AMAC Exclusive – By Simon Maas
After President Joe Biden warned all Americans to leave Ukraine late last week, Biden Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced yesterday that the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv was relocating its remaining staff to Lviv, a city in western Ukraine further away from the threat of Russian invasion. The move comes as Biden administration officials say they expect Russia to attack Ukraine at any moment, something which, if true, could threaten to embroil the U.S. and its NATO allies in a hot war with Russia.
Aside from Biden’s well-documented failures in handling this specific diplomatic crisis, Biden and his administration also appear to be missing the bigger picture from a global geopolitical standpoint. Namely, that Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine is not just an isolated incident, but rather the product of Putin’s growing confidence thanks to much closer ties with Communist China. In turn, both China and Russia have recently ramped up trade, diplomacy, and military cooperation with Iran, sending a clear signal to Washington that the days of unmatched U.S. supremacy are over.
Just days ahead of the start of the Winter Olympics in Beijing, Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin met to discuss the situation in Ukraine, among other things. Xi didn’t explicitly endorse a Russian invasion, but he offered firm support to Putin. In a lengthy joint statement, both leaders sent a not-so-subtle message to Washington: Stay out of our way.
“Russia and China stand against attempts by external forces to undermine security and stability in their common adjacent regions,” the statement said. Both countries “intend to counter interference by outside forces in the internal affairs of sovereign countries under any pretext, oppose color revolutions, and will increase cooperation in the aforementioned areas.”
In the sweeping, 5,300-word statement, Xi also joined Putin in opposing “further enlargement of NATO” and called “on the North Atlantic Alliance to abandon its ideologized Cold War approaches.”
Moscow, in turn, endorsed Beijing’s position that Taiwan is “an inalienable part of China” and agreed to oppose “any forms of independence” for the island democracy, which the Chinese government views as a renegade province that must be brought to heel.
Xi and Putin then praised the relationship between the two countries in the joint statement, heralding a “new era” of the global order and taking clear jabs at the U.S., even if they didn’t call out Washington by name.
“Friendship between the two states has no limits,” the two leaders declared. “There are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation.”
When pressed Sunday on whether he was concerned about China and Russia drawing closer, President Biden seemed to dismiss the question.
“There is nothing new about that,” Biden told reporters.
Experts disagree.
“This is a pledge to stand shoulder to shoulder against America and the West, ideologically as well as militarily,” Robert Daly, director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Wilson Center, told the New Yorker. “This statement might be looked back on as the beginning of Cold War Two.”
Moreover, the numbers suggest that China and Russia are indeed growing closer. Trade between the two countries topped $140 billion last year — an all-time record, and more than double the amount during 2015. At Friday’s meeting, both countries also announced new oil and gas deals valued at an estimated $117.5 billion.
Biden didn’t seem to understand the show of solidarity between Eurasia’s two great authoritarian powers was a direct challenge to Washington.
Hours before Xi and Putin shook hands, the U.S. warned China against helping Russia evade sanctions related to the Ukraine crisis. The American warning came after Secretary of State Antony Blinken tried to push Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi to keep China neutral or out of the Ukraine situation in a call last month.
Two weeks before the Xi-Putin meeting, Blinken met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Geneva. Lavrov proposed an interim deal to revive stalled talks with Iran over its nuclear program. The Biden administration has tried to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, from which President Trump withdrew in 2018. U.S. officials now say negotiations only have a few weeks left to produce an agreement.
“Russia shares our sense of urgency,” Blinken said. “We hope Russia will use the influence it has with Iran to impress upon Iran that sense of urgency.”
As Blinken was speaking, however, Russia was conducting joint naval drills with Iran and China in the Indian Ocean.
A day earlier, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi met Putin in Moscow. While in Russia, Raisi spoke before the Duma (Russian legislature) and blasted the U.S. for having a “strategy of domination,” which he said has “failed” and put America at “its weakest position.”
