This is part three of a six-part column that examines global geopolitical readjustments since 2019 and the strengthening of two allied blocks of authoritarian nations in a standoff with two blocks of democratic states. I utilize historical perspectives to assess the likelihood of the expansion of war into Europe, Asia and beyond: the dreadful scenario of a third world war.

CHINESE EXPANSIONISM

With 3.383 million barrels per day, China is the world’s seventh-largest crude oil producer, but that does not even come close to fulfilling internal demand. The world’s second-largest economy is also second in oil consumption (15.4 million barrels a day), which means that it must purchase the balance of what it needs from foreign sources. Last month, Reuters news reported that Russia had surpassed Saudi Arabia for the first time as China’s top source of oil. As of May of this year China is receiving 55% more Russian oil than they were in 2021.

Incapable of leveraging oil as part of its diplomatic arsenal, China has for about a decade used the peaceful strategy of constructing ambitious infrastructure projects around the world. Take, for example, the Belt and Road initiative, a transportation system conceived to connect the Pacific port city of Lianyungang to Rotterdam. Attila’s empire reached that far west.

Its southern counterpart, the New Eurasian Land Bridge, starts in China’s pacific coast, crosses through several countries including Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Turkey, where it connects with the Mediterranean (a new Bosporus) and continues to Western Europe. This is what I meant earlier when I said that the Chinese have the long-term perspective of decades and centuries. If all goes as planned, all roads will lead to Beijing.

The other major Chinese expansionist tool is what Indian scholar Brahma Chellaney first dubbed (in 2017) China’s “debt-trap diplomacy.” There’s nothing new about this strategy, deftly used for centuries by the world’s commercial powers as a colonial and neocolonial weapon to gain influence and power over economically and politically weaker nations. China is familiar with that strategy, having been on the receiving end of the scheme from the 1870s through 1940s. The Chinese remember it well, as they do the diabolical British scheme to force imports of Indian opium to get the country addicted to the narcotic extracted from the poppy flower. Social media platform TikTok, which is owned by a Chinese company, has successfully addicted hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of American children and youths.

High-speed trains, loans and addictive internet platforms, not the recently unveiled hypersonic missile, are China’s most formidable weapons.

A NEW AXIS?

Since the start of the 21st century, Russia-China relations have become tighter diplomatically, commercially and militarily. In 1996 China joined Russia and three former Socialist Soviet Republics in an alliance that came to be known as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), with the goal of coordinating joint military exercises.

Russia and China have come even closer since the latter escalated its anti-Taiwan rhetoric in 2021 and the former invaded Ukraine in 2022. Iran, meanwhile, has established military alliances with both powers. All three nations have much in common and share similar geopolitical goals. They fall under the Democracy Index’s lowest category (authoritarian regimes); all three endure heavy sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies; and they want to undermine U.S. economic, diplomatic and military power. This convergence of interests has cemented an alliance that some have dubbed the “New Axis.”

It was not that long ago that China and the United Sates were allies, and not that much further back when they were enemies. Communist China-U.S. relations became increasingly hostile after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. As tense as U.S.-Soviet relations were, President Lyndon B. Johnson saw Beijing as an even greater threat than Moscow and even considered a preemptive military strike to stop its nuclear weapons development program. Then came the Vietnam War and Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, which further stressed China-U.S. relations.

The turning point came in the 1970s in a context of increased hostilities with the Soviet Union. Both China and the United States saw rapprochement as a strategy to curb the threat of Soviet expansion. In February 1972, President Richard Nixon traveled to China and both nations signed the Shanghai Communique, a blueprint for the normalization of U.S.-China relations that culminated with the full establishment of diplomatic relations in 1979. China’s threat had shrunk to the point that NATO’s Southeast Asia counterpart, SEATO, disbanded in 1977.

To be continued.

Readers can reach him at LMF_Column@yahoo.com.