The West need not fear a Chussia aligned against it. It instead needs to develop geopolitical strategies to deal with China as the dominant power in Eurasia. For like the United States at the end of the nineteenth century when it consolidated its borders and established hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, China has consolidated its security in Eurasia and is now free to project power globally.
On 8 February 2022, Vladimir Putin meeting with Xi Jinping in Beijing announced to the astonishment of the world that they had agreed to a ‘friendship without limits’. Two weeks later, Russia invaded Ukraine. Western media, conservative think tanks, and many politicians began ranting about the ‘alliance of autocracies’, ‘axis of authoritarians’, and so on. The Chussia Anxiety was born.
The anxiety and the handy historical reference to pre-WWII alliances between the dictatorships had been long simmering. Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and the West’s first round of economic coercion against Russia saw Moscow draw closer to Beijing. Since Xi Jinping’s elevation to the top job in 2012, the leaders have met over 40 times, although many of these have been in the margins of multilateral or regional meetings. As far as these things go, the leaders display affection towards each other.
They also share a deep sourness and suspicion of the US-led liberal West. Not without some justification, they are convinced the US will seek every opportunity for regime change and that the US’ allies are hand maidens in this. Both seek an international order that is accommodating of their rule and regimes. With the end of US global primacy and the emergence of a multipolar order, they believe this is their time. Xi said as much when farewelling Putin in March 2023, when he said ‘there are great changes in the world not seen for a century and we are driving those changes.’
So the China Threat has now become the Chussia Anxiety. This is a bigger and more dangerous adversary which requires an overwhelming response.
In July 2022, at the Madrid NATO Summit, where understandably and quite reasonably all focus was on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the US and some NATO ministers, and especially NATO’s then Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, began talking about a single global theatre of conflict: NATO versus Chussia.
The Australian Prime Minister, ever willing to regurgitate an official’s brief and accommodate the US, even took up the cause of a single global theatre. Some European states quickly killed it off, but it didn’t stop Stoltenberg shifting to the need for an Asian NATO and proposing a formal NATO presence in Japan. Japan’s briefly incandescent Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba........