{"id":394945,"date":"2025-09-03T16:13:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-03T16:13:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/394945\/"},"modified":"2025-09-03T16:13:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-03T16:13:09","slug":"trumps-belligerence-is-pushing-xi-putin-and-kim-together-and-tearing-the-old-world-order-apart-simon-tisdall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/394945\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s belligerence is pushing Xi, Putin and Kim together \u2013 and tearing the old world order apart | Simon Tisdall"},"content":{"rendered":"

Donald Trump\u2019s first reaction to the disconcerting spectacle<\/a> of China\u2019s Xi Jinping, Russia\u2019s Vladimir Putin and North Korea\u2019s Kim Jong-un marching side-by-side at a huge military parade in Beijing was, predictably, all about him. This show of solidarity and strength, he complained, was nothing less than an attempt to \u201cconspire\u201d against the United States. Trump likes military parades \u2013 his own, that is. Even more, he likes to be on the podium, at the centre of attention. He casts himself as world number one. The images coming out of the Chinese capital this week challenged him on all three counts.<\/p>\n

This puncturing of Trump\u2019s insecure ego, and the striking feebleness of his response, will greatly gratify Xi. Trump\u2019s behaviour towards China since taking office in January has been aggressive, vindictive and patronising by turns. His punitive trade tariffs<\/a>, in particular, have caused unprecedented disruption. Though the worst of the levies are paused until November, they help explain Xi\u2019s repeated insistence China is a proud nation that will not be bullied. At the same time, Trump has talked vaguely about offering a face-to-face summit, as if bestowing a great gift. Parading the Beijing triumvirate was Xi\u2019s pointed riposte.<\/p>\n

Even by Red Square standards, the Chinese president\u2019s ostentatious display<\/a> of military might was impressive. The pageantry, anthems, immaculately synchronised, goose-stepping soldiers, tanks, artillery pieces \u2013 and even the release of 80,000 bewildered doves \u2013 all spoke to China\u2019s rapid advance towards global military parity with Washington. Most worrying for the US navy patrolling the western Pacific was the unveiling of hypersonic, nuclear-capable, long-range missiles and underwater drones. China was \u201cunstoppable,\u201d Xi declared. In marking the end of the second world war, \u201chumanity is again faced with the choice of peace or war, dialogue or confrontation, win-win or zero-sum,\u201d he said. This, too, was an unmistakeable warning aimed at Trump. Whether he heeds it is another matter entirely.<\/p>\n

For all the trumpets and bayonets, Xi\u2019s overall purpose in orchestrating this grand political and diplomatic, as well as martial, performance was to project China\u2019s future global leadership role, as envisioned and shaped by himself. This is what Xi has been working towards ever since he rose to the top of the Communist party pile in 2012. He has centralised control<\/a> to a greater degree than any leader since Mao Zedong, whose often disastrous leadership he reveres. Criticism of Xi\u2019s missteps \u2013 and there have been many, over economic management, jobs, a property crisis and corruption \u2013 has brought ever tighter restrictions on corporate, media and personal freedoms. As a surveillance state, China is unquestionably world number one. Xi\u2019s foreign policy, notably towards Taiwan and across the South China Sea region, is fiercely expansionist.<\/p>\n

By gathering dozens of national leaders, first at last weekend\u2019s biggest-ever annual conference of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) \u2013 a potential Eurasian EU equivalent \u2013 and then in Beijing, Xi set down a marker whose significance will reverberate far beyond the White House. By their presence<\/a>, the leaders of Turkey, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Iran and many other actual or would-be rising powers kowtowed to Chinese power. Even India\u2019s leader, Narendra Modi, alienated by Trump\u2019s tariffs<\/a>, played along, minimising longstanding rivalries with China. The SCO\u2019s joint declaration<\/a> in effect endorsed a new, emerging global security and economic order that challenges the post-1945 settlement, directed and dominated by Beijing. It was the latest, triumphalist assertion of Xi\u2019s vision of China as pre-eminent 21st-century power.<\/p>\n

Little wonder Trump was put out. Yet who would seriously disagree that it is his foolish, provocative antagonising of friends and foes alike with his refurbished, multifaceted brand of neo-imperial US overreach that has induced so many countries to throw in their lot with China? That said, the assumption that the Beijing alliance, with the Xi-Putin-Kim triumvirate at its heart, can hold together long-term<\/a>, and find constructive, nonmilitary ways to cooperate, is highly questionable.<\/p>\n

Putin needs Xi\u2019s help right now with Ukraine, but Russia has a historical, visceral fear of Chinese expansionism. North Korea\u2019s Kim \u2013 whose regionally destabilising behaviour and perpetual impecuniousness worry Beijing \u2013 likewise fears Chinese domination. Or look it another way: both Putin and Xi are in their 70s. They will not be in charge for ever. Their rule is highly personalised. Absent them, in both countries, vacuums beckon. The potential for explosions of dissent<\/a>, currently repressed, is massive.<\/p>\n

Theirs is a three-way partnership of expediency, lacking ideological, intellectual or moral underpinning. They are united in opposition to American hegemony, to a western-dominated financial system based on the dollar, to what they regard as noisome universal standards of human and civil rights. They are all antidemocratic authoritarians to their very marrow. In other words, like hard-right populist demagogues in the US and Europe<\/a>, they know what they don\u2019t like.<\/p>\n

Whether they know how to replace that which they would destroy, whether they have any viable, credible idea of alternative global structures that reaches beyond mere national self-interest and political, personal advantage is doubtful. Given the choice, many middle-ranking countries might well drift<\/a> back into the US orbit, if it were led by a more rational, less confrontational president.<\/p>\n

In 1945, when the UN and the present world order came into being, a shared determination, primarily among western powers, that the catastrophes of two world wars should never be repeated, was central to their decision-making, however imperfect. Any similar sense of altruism is wholly absent today from the pragmatic, performative calculations of the Beijing triumvirate. All of which, it must be said, bodes ill for the world. Looking at Xi, Putin and Kim, plus the isolationist-nihilist Trump, biblical scholars might be forgiven for recalling the four horsemen of the apocalypse: conquest, war, famine and death.<\/p>\n

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No prizes for which one is which.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Donald Trump\u2019s first reaction to the disconcerting spectacle of China\u2019s Xi Jinping, Russia\u2019s Vladimir Putin and North Korea\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":394946,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[12,26],"class_list":{"0":"post-394945","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-news","9":"tag-world"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115141253814779067","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=394945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394945\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/394946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=394945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=394945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=394945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}