The Winter Olympics have started in Beijing – and China and Russia are fielding a joint team.
Their ambition is not to win gold in curling or ice hockey – but to shatter once and for all the world shaped by the West since 1945.
At the end of the Second World War, Britain, America and Stalin’s Russia defeated the Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Japan – an alliance around which, Hitler had vaingloriously boasted, the world would one day spin.
Half a century later, after the 9/11 attacks, US President George W Bush described a new ‘Axis of Evil’: Iran, Iraq and North Korea, which he accused of sponsoring terrorism around the world.
And now a new axis of evil threatens to shake the foundations of global security and redraw the planet’s geopolitical map.
Both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are students of history, and these two autocratic presidents-for-life have studied why previous challenges to Western hegemony failed, such as the lack of co-ordination between Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan during the war.
They will not repeat such mistakes. In Beijing yesterday, Putin and Xi met and put on a carefully choreographed and genial display.
MARK ALMOND: Both Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping (pictured together) are students of history, and these two autocratic presidents-for-life have studied why previous challenges to Western hegemony failed, such as the lack of co-ordination between Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan during the war
Putin hailed his country’s ‘unprecedented’ ties with China, and in a joint statement, the two leaders lambasted Western powers for supposedly meddling in their affairs.
China accused America of stoking protests in Hong Kong and bolstering Taiwanese independence, while Russia accused the US of destabilising Ukraine.
Unlike the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, when Western leaders cheered on their countries’ athletes, Nato leaders have spurned the current contest amid a so-called ‘diplomatic boycott’.
But in a sign of just how important these talks are to Russia and China, Putin – who avoided last year’s G20 meeting and Cop26 – has made one of his rare trips outside the Kremlin since the pandemic began.
Xi has not left China’s borders since the plague started in his country in 2019. But now he is at last reunited with the Russian leader he has called his ‘old friend’: the pair have met 38 times already.
Their two countries are expected to sign up to 15 deals imminently, including trade and business arrangements, plans to explore the Moon together and, crucially, working to offset what they call ‘the negative impact of unilateral sanctions’ – such as those the West might impose if Moscow invades Ukraine after the Games, as analysts increasingly expect it to.
On that score, China is making it ever clearer that it supports Russia in its dispute with the West over a possible Nato expansion – Putin’s pretext for any invasion.
Even if a formal military alliance between the two nations has not been signed, do they need one when they already agree on the ‘threat’?
Putin watches the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics, before he was accused of ‘faking a nap’ when the Ukraine team walked out
Team Ukraine take part in the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Beijing
Outside the military sphere, Russia has been indicating that it is willing to build a giant new gas pipeline across the Mongolian steppe and into China.
All these deals, with more said to be on the way, will do much to strengthen the ‘ever-closer union’ of these two vast nations.
Last year, China and Russia renewed a 20-year treaty on ‘friendly cooperation’ while agreeing almost $150billion (£110billion) in bilateral trade and declaring that their relations had reached ‘the highest level’ in history.
Unlike the scrappy 1930s Axis or the minnowish Axis of Evil that dominated global-security discussions at the dawn of this century, modern Russia and China have spent years developing a deep and intimate partnership across a multitude of fields.
From close cooperation in the United Nations Security Council to joint military manoeuvres, their rulers increasingly work in tandem. Unlike Western politicians who face being thrown out of office every few years, Putin and Xi are at liberty to think and plan in decades.
They share a mutual disdain for democracy, human rights and individual freedoms – while their respective ambitions can be uncannily complementary.
Take Ukraine. Putin is bullying his neighbour, trying to humiliate Kiev into abandoning any hope of joining Nato while also seeking to degrade the American-led alliance by forcing Washington to reject Ukrainian membership out of hand.
All this posturing and war-gaming suits Beijing – which can then ramp up its own rhetoric about retaking Taiwan.
Smoke and flames fill the air during a Belarusian and Russian joint military drill at the Brestsky firing range in Belarus
Then there is global trade, in which key developments are shunting Russia and China – who already share a border 2,500 miles long – ever closer together.
As the nominally Communist China has embraced the market economy with gusto, its vast manufacturing base has penetrated deep into Western society.
Meanwhile, Russia enjoys an extraordinary wealth of natural resources, including oil, gas, metals, timber and food to name just a few. This makes it a vital partner to China, whose booming industries have an insatiable appetite for these commodities.
Now, as its relations with America worsen, Beijing has become worried that its global supply chains could be vulnerable to a potential US naval blockade.
This has pushed China to see Russia as its key strategic and material partner. The two countries are drawing up plans to reorientate much of their trade away from the sea – and to land routes through Central Asia: the so-called ‘New Silk Road’.
Then there is propaganda. Across the West, Russia and China are increasingly brazen in their attempts to influence policy and shape public relations.
As the Daily Mail has extensively reported, Beijing has for years been buying ‘friends’ in influential places – from our own Parliament to Oxbridge colleges. This has done much to silence qualms about its repressive regime.
Russia’s huge cash flow from energy has given it the resources to buy lobbyists and tie valuable sectors of the City of London in with its oligarchs – proving Lenin’s dictum that capitalists will sell you the rope you’ll use to hang them with.
It would be deeply naive to think that because Western values are ‘better’ than authoritarian ones, we are certain to triumph in this intractable battle.
Short-sighted appeasement by Britain in the 1930s, along with America’s then-isolationist approach, almost saw the collapse of Western civilisation.
To our great fortune, Putin and Xi are not modern Hitlers. But they are strategically minded – and pooling their vast resources to undermine our way of life.
That is as much of a challenge as the one we faced in the last century – and it is not going to go away.