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Wednesday’s military parade in China garnered international media attention. Held in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, the scene of a Chinese Communist Party massacre of up to 1,000 political protesters in 1989, the parade celebrated the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s honored guests included Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. But talk of a budding China-Russia-North Korea NATO-type military alliance is exaggerated. Rather, it reflected four compelling but more limited concerns.
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First, China’s growing economic and military dominance over Russia and North Korea. Second, the shared antipathy of all three nations toward the United States and its post-1945 democratic alliance structure. Third, the hope of all three nations that, through careful but closer cooperation, they can boost their own individual interests alongside their shared interests. Fourth, India’s desire to broadcast dissatisfaction over the tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump in response to India’s importation of Russian energy supplies and associated funding of Russia’s war effort against Ukraine.
“Careful” is the keyword here.
The striking Chinese military equipment and troops displayed on Wednesday included advanced weapons systems such as hypersonic vehicles and ballistic missiles designed to smash into the U.S. territory of Guam and sink American aircraft carriers. These weapons afford China credible means to defeat the U.S. military in a conflict over Taiwan. But just as Russia would have little interest in defending North Korea from U.S. military action, China would have little interest in supporting a Russian conflict with NATO. Similarly, neither North Korea nor Russia would want to directly involve itself in a Chinese attack on Taiwan.
Similarly, while making a big show of his talks with Xi and Putin, Modi would have watched the procession of weapons on Wednesday fully aware that some of them were built with his country in not-so-pleasant mind. This is no small issue for Modi, as there have been repeated military clashes in recent years in the highly contested “line of actual control” areas along the China-India border. Dozens of soldiers were killed in these confrontations. India will not join a Sino-Russian partnership because, over the longer term, that partnership would cost New Delhi far more, lost market access to the West, for example, than it would gain.
From a U.S. standpoint, then, the cooperating China-Russia-North Korea axis poses specific but not unified strategic challenges.
The first challenge of strengthening Sino-Russian military cooperation is the anti-submarine warfare expertise that Putin is affording the Chinese military. In contrast to Russian land forces, Russian submarine forces remain generally excellent and know how to detect, track, evade, and defeat U.S. submarine forces. While Russian submarine forces are inferior to their U.S. counterparts, their experience against the U.S. Navy remains invaluable to the Chinese military. That is because submarine warfare remains the defining area in which the U.S. has a clear advantage over China. In the event of its invasion of Taiwan, the Chinese military fears that U.S. submarines would wreak havoc on its forces.
When it comes to Kim Jong Un, the key U.S. concern is Russia’s provision of technical expertise to advance North Korea’s nuclear ballistic missile program. In return for the deployment of thousands of North Korean soldiers to bolster its Ukraine war effort, Moscow is helping Pyongyang improve the rocket systems that power its ballistic missiles, and the targeting and maneuver proficiency of the warhead reentry vehicles that would carry nuclear weapons onto their targets.
To be clear, this Russian enabling of a direct threat to the lives of millions of American citizens reflects Putin’s enduring ideological hatred for the U.S. This action and innumerable other activities prove the delusion of those who believe the U.S. can draw Russia out of China’s orbit. Putin wants to weaken the U.S. because a world in which the U.S. is strong is a world in which Russia cannot easily blackmail or conquer its democratic neighbors into submission.
Still, Xi, Putin, and Kim lack the unifying alliance purpose that sustains diplomatic-military relationships such as that of NATO.
In contrast to NATO allies, the Chinese and Russian intelligence services spy against each other rapaciously, limiting their most valuable intelligence sharing to only those areas their senior leadership allows. Beijing also holds a dominant balance of power in its relationship with Moscow. At present, Putin must tolerate this uncomfortable dynamic due to the war in Ukraine. That war makes Russia heavily reliant on its energy exports to China and the reciprocal import of goods from China that would otherwise be unavailable due to Western sanctions.
Nevertheless, long-running tensions over Sino-Russian borders, each country’s ambitions for regional influence, and divided agendas in Europe limit the prospect of a direct military alliance. The Russian political and military elite remain deeply fearful that Xi intends to turn their country into a de facto Chinese colony. This leads both countries to important policy restrictions. Just as China limits its support for Russia’s war on Ukraine to the provision of equipment, including, though denied by Beijing, some military equipment, Russia would be highly reluctant to join a Chinese attack on Taiwan.
China wants an end to the Ukraine war on terms favorable to Moscow. But Beijing also wants it ended sooner rather than later. It fears the increasing damage that its support for Russia is doing to its European relationships. The relative absence of top European officials at Wednesday’s parade, in protest of Putin’s attendance, reflects Europe’s frustration over China’s policy on Ukraine. Xi knows that were the European Union to ever impose coordinated sanctions over China’s support for Russia’s war, it would pummel the already struggling, wholly export-dependent Chinese economy. China values its key economic interests far more than it does Russia’s control over Ukraine.
Russia would be similarly reluctant to directly participate in a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Putin knows that even in the event of a Chinese victory, the benefits would accrue massively to Beijing. Regardless, assuming U.S. intervention in Taiwan’s defense, Russia would lose vast amounts of air and naval forces it could not easily replace. This would fundamentally weaken Putin’s military power potential in Europe and his long-term project to restore Russian political dominance over Eastern and Central Europe. Indeed, while China’s regional supremacy would be assured by its conquest of Taiwan, so also would Moscow’s vassal status under Beijing. And were a Taiwan-U.S. victory to occur, Russia would suffer grave military losses without receiving any possible Chinese rewards.
Then there’s the North Korea war scenario. Beijing and Moscow know that the only credible scenario for a new Korean war would be if North Korea launched an invasion of South Korea, or a ballistic missile attack on South Korea, Japan, or the U.S. And they know that in any of those scenarios, the U.S. and South Korea would have to fight to remove Kim Jong Un from power to prevent a recurrent threat. That would force them into one of two choices.
One option would be to stay out of the war and instead use political leverage to ensure that Chinese interests along its North Korean border were protected post-war. The second option would be to fight the U.S. military against a backdrop in which the international community, near universally, supported South Korea and the U.S. — some close South Korean partners might even deploy forces. Beijing and Moscow also know that the second option would mean a credible risk of direct nuclear confrontation with the U.S. They know that they would almost certainly lose that nuclear war.
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This is not to say that the China-Russia-North Korea axis is something to put out of mind. On the contrary, reflecting this parade’s intended challenge to the West, attending European and U.S. delegations were limited to low-level officials. In an attempt to substitute for these notable absences, Beijing included CCP-bought-and-paid-for Western politicians such as Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto and former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr. Ultimately, the West recognizes that this parade is not about celebrating a historic victory over an evil imperium, but rather about intimidating the free world. Modi also knows this but is playing for U.S. attention.
That unity provides the cause for proportionate concern here. This alignment poses some direct and significant threats to the U.S. and its allies. But it does not represent a unified military alliance. These countries might have varied mutual interests, but they also have abundant mutually exclusive agendas.