Western dysfunction is bolstering China

By Marc Champion

THE POST-GAME ANALYSIS of this week’s gathering near Beijing of non-Western leaders is in. The spectacle of China’s Xi Jinping, India’s Narendra Modi, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin holding hands, hugging, and sharing rides was judged by some as marking a transformative shift in global alliances, and by others as theater. But perhaps they miss the point. We should be judging Xi’s show of strength by its ability to contrast with the chaos and weakness among his competitors in the US and Europe.

What emerged from Monday’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit was, in concrete terms, thin gruel: A development fund without details or monetary commitments, to be put at the service of a military network that lacks either a collective defense clause or joint command structure. The more substantive message probably came a day later, as Xi oversaw a display of Chinese military power, flanked by Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, two outlaws of the liberal, US-led order he seeks to destroy.

As my colleague Mihir Sharma , no photo op or rhetoric can disguise the fact that India — Xi’s trophy guest at the SCO — remains threatened by China, even as it tries (and likely fails) to achieve some form of detente. The two countries have longstanding border disputes that turned violent as recently as 2020-2021. Just as worrying for New Delhi is that Beijing has become the chief supplier of arms and economic support to Pakistan, India’s nemesis. In May, Islamabad used Chinese fighter jets and PL-15 air-to-air missiles that outrange their US equivalent to humiliate India’s air force, downing brand new French Rafales.

So while India may be the world’s most populous nation and a future superpower, it still needs the US. Putin is now so dependent on Beijing and so overstretched by his invasion of Ukraine that Moscow can offer little of the counterbalance it did through much of the Soviet era. In fact, India’s military is so overmatched by China’s that its dependence on US arms and backing in some ways echoes Europe’s. But again, this misses the point.

It’s less important how fast or effectively China is building its alternative to the US-dominated international systems than that its actions are coherent and have an achievable trajectory. This is what Monday’s SCO diplomacy and Tuesday’s military parade achieved. In the process, they highlighted the contradictory, if not self-destructive, trade and foreign policies of the US administration. And while European policy goals may be more consistent, they’re unachievable absent US support (and therefore largely irrelevant).

How much sense, for example, does it make to compare the SCO’s lack of a collective defense commitment with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Article 5, when Trump has been busy chipping away at the provision’s credibility, and Xi and Kim are supplying Putin with critical components, troops, arms and munitions to fight his war? And why does China need joint command structures to aid Russia in Ukraine? Especially as the US defunds its support for Kyiv and Europe is unable to fill the gap? A British or French military parade held after China’s would be painful to watch.

Modi and other leaders who showed up in Tianjin are far from naïve enough to believe Xi’s rhetoric of equality (or even democracy) among states, his offer of “win-win” solutions, or claimed disinterest in establishing Chinese hegemony. But how they react — by submitting or building up the defenses needed to ensure independence — depends on finding a backer capable of deterring Chinese predations. The US no longer looks like a reliable bet.

In fact, if there is any strategic case to be made for Trump’s effective abandonment of Ukraine, it would be as a step toward repairing US relations with Russia to peel it away from China, America’s only true peer rival. That would severely misinterpret Putin, but it seems unlikely ever to have been a serious US policy goal, given the administration’s willingness to drive Modi, quite literally, into Xi’s arms.

The importance of China’s summitry should not be measured just by how well it did in building the financial institutions and military alliances it wants to replace. Some version of a new Chinese order will come, whether regional or global. Judge it instead by the mirror it has held up to the chaos in Washington and Europe. India, Egypt, Turkey, Vietnam, and other nations either at or watching Xi’s show will draw their own conclusions.

BLOOMBERG OPINION