Authoritarian divisions

AS China uses the Olympic Games to showcase the return of its civilisational power, Russia has launched an attack on Georgia to remind the world that it will reclaim its historic influence by resort to force.

Beijing's opening ceremony was a fusion of Confucian past and glorious future and, above all, a message that China's greatness is an irresistible force of the 21st century. At the same time Vladimir Putin claimed for the Russian nation the soul of Alexander Solzhenitsyn (lest it be seized by the West) bringing that indomitable witness against Soviet tyranny into the bosom of the motherland. History, in case you missed the point, has not ended. China recruits the soft power of the Olympics to advance its cause and obliterate the memory of much of its 20th-century humiliation. Russia deploys the hard power of military invasion to lay claim to Georgia, Stalin's birthplace, and destroy its putative alliance with the West.

Russia and China have a relationship born in mistrust and mired in rivalry, yet they take mutual heart from their contemporary experience: the success of the autocratic state.

Beneath Olympic harmony, China is unforgiving, refusing any serious concessions from its security state and Communist Party apparatus. In New York, it is reported Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the elected President of Georgia "must go". Putin's action has excited hyperbole. Frequent comparisons are being made with Hitler's spurious justification for his march into the Sudetenland on the eve of World War II. "Putin is putting Russia on a course that is ominously similar to Stalin's and Hitler's in the late 1930s," former Democratic presidential adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski said.

Two prominent figures from the Clinton administration, Richard Holbrooke and Ronald Asmus argue that Putin's real goal is "regime change" in Georgia.

"Moscow seeks to roll back democratic breakthroughs on its borders, to destroy any chance of further NATO or EU enlargement and to re-establish a sphere of hegemony over its neighbours," they wrote in the Washington Post.

The world of 1989 is not lost, but it is far distant. The fall of the Berlin Wall was the symbolic demise of communism. The collapse of the Soviet Union unleashed Western triumphalism and the idea of a new world order rising from Soviet ashes. In the East, 1989 saw China's leaders order the shooting of their own people in Tiananmen Square, surely proof that their regime was unsustainable.

Western afterglow reached its zenith with George W. Bush. The 2002 US National Security Strategy declared the century had ended with the West's victory and "a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy and free enterprise". It was a bipartisan given. But it was never accepted in Beijing or Moscow. Indeed, it is actively contested, and that contest is now on display. Slight problem for a universal conclusion.

Putin said the Soviet Union's collapse represented "the greatest geo-political catastrophe of the 20th century." His aim is to resurrect Russia from weakness. US analyst Robert Kagan argues that Putin has persuaded many Russians to see this "surrender to the West" as a nationalist humiliation similar to Germany's humbling by the punitive Versailles peace treaty after the Great War. Kagan says Putin's ambition "is to undo the post-Cold War settlement" with Moscow seeking not "integration in the West but a return to a special Russian greatness".

Meanwhile, China's regime has found a legitimacy of sorts in economic success, rising prosperity and stoking a nationalistic pride that offers political cover for freedom's denial. The medal count at the Olympics must await the final event, but any Chinese sporting victory over the US will operate as a silent omen of future GDP performance.

Welcome to the new world of nationalism, financial power and authoritarianism. Each has been a potent force in the history of mankind. But these three forces fused together in contemporary China and Russia constitute a formidable trio of unpalatable state power. It is a challenge the West is just starting to comprehend.

Beijing and Moscow choose to use these tools in different ways - China is subtle, Russia is brutal - but the strategy of the autocratic state is a shared theme. It is economic power that fuels their rising confidence. China's economic success comes from its huge trade competitiveness and its role as a surplus financial provider. Russia's originates in its control of massive resources and energy - it benefits from one of the greatest income transfers in history from energy buyers to energy sellers.

Remember, just as the US now depends on China's national savings to fund its current account deficit, so Europe increasingly depends upon Russia for energy sources. The Russians have a 19th-century mindset for the great game of resources competition. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Josef Joffe, editor of Die Zeit, says: "If Moscow gains control over Georgia, it is 'good night and good luck' to Europe. All of its gas and oil bought in Eurasia (minus the Middle East) will pass through Russian hands in one way or another."

Listen and you detect the sense of US shock and impotence about Russia's move. Georgia's President, Mikheil Saakashvili, says it is a war over "the kind of Europe our children will live in". The bell is tolling: the warning goes out that Russia's attack is a turning point and its aggression must be met. Then comes the qualification: the US cannot use military force. This is overlaid by a strategic confusion: an unresolved debate in the US about whether its NATO expansion strategy was right or wrong.

The unipolar moment for the US is long gone. American analyst Fareed Zakaria argues that "on every dimension other than military power - industrial, financial, social and cultural - the distribution of power is shifting away from US dominance."

This is not a prediction of US demise. Such a claim would be absurd. Nor does it overlook the immense problems facing Russia and China, and the guaranteed crises they face down the track. It does, however, assert that the time when the US could determine the global order is finished.

Russia is resisting encirclement by Western powers and Western values. China will not acquiesce in any US-led containment ploy in Asia, in the unlikely event that the US attempted such a strategy.

The moral for Australia is that realpolitik never died. Yes, the Rudd Government's multilateral dreams should be pursued, but they need to be hedged against the possibility that competition, not co-operation, will define the coming disorder.