C HIN A C HI N A
Axis of Troublemakers China and Russia have formed an alliance of disruption. Both culture wars and shooting wars play into their hands.
By Michael R. Auslin
F
our years ago, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping made pancakes together in Vladivostok while thousands of their military forces conducted joint exercises in Siberia. In February, as China hosted the Olympics, Putin and Xi announced that a new era in interna-
tional relations had begun, one in which the two great authoritarian powers of the twenty-first century would reshape the liberal international order established in 1945 and reaffirmed in 1991. Some call it Cold War II, yet the blossoming relationship between Moscow and Beijing may best be thought of as an alliance of disruptors. As Russia roils Europe over Ukraine and China turns its attention to Taiwan after crushing Hong Kong’s democracy over the past two years, these two historically major powers are reasserting themselves almost in tandem. As a result, prospects for global destabilization are greater than at any time since the last gasp of Soviet adventurism in the 1980s. Michael R. Auslin is the Payson J. Treat Distinguished Research Fellow in Contemporary Asia at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of Asia’s New Geopolitics: Essays on Reshaping the Indo-Pacific (Hoover Institution Press, 2020) and the co-host of the Hoover Institution podcast The Pacific Century (https:// www.hoover.org/publications/pacific-century). H O O V ER D IG E ST • S u m m e r 2022
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