China and Allies Seeking to Overturn US-Led Global Order: Former National Security Official

Russian President Vladimir Putin (R) meets with Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the Kremlin in Moscow on March 21, 2023. Photo by Sergei Karpukhin / SPUTNIK / AFP via Getty Images

China and its allies are seeking to alter the global order set up by the United States, according to Alex Gray, senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC) and former Deputy Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff of the National Security Council (NSC) at the White House.

“We need to acknowledge that China, Russia—and to a lesser extent Iran—are building an axis to try and change the traditional U.S. order globally,” Gray recently told “China in Focus” on NTD, the sister media outlet of The Epoch Times.

The former official said that since 1945, the United States has “ordered the world in such a way as to be amenable to free markets, free people, democracy—really our system of governance and the way we view the world.”

However, Gray said that such a system of order “doesn’t work for the Chinese Communist Party.”

Therefore, the Chinese regime is working to rewrite the traditional order “through economic coercion, military coercion, through their techno-authoritarian surveillance state.”

China, he said, is looking to “change the paradigm globally, to be one that is much more built around the Chinese Communist Party’s view of the world, the Putin theocracy’s view of the world, the Iranian theocracy’s view of the world, the Cuban dictatorship’s view of the world.”

True to the nature of a totalitarian regime and a surveillance state, Gray said that China aims to export around the world the model that it believes to be conducive to its interests.

“I certainly think that a world in which the Chinese Communist Party is dictating the rules of the road is inherently a world without liberty, and a world without freedom,” he said.

During Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s three-day state visit to Russia this week, the two leaders openly pledged to reshape the international order to their interests, with Putin saying that China and Russia would create a more just “multipolar world order” to replace the “rules” of the current international order.

Untrustworthy

Gray pointed to the 12-point peace proposal for a ceasefire in Ukraine proposed by China in February.

The deal has been largely dismissed in the West as it lacks concrete plans and does not mandate Russia to withdraw its troops from Ukraine—a condition that Kyiv and the United States have insisted on as a precondition for any peace talks.

In a joint statement following their talks on March 21, Putin praised Xi for the peace proposal.

“We believe that many of the provisions of the peace plan put forward by China are consonant with Russian approaches and can be taken as the basis for a peaceful settlement when the West and Kiev are ready for it,” Putin said.

Gray said that any statement or proposal by Xi or the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is unreliable and, thus, he noted that “we have to be very cognizant of the reality of China’s actions, not just the words.”

“And that’s been consistent, whether it’s their behavior on human rights, their behavior in the South China Sea, their behavior with regards to foreign interference across the world—you can’t believe a word that the Chinese Communist Party says, and that’s been buttressed by decades of behavior belying peaceful words,” he noted.

“Their behavior in Ukraine has been duplicitous from the beginning. Putin and Xi said right before the invasion [that] they have an unlimited partnership—and we should take them at their word,” he said.

“Xi Jinping, from day one, has been buying Putin’s oil, he has been keeping the economy afloat of the Russian Federation, he has been behind the scenes. I think we have pretty good evidence that they have been providing material that has contributed to the Russian war effort,” he added.

Pushing Back on China

To push back on the threat imposed by China, Gray called on the United States to deter Xi in East Asia based on the lessons of the failures of deterrence in Ukraine.

“Xi Jinping is watching. He’s learning lessons. He’s calculating whether there’s the same lack of deterrence as it relates to Taiwan. And we need to be watching and learning from the mistakes that were made in 2021 and 2022, and hopefully implementing a much more effective deterrence policy against Xi Jinping in Taiwan,” he said.

Gray called for the United States to ensure more clarity in its position on Taiwan.

America should make clear, he said, that “the continued sovereignty of Taiwan is an absolute American imperative.”

“So I think that ... is what Americans should be focused on, is what sort of world will we live in if we allow the dictators, Putin and Xi, to have untrammeled rights to rewrite the map of the world?” Gray said.

Frank Fang contributed to this report.