Summit fuels West’s fears of a new axis of autocrats

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin toast with vodka during a signing ceremony in 2014 in Shanghai. Picture: Getty Images

For decades China and Russia were at loggerheads over how to implement a communist revolution. Now, as this week’s Winter Olympics summit between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin is likely to show, they are cementing an alliance to make the world safe for autocrats.

The Chinese President is backing his Russian counterpart in resisting what they both ­declare to be Western interference in Ukraine; no doubt when the time comes, Putin will declare that a Xi invasion of ­Taiwan was actually a Western “provocation”.

The wisdom of the Nixon-Kissinger era was that Moscow and Beijing could be played off against each other to America’s benefit, but the Russian troop build-up around Ukraine has forced Russia and China into a sticky embrace.

Relations between the two have rarely been so intimate. China has been buying significant quantities of pipelined natural gas from Russia. The price is lower than what could be expected from the Nord Stream 2 pipeline into Europe but it gives the Kremlin a safety cushion should the West decide to punish Russia if it invades Ukraine.

China could also help Russia if the US and the EU strike at the heart of the Russian banking system or even exclude Moscow from Swift, the international payments network.

Russia and China have been thinking for a while, since the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, how to blunt the edge of what they deem to be Western financial warfare.

The US recently appealed to China to intercede with Russia to head off an attack on Ukraine. Yet, China and Russia have already become allies. They stage military exercises together, co-ordinate their voting in the UN Security Council, and are working on a joint lunar mission.

The visit of Putin to Beijing is only his third Covid-era trip abroad; Xi hasn’t left China since the Wuhan outbreak.

Putin is promising that a “new model of co-operation” will be sealed.

It is beginning to look more and more like the geopolitical set-up predicted by George ­Orwell in 1984 – a world divided into Oceania (North America and Britain), Eurasia (dominated by Russia) and Eastasia (the ­Chinese landmass).

Putin is gambling on what he sees as a leadership vacuum in Oceania, and thinks there is something to be won. Who in the West, after all, is ready to challenge rivals on two fronts?

The Times