Russia and China Form Mutual Alignment, Challenging NATO Supremacy

Amidst continuing global contestations, regional alliances have produced new revelations in their historied role as axes of power. “Moscow and Beijing have declared their opposition to further enlargement of NATO and to the formation of other regional security alliances,” notes a caption under an image of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin in The New Yorker. This stance challenges an extant global order developed after the Second World War. The contemporary geopolitical schema is one structured by WWII, the Cold War, and the rupture of the USSR; NATO membership, then as now, is ever-growing as it reviews applications from nascent nations and former Soviet satellites. Pre-dissolution, Soviet countries countered with their own mutual defense alliance, the Warsaw Pact, an ideological alternative to NATO and another tool of regional solidarity shielding from world-shaking events.

In an alliance reminiscent of the defunct Warsaw Pact, Chinese president Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin have conspired this year. The leaders released a statement of solidarity testing a NATO-empowered world order and consolidating the East-West divide that has existed since the beginning of the Cold War. “The world’s two most powerful autocrats unveiled a sweeping long-term agreement that also challenges the United States as a global power, NATO as a cornerstone of international security, and liberal democracy as a model for the world,” The New Yorker columnist Robin Wright writes. In the same joint statement, the presidents announced their expansionist ambitions into the territories of Taiwan and Ukraine. U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin noted to the Associated Press a “steady increase in provocative and destabilizing military activity near Taiwan,” which recalls Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Both consist of an “indefensible assault on a peaceful neighbor [that] has galvanized the world and…reminded us all of the dangers of undercutting an international order rooted in rules and respect,” Austin concludes. And while Taiwan falls into a gray category of U.S. foreign policy, the U.S. is committed to defending its sovereignty against the mainland’s imperialist ambitions. Curiously, during an interview with ABC News, Biden “compared the U.S. relationship with Taiwan to America’s Article 5 commitment under NATO, which obligates the alliance to defend any member that’s attacked,” the Associated Press reports.

While a China-Russia partnership is indeed a regional alliance, the act of solidarity represented by the pact communicates an anti-American arrangement. “This is a pledge to stand shoulder to shoulder against America and the West, ideologically as well as militarily,” Robert Daly of the Wilson Center said. “This statement might be looked back on as the beginning of Cold War Two.” Like NATO, the China-Russia alignment formalizes a trend of ideological, political, and economic congruence between the nations and a (still-abstract) program for moving into a reordered geopolitical future. Most consequentially, “Russia and China are challenging the balance of power that has defined the global order since the Cold War ended three decades ago.” But rather than a positive plan or even a precise defense alliance, the accord presents a detractors’ stance familiar to both nations against the economic and political supremacy of the West.

At other points, the jointly-released communiqué reads more like a bid for self-determination. “Russia and China stand against attempts by external forces to undermine security and stability in their common adjacent regions,” the memo reads, and “intend to counter interference by outside forces in the internal affairs of sovereign countries under any pretext,” The irony of this point is, of course, Russia’s ongoing attempts upon the sovereignty of Ukraine, and China’s stated intentions towards Taiwan.

“As the Ukraine crisis began spilling over onto already tense U.S.-China relations,” Robin Wright mentions, the emergent position of China on Russian aggressions demonstrates a further disinterest in diplomacy with the West. Biden’s vision for diplomacy with China is largely communicated in economic terms in his proposed framework for “stable and manageable competition.” Punitive actions against the nation would likely fall also in the economic ambit, the West ready with punishing sanctions it could deploy against China.

Potentially initiating a new phase of Cold War factionalism, the alignment of Russia and China represents an informal military and economic confederation that challenges the supremacy of America and the West. As with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, which unleashed a ballistic charge of post-Soviet states that sought the protection of NATO, membership applications have flooded the organization following Russia’s actions upon Ukraine. “The start of the Cold War…saw an ideological and economic divide between the capitalist states of Western Europe backed by the United States…and the communist states of Eastern Europe, backed by the Soviet Union,” open source information notes. This divide had massive geopolitical reverberations, and the consolidation of the Eastern and Western alliances colored the governance of respective allied countries. Similar effects can be expected from the China-Russia accord and expected NATO expansions. NATO has always been a defense alliance premised on economic cooperation and integration. Conforming ideologies of economic management are a prerequisite for joining the alliance and of equal import to defense topics like military integration. The opposed economic programs of Eastern and Western blocs, reasserted by recent developments in global relations, embody a broader ideological and political discrepancy that continues to the present day.

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