The West has been sent into a wild panic by the prospect of a China-Russia alliance. Since last week, when Russian president Vladimir Putin brought a large, high-powered delegation to meet Chinese president Xi Jinping in Beijing, the Western media have been suffering from a neurotic spasm.
They claim this new alliance heralds an ‘ominous future’ and marks the ‘start of a second Cold War’. This so-called axis of evil (or ‘unholy alliance’, if you prefer) is ‘converging on a shared purpose of overturning… the prevailing international system’.
Much of this over-excited commentary misunderstands the true nature of the relationship. The China-Russia alliance reflects the collapse of the West’s favoured rules-based international order far more than it represents a new dynamic order of its own.
This is no bid for world domination, but an opportunistic play – albeit a dangerous one. Just as Stalinism, a lineage that China and Russia really do have in common, always gained more of a purchase in parts of the world where capitalism was weak, its successor regimes in Beijing and Moscow today have again come together as a response to the weakness of the West.
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