A New Threat for the U.S.

It sounded like a echo of the 1950-1960 Sino-Soviet Alliance, when the new Chinese Defence Minister Wei Fenghe said at a meeting held in Moscow this month that the Chinese “Pala has come here to show Americans the close ties between the armed forces of China and Russia! ”

Of course, the road to a full military alliance remains long, and it is easy to ignore Wei's statement as a rhetorical stance. But that would be wrong, as Wei mentioned, however, an ominous feature of today's world policy - the growing alignment on a front, of various geopolitical rivals in America.

Of course, this alignment is not new: autocrat states and opponents of the United States of America, such as North Korea, Syria, and Iran, have been co-operating among them for years on cases from the sale of weapons to the spread of nuclear weapons.

What is now changing is that co-operation among America's major power competitors is increasing, as threats to the Washington-led international order are also on the rise.
We start with Russia and China. While these countries have deepened efforts to restore their geopolitical influence, they have made common causes on a number of fronts.

China secured a diplomatic defence for Russia at the UN Security Council following the Crimea annexation in 2014, despite the traditional Beijing reluctance to support “separatist” movements, out of fear of encouraging such forces in Taiwan

Moscow and Beijing have also worked together to block United Nations' support of the Assad regime in Syria, as well as to oppose the military deployment of the United States to the Korean Peninsula, at a time that has closer ties with the sale of weapons, energy deals and development of military technology.
Russia and Iran have often been geopolitical rivals, but today they are co-operating to undermine the American influence in the Middle East.

Tehran and Moscow have formed a military alliance de facto, to hold Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad in power, and preserve or increase their influence in the region with Russians providing air power, and Iranians land.
Co-ordination between Russian and Iranian officials has been strengthened not only in the field of battle, but also at the highest levels of government.
Our co-operation could isolate America”, Ali Khamenei, Russian President Vladimir Putin, told the Iranian Supreme Leader during a meeting between them at the end of 2017.

Meanwhile, while cooperation among American rivals has rightly been described as more opportunistic than systematic, it is surprising that these countries are finding more and more cases of working together, and that they seem to be in their interest. This is happening for two reasons: geopolitical and ideological.
The geopolitical reason is the fact that what Iran, Russia and China have in common is that everyone is trying to weaken, in their own way and for their motives, an international order built on the rule of the United States of America, its allies and partners.

The ideological reason, is that these countries also share a commitment to non-liberal rule in a relatively liberal era. Of course, Marxism-lenism no longer ensures the essence of the relationship between Moscow and Beijing, as happened in the time of Stalin and Mao.

But Russia, China and Iran are all three autocratic regimes that see themselves struggling for influence and even survival in a world where the main power is a democracy and democratic values are still remarkable.
Under these conditions, Washington should simply seek to divide its opponents by using respected diplomatic maneuvers, for which Richard Nixon and Henry Kisinger rightly won great commendation in the early 1970s.
In 2017 the Trump Administration considered ways of division between Iran and Russia in the Middle East. International relations researchers like John Mearsheimer have suggested Washington reconciles with Moscow to best Beijing.

But because these countries are currently more hostile to America than to each other, opportunities are few.
Theoretically, the United States of America may try to reach possibly a major “agreement with Russia, which would include accepting Russian domination in Ukraine, removing the Baltic states of NATO's defence net, allowing the penetrate of a Russian sphere of influence in countries of the former Soviet Union and in parts of Eastern Europe, as well as acknowledging Moscow as an equal geopolitical player in the Middle East here all these in hopes that Russian officials will start to give up their hostility with the West, and focus on the long-term threat coming from China.

But the cost of such an agreement would be so high and the benefits so uncertain that it will practically never be considered as an initiative.
In time, greater opportunities may arise to put US rivals against each other. But for now, America faces the undisputed task of supporting an international system that is being challenged in multiple fronts and by opponents who are increasingly working together. /Bloomberg View