergoing will feel confident about accepting US protection, or even maintaining the American democratic system, when they see this Titan apparently writhing in its death throes? It is easy to guess what they are thinking in Beijing and Moscow. Nothing could be more destabilising for an already fractured world.