Alarm over a ‘China-Russia axis’ revives unwanted Cold War mentality

Talk of a Sino-Russia-US ‘strategic triangle’ forces an outdated framework onto a changing, multipolar world and increases the risk of a great-power conflict

Such rhetoric is made more dangerous given that the real struggle of the 21st century – climate change – must be fought collectively, not between rival powers

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Wang Huiyao

Wang Huiyao is the founder of the Centre for China and Globalisation, a Beijing-based non-governmental think tank.

Published: 1:30am, 1 Mar 2022Updated: 2:08am, 1 Mar 2022

Fifty years ago last week, President Nixon made a landmark visit to Beijing that thawed tensions with China and reshaped the geopolitics of the Cold War. After the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s had effectively turned a bipolar world order into a “tripolarity”, Nixon’s trip and the rapprochement it symbolised substantially altered the balance of power in the triangle of China-Soviet-US relations.

The “strategic triangle” was the dominant frame through which geopolitics was understood at the height of the Cold War. It largely fell dormant with the fall of the USSR but has now been revived by some Western observers, with Putin’s Russia filling in for the Soviet Union.

This revival has been triggered by events in Ukraine and the joint statement between China and Russia on February 4, which was seen by some as a mirror moment of Nixon’s 1972 China visit – one that today brought Beijing and Moscow together against the US. It has generated a wave of headlines in the US warning of “The New Axis of Autocracy”, an “alliance of autocracies”, and a “New Superpower Struggle Among US, Russia, and China”.

But whatever the Cold War echoes in the current Ukraine crisis, applying this 20th-century triangular framing to our world today is a dangerous and misguided anachronism, for three major reasons.