The Chinese Communist Party had a busy week at the United Nations. At the International Court of Justice, its envoy defended Hamas’s terrorism as a legitimate “armed struggle” against “colonialism.” And in a U.N. Security Council meeting, China sided with Russia to urge the United States to stop supporting Ukraine. The CCP has been taking any shot it gets to trash the West on the world stage.
China’s U.N. ambassador, Zhang Jun, engaged in even more anti-Western animus on Friday with a series of bitter comments about NATO. “We encourage NATO to do some soul-searching, come out of the cage of Cold War mentality, and refrain from acting as an agent of trouble instigating bloc confrontation,” he said before criticizing NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg for “saber-rattling.”
Zhang and other CCP leaders are hypercritical of NATO because they understand any similar security alliance in the Pacific could put a stop to their expansionism. In the last Cold War, NATO was a key element in America’s strategy to contain and eventually defeat Soviet communism. Chinese strategists have learned from the USSR’s mistakes and are seeking to advance a geopolitics of “multipolarity” to break out of containment.
For two years now, China has provided Russia with critical support for its invasion of Ukraine because the country wants to do the same thing to Taiwan. It started mere weeks before the invasion when CCP Chairman Xi Jinping pledged a “no-limits friendship” with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Since then, Sino-Russian trade has exploded, smashing records in 2023.
China has also been secretly supplying Russia with vast amounts of military equipment. Chinese components, for example, are vital to the drones Iran has been supplying to Russia. Xi is providing Putin with all this support because he hopes that a Russian victory in Ukraine will set a precedent. He wants to degrade Western confidence as he prepares his forces to occupy Taiwan.
Russian and Chinese officials will sometimes explain their actions as steps toward creating a “multipolar world order.” Alexander Dugin, a Russian political theorist with ties to the Kremlin and a senior fellow at China’s Fudan University, is perhaps the most intellectually serious advocate of this new position. Blending together critiques of the world order from the extreme Left and Right alike, he argues that powers such as Russia and China need to foment a revolution against so-called “Western hegemony.” Dugin envisions a world divided into distinct civilizational blocs not entirely unlike the nightmare of George Orwell’s 1984.
Xi has made a similar concept of “multipolarity” a core pillar of Chinese statecraft. He has, for instance, urged Europe to “achieve strategic autonomy” from the U.S. and become an “an independent pole in a multipolar world.” China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a sort of global infrastructure investment scheme, is sometimes pitched to potential partners as a way to make them independent from the West. And Chinese diplomats and financiers are attempting to find new ways to weasel into Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East and counter Western influence.
“Multipolarity,” though, is nothing more than an excuse to terrorize weaker countries. Putin and Xi believe they possess a civilizational right to direct the destinies of peoples with the misfortune of existing within their “spheres of influence.” They are willing to take violent action to prevent any possible pivots to the West, whether economic or political. The Moscow-Beijing Axis simply cannot abide peoples freely choosing to move away from their corrupt and authoritarian systems.
Beyond the mounting tragedy of Russian war crimes in Ukraine, China’s own pattern of behavior also proves that “multipolarity” is not in the interests of smaller countries. The CCP has always treated its imperial victims with extreme brutality. In Tibet, the CCP’s occupation has resulted in thousands of human rights abuses, including torture and illegal killings. In Xinjiang, the CCP is engaged in a terrible genocide against the indigenous Uyghur population. And in Hong Kong, the CPP is viciously repressing its political opponents. Pacific nations should be clear-eyed about the immense danger posed by Xi’s expansionist ambitions.
The only viable answer to CCP aggression is increased cooperation among its prospective victims. The U.S. alone does not have the resources to prevent a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, even leaving aside other regional commitments. China possesses the largest navy in the world, and its shipbuilding capacity is more than 200 times greater than the U.S. But by working together with regional partners such as Japan and the Philippines, America can maintain a level of deterrence while the country rebuilds a military advantage.
China, Russia, and their junior partner Iran hope that multipolar chaos will distract the U.S. They believe that setting fires everywhere will limit America’s ability to project power around the globe. Universal aggression on the part of the Eurasian axis is already alienating their neighbors. But their strategy will backfire if American leaders keep their wits about them — admittedly a big “if.”
Zhang’s recent anti-NATO outburst at the U.N. is an excellent reminder of what the Chinese Communist Party fears the most: strong alliances between free peoples. As one World War II-era poster put it, “United we are strong. United we will win.”
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Michael Lucchese is a Krauthammer Fellow at the Tikvah Fund and the founder of Pipe Creek Consulting.
