The Bali summit of the G20 nations in mid-November showed just how fragile and constantly changing the world’s nerve systems of alliances, treaties, and diplomatic balances. U.S. President Joe Biden wanted to calm the rising tensions in U.S.-China relations but ended up looking as though he was going to Chinese leader Xi Jinping rather than having Xi come to him.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, long an apologist for Xi, ended up being snubbed at Bali by Xi, possibly ending the Ottawa-Beijing honeymoon. The whole issue of international relations is shaped more by nuance than by the “headlines” of treaties and alliances.
Niccolò Machiavelli once said that a conspiracy is only safe if it is shared by no more than two people, provided that one of them is dead.
A similar observation can be made of treaties and alliances: they are by nature fragile, temporary, unsafe, and always a contest of conflicting priorities. They are living things reflecting their signatories’ geopolitical and cultural identities, and they have finite lifespans.
Treaties and alliances are meant, by definition, to address immediate and imminent challenges common to more than one nation-state. They are designed to achieve specific common goals, usually deter threats or end or reduce competition between opposing states.
Today, for example, we need to ask who the great powers can count upon as allies in their fight for survival and victory.
Even vast treaty empires, such as the Amphictyonic League of Delphi of the seventh century B.C., the League of Nations between the two World Wars, and the United Nations of the second half of the 20th century, are temporary devices that are meant to constrain military conflict. And yet we treat them as perpetual and enduring milestones of human advance.
When the world changes, alliances and treaty structures, along with the need for them, change.
Lord Palmerston, the 19th-century British prime minister, told Parliament: “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”
We are now in a changed world—one that will change even more dramatically over the coming decades, even though our interests remain “eternal and perpetual.”
It was clear when the Cold War ended in 1990-91 that the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO)—the creature of the imploded Soviet Union, the USSR—had evaporated. And with the disappearance of that rival to the Euro-Atlantic West, the surviving North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) itself slipped into irrelevance.
NATO remained technically alive, only gradually losing cohesion, efficacy, and purpose for want of a uniting challenge. NATO had done its task of providing a geostrategic Western bulwark against the Soviet bloc but failed to repurpose or disband after victory.
For example, was the United States to be defined by a small group of al-Qaida extremists, embarrassing the nation on Sept. 11, 2001, with a terrorist attack?
The subsequent “Global War on Terror” will, in retrospect, be seen as an illogical response to what was a tactical threat. It led Washington into a series of kinetic engagements—dragging its allies and creating enemies—ultimately delivering the United States into a disadvantageous strategic position. The United States caused its allies to follow it through numerous self-destructive strategic policies, making those allies cautious of the United States.
So the banners of old alliances still hang in the corridors of power: NATO, the Australia-New Zealand-U.S. (ANZUS) pact, and so on. But their nature and relevance have changed as geopolitics has changed. Even recently contrived alliances to meet newly-emerging threats, such as the Japan-India-Australia-U.S. Quadrilateral pact (the Quad), are undergoing change almost daily. So, too, is the “opposing” pact, the new Eurasian bloc that emerged in 2022 from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
The Quad has proven ephemeral. It began in 2007 and lasted into 2008. It was revived in 2017 and continues today, but its fragility is starkly evident. India’s faith in the United States, as the primary partner, was shaken by Washington’s seeming loss of strategic control with the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in August 2021.
India had prepared robust defenses against the Quad’s common foe, communist China, including the ability to hold down Chinese forces on the Tibetan Plateau between mainland China and the Indian sub-continent in the event that China attacked Taiwan.
But India doubted that the United States showed sufficient resolve to do its part against China. And then came the Quad summit in Tokyo on May 24, at which Biden tried to push the Quad into a declaration against the Russian invasion of Ukraine. New Delhi saw this as something apart from the containment of China and resisted. Russia, after all, was critical to India’s position on the Eurasian landmass, particularly as a supplier of energy and weapons.
And then, at the Sept. 15-16 SCO summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with China’s Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Modi agreed with Xi to reduce tensions on the Tibetan Plateau.
This reduced the great threat on China’s southwestern boundaries, enabling Xi to safely focus on increasing his pressure on Taiwan.
Thus, great alliances crumble.
To the West, NATO seemed poised for a return to relevance when, in February, Russia militarily attacked Ukraine. But the military aspect of NATO did not revive.
NATO had become a loose political alliance and lacked the military cohesiveness it demonstrated in the late 1980s. In 2022, NATO and its member states separately had shown no ability to understand that modern warfare had evolved dramatically away from the Napoleonic modes of “total war,” which had prevailed since around 1800.
This transformation in the nature of war was shown in stark detail in the great work of strategic philosopher Dr. Stefan T. Possony in 1938, with his book, “Tomorrow’s War,” and my own book in 2022, “The New Total War of the 21st Century and the Trigger of the Fear Pandemic.” Today’s warfare is a new form of total war in which traditional kinetic military action is dangerous and renders outcomes problematic.
Thus, military alliances are outflanked when their expectations of warfare are undermined and defeated before military action begins. This follows the Sun Tzu maxim: “To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.”
In the Indo-Pacific, the U.S. position changed to the point where it was no longer the font of all alliances against China, even though Washington was still the most critical element.
A new set of bilateral arrangements has emerged in which the United States was clearly engaged, but smaller regional powers reflected the growing multi-polarity of the region.
Meanwhile, apart from its disintegration as an efficient military venture, NATO had also fractured politically.
NATO’s European pillar, Germany, had perceived itself as left out in the cold when the United States forced European NATO members to engage in a proxy war against Russia through Ukraine. This led to the termination of Russian oil and gas supplies to Western Europe, hitting Germany harder than other states and promising a 2022-23 winter of greater economic and human hardship than it had seen since World War II.
As a result, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited Beijing on Nov. 4, immediately after the conclusion of the CCP’s 20th Party Congress and the installation of Xi to dictatorial status. Scholz sought China’s commitment to stronger economic ties with Germany, weakening the earlier NATO stance against the Chinese regime.
Another “loyal” NATO member, Turkey, was similarly undermining the North Atlantic Alliance by strenuously pursuing relations with both Moscow and Beijing. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was busy at the Sept. 15-16 SCO summit, strengthening his strategic bonds with Russia and China.
Erdogan was simultaneously blocking the entry of Sweden and Finland into NATO and planning a conflict with its neighbor and fellow alliance member, Greece.
And this dysfunctional alliance is what the United States had been touting as the great Western bulwark, even as the definition of “the West” had become lost in history.
What was occurring at the same time, mainly due to the perceived collapse of Western cohesion and prestige, was that a new Eurasian bloc had become concrete, particularly at that SCO summit in mid-September 2022. It was in the immediate run-up to that summit that Putin finally abandoned any hope that Russia could achieve readmission to the trading world dominated by the United States. His attempts to reconcile with Washington and London had been consistently rebuffed before and during the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
The new Eurasian bloc emerged from the SCO, between Russia, China, Iran, Belarus, and some peripheral non-Eurasian players. And as this arose, NATO and the Quad became fragile.
In September 2021, the governments of the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom created a new pact, AUKUS: the Australia-United Kingdom-United States treaty. It was conceived as a mechanism to exchange nuclear submarine propulsion technologies from the UK and the United States to Australia. But it is a critical security alliance giving three allied states, which had near-perfect military and intelligence interoperability, the capacity to dominate all of the world’s oceans and polar regions.
This was a new alliance—elegant and efficient