Raisi said countering U.S. sanctions requires a collective response from “independent nations” – a clear call for unity between Iran, Russia, and other adversaries of the U.S. He also parroted Russian talking points on NATO, saying the alliance “seeks to infiltrate various geographical areas with new alibis that threaten the common interests of independent states.”
Notably, Russia intervened militarily in Syria to help Iran keep its ally, President Bashar al-Assad, in power during the years-long Syrian conflict.
Trade between Iran and Russia isn’t huge, but exceeded $3.5 billion last year, a record, and appears to be trending upward.
Meanwhile, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian recently announced that the 25-year “comprehensive strategic partnership” between Iran and China signed last year just went into effect. As the core of the arrangement, China will invest significant sums of money in Iran over the next quarter-century in exchange for a steady supply of cheap Iranian oil.
China, which is Iran’s largest trading partner, is arguably the chief reason why Iran survived American economic pressure. By ignoring U.S. sanctions and purchasing oil from Iran, China was able to just keep the Iranian economy afloat – allowing their blatant human rights abuses and targeting of American interests to continue.
Both China and Russia’s bilateral relationships with Iran are pragmatic, to be sure, and are hardly ironclad. Indeed, there’s much debate inside Iran about the extent to which the regime should sacrifice its sovereignty to foreign powers, and Beijing and Moscow only support Iran to the extent that doing so advances their interests.
Plus, it should be noted, China and Russia haven’t formed a formal alliance and, due to their size and geography, will always be rivals to some extent. (For example, China’s growing economic relationship with Europe is also at odds with a closer Chinese-Russian relationship.)
Nonetheless, all three countries are clearly drawing closer and see the time is ripe to go on the offensive. Undergirding this effort is a visceral, ideologically driven commitment to upend the U.S.-led global order, which has been defined by an open global economic system, international institutions, liberal political norms, and American supremacy.
Shortly before Raisi met Putin, a spokesman for the Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee stated what Iran hopes to achieve through its relationships with China and Russia.
“In the new world order, a triangle consisting of three powers — Iran, Russia, and China — has formed,” said Mahmoud Abbaszadeh-Meshkini. “This new arrangement heralds the end of the inequitable hegemony of the United States and the West.”
China and Russia have used similar rhetoric about forming a “new world order.”
In 2014, Putin delivered his annual speech to the Valdai International Discussion Club, whose theme for that year’s meeting was “The World Order: New Rules or a Game Without Rules.”
During his remarks, Putin said adhering to a U.S.-led global order is not an option, adding the world either needs to respect Russian interests or risk a world without rules.
“Either way, we can do whatever we like, disregarding all rules and regulations,” Putin said.
One year earlier, Xi told the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee that, among other objectives, they must prioritize “laying the foundation for a future where we will win the initiative and have the dominant position.” In 2017, Xi said China would “become a global leader in terms of composite national strength and international influence” and build a “stable international order” in which it can achieve “national rejuvenation.”
China, Russia, and Iran never accepted the global order that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. But America was too strong to do anything about it. So, Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran bided their time, gaining strength and waiting for the right time to strike. Perceiving the U.S. as weak, they seem to believe the time has now arrived.
Of course, this anti-American axis, led by China and Russia, has been willing to help others opposing U.S. interests.
Both Beijing and Moscow, for example, blocked U.S. efforts to sanction North Korea at the United Nations as recently as last month.
In the Western Hemisphere, China and Russia have also continued to support Venezuela and prop up its oil trade, despite the country being under U.S. sanctions. Nicaragua, to cite another example, recently revived ties with China, signing a series of agreements with Beijing and ending its relationship with Taiwan.
In short, U.S. power is under siege as a new, hostile axis forms that oppose everything the American people hold dear. Whether the Biden administration is up to the challenge remains to be seen. So far, however, it doesn’t look like China, Russia, or Iran is terribly impressed.
Simon Maas is the pen name of a writer living in Virginia.