With Europe in flames and the phrase “World War III” spoken without inviting ridicule in the context of Ukraine, it may seem odd to suggest that the grim conflict is part of something yet bigger.
It is, however, true. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s revanchist attack on an independent nation that was once a satrapy of the Soviet empire fits precisely into a wider effort by the world’s allied tyrannies to destroy American global leadership and undermine liberal democracy everywhere.
For sure, the attack on Ukraine is the most recent, violent, dramatic, disgraceful, and dangerous manifestation of that broad strategy, and thus rightly has dominated global attention since Russia launched its war last month.
But it is vital that its bigness, immediate horrors, and danger of spreading do not obscure the fact that its purpose is not simply to change the map of Europe but to buttress the world’s worst despots and overturn assumptions about systems of government, national self-determination, and human rights that have prevailed for 75 years.
As Anne Pierce writes in the Washington Examiner’s cover story this week, a new triumvirate of Axis powers — Russia, China, and Iran — is challenging the dispensation of the past three generations. Each of these nations is malevolent in every aspect toward its own people and both fearful of and hostile to the challenge presented by the attractive freedoms and comforts of the West.
Fittingly, the middle two letters of “axis” are the name of the man, President Xi of China, who makes this clash possible and victory plausible for the malefactors. It is Xi who has returned China firmly to its totalitarian ways and made confrontation with America explicit and unapologetic where once it was implicit and stealthy. The switch is a measure of his confidence.
As the Washington Examiner reported, the U.S. intelligence community regards the Chinese Communist Party as its “absolutely unparalleled” opponent. The most recent report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence warns that “China increasingly is a near-peer competitor, challenges the United States in multiple arenas — especially economically, militarily, and technologically — and is pushing to change global norms.”
Russia and Iran, Putin and the Ayatollah Khamenei, have latched on to China’s star. They are deadly and threatening in and of themselves — not least because the former has nuclear weapons already and the latter may soon join the club — but neither would have anything like their current potency if they were not allied to a superpower that may have the ability and certainly has the will to make the world safe for despots, to make conquest an understood if not accepted modus operandi of nations, and to displace America as the global hegemon.
The Axis is watching for American weakness, and we are giving them plenty of it. The latest avoidable fiasco of the U.S. and Poland publicly quibbling over how to supply fighter jets to Ukraine while avoiding primary blame for doing so flashed yet another signal not just to Putin, but to Xi and the ayatollah, that their enemy is not serious and will buckle under pressure.
