If goose-stepping troops and nuclear weapons on trucks are your thing, then Beijing on Wednesday was the place to be. A Chinese celebration of the 80th anniversary of the end of the second world war was marked by a massive military parade, in front of President Xi Jinping and more than 25 invited world leaders — including Vladimir Putin of Russia and Kim Jong Un of North Korea.
In his speech, Xi presented himself as a man of peace and a believer in “win-win” co-operation. But the display of Chinese military might sent out a rather different message — particularly when combined with the warm welcome Xi extended to Putin, whose invasion of Ukraine has unleashed the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945.
Watching from the US, Donald Trump sounded almost wistful about his absence, when he remarked: “I thought it was a beautiful ceremony. I thought it was very, very impressive.” But in a social media post, Trump addressed to Xi, he wrote: “Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against the United States of America.”
If the US president is now coming around to the belief that Russia, China and North Korea collectively intend to undermine American global leadership then he is a late convert to an idea that became widely accepted in Washington during the Biden years.
Those nations, together with Iran, were described as an “axis of upheaval” in an influential article by Richard Fontaine and Andrea Kendall-Taylor published in Foreign Affairs magazine in 2024. Hal Brands, another Washington commentator, argued in March that “all around Eurasia’s vibrant, vital periphery, revisionist states are on the move”. He added: “China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia are attacking the regional foundations of Eurasian stability . . . War or the threat of war has become pervasive.”
The president of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, was also in Beijing for this week’s military parade and for the preceding meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), a grouping of 10 member countries — with some other nations granted partner status.
In recent months, some analysts had downplayed the idea of an “axis of upheaval” — pointing to the lack of concrete Russian or Chinese support for Iran when it came under attack by Israel and the US in June.
But North Korea, Iran and China have all played important roles in sustaining Russia’s war in Ukraine. North Korean troops arrived to fight alongside the Russians in the Kursk region late last year. The Shaheed drones that have been pouring down on Ukrainian cities and troops in increasing numbers in recent weeks were designed in Iran and are now manufactured in Russia. And trade with China has provided a lifeline to the Russian economy — allowing it to survive western sanctions.
The footage of Kim, Putin and Xi strolling together, at the head of a group of world leaders, was powerfully symbolic. It was the first time that the three leaders had been filmed together. Whatever their other differences, the three leaders — along with the Iranian government — share a belief that the current global power structure has thwarted their national ambitions. They want to change the world order — and seem increasingly inclined to work together to further that aim.
The obvious US response to the emergence of an anti-western grouping, led by China and Russia, would be to strengthen America’s own network of alliances — and to try to draw nonaligned nations towards the west.
But the Trump administration has done the opposite. The US president has attempted to build friendly relations with Putin, Xi and Kim — while threatening American allies and alienating nonaligned countries.
Trump’s charm offensives with Russia, China and North Korea have so far yielded remarkably little. Efforts to forge a friendship with Kim during the first Trump administration came to nothing. Indeed, their collapse seems to have led to a radicalisation of North Korean policy, with Kim accelerating the development of advanced weaponry and adopting more hostile policies towards South Korea and the US.
Trump’s hope that his recent summit with Putin would lead to a swift peace settlement in Ukraine has not been realised. And Xi seems in no rush to stage his own summit with Trump.
At the same time, since taking office in January Trump has sown confusion and dismay within the western alliance — threatening the sovereignty of Canada and Denmark and imposing 15 per cent tariffs on the EU. Japan and South Korea, which both host American military bases, have also been hit with 15 per cent tariffs. Taiwan, which China covets and which America has pledged to protect, got 20 per cent tariffs.
Perhaps the most baffling and counter-productive geopolitical play of the lot is Trump’s antagonistic stance towards India. Courting New Delhi has been bipartisan American policy for more than 20 years, as successive US administrations have seen the country as an indispensable counterweight to a rising China. A deadly clash between Chinese and Indian troops along their disputed border in 2020 led to a sharp deterioration in relations between Delhi and Beijing — and handed the US an opportunity to get closer to India.
Just in January the US and India signed an agreement on critical and emerging technologies, which deepened their defence ties. Both countries anticipated that a Trump presidency would lead to even better ties between the US and India.
Instead, Trump has set about trashing relations with India — for reasons that seem to be largely trivial and to do with his own wounded ego. When a military clash broke out between India and Pakistan in May, Trump was swift to claim credit for ending it. The Pakistanis played along and nominated the US president for the Nobel Peace Prize. India refused to endorse the White House’s narrative. Last month, the US imposed 50 per cent tariffs on India, citing continued Indian purchases of Russian oil.
This week Indian prime minister Narendra Modi paid his first visit to China for seven years to attend a summit of the SCO. He also participated in a warm group photo with Xi and Putin, which was swiftly transmitted around the world.
The Indians were clearly sending a deliberate message to the White House. But, at the same time, there is a serious strategic rethink going on in New Delhi. The school of thought within the Indian elite that sees Russia as an old and reliable friend — and the US as treacherous and unreliable — has been strengthened. For the US to alienate India would be “a massive act of geopolitical self-harm”, in the words of James Crabtree, former head of the Asia office of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Writing on Truth Social on Friday, Trump said: “Looks like we have lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest China. May they have a long and prosperous future together!”
Growing doubts about whether the Trump administration can be relied upon are now spreading across America’s network of allies in Asia. But there is little prospect of the countries of the region organising an effective resistance to Chinese regional hegemony without American help. As Crabtree puts it, if the US pulls back from the region, “China will fill that void and China will become the dominant country in the world”.
It seems more possible that America’s European allies could eventually organise themselves to contain Russian power, without the US playing the central role. But even Europe’s “coalition of the willing” to support Ukraine — which met in Paris this week — is still insisting on the need for American security guarantees to underwrite any European deployments. As President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine put it this week: “We are counting on the US backstop.”
Disarray within the western alliance has inevitably amplified the significance of the events in Beijing this week. But analysts are divided about how much of real substance was achieved.
Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin, argues that the SCO remains a “very loose and dysfunctional” organisation with a lot of internal divisions. It contains both India and Pakistan, who recently fought a brief armed conflict. By contrast, the G7 group of leading democracies is a much more like-minded and action-oriented grouping — although Trump has put its internal coherence under enormous strain.
But others argue that significant measures were agreed upon at the SCO summit. Jesper Koll, a Tokyo-based economist and former investment banker, points to the agreement to establish an SCO development bank, which will concentrate on infrastructure and trade finance — and attempt to promote alternatives to the dollar. Koll argues that the “foundations for a new global financial architecture are being built, but not in Washington . . . the counter attack against Maga in general, the weaponisation of the dollar in particular, is getting real.”
The sceptics might counter that Beijing first called for the creation of an SCO development bank in 2010. But Russia, which is increasingly dependent on China, seems to have now dropped any objections to the bank. Xi has also announced a “global governance initiative”, which looks like an effort to create other China-centred structures that could counter western-dominated institutions.
While Chinese efforts to build up alternative structures of global governance still often sound vague, the military might on display in Tiananmen Square this week was very tangible.
Western intelligence officials will be poring over the footage of China’s new hardware in an effort to increase their understanding of Beijing’s military capabilities. Much of the weaponry on display — such as hypersonic missiles that are designed to sink aircraft carriers — is clearly designed to position China to defeat the US in a war over Taiwan.
Chinese officials argue that this week’s parade of military prowess was all part of a policy of “peace through strength” — reflecting a determination that China will never be bullied. But China’s nervous neighbours are not convinced.
They might recall the maxim of the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, who once advised: “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired.” Many in the region — and some in Washington — will conclude that Xi has hung China’s pistol on the wall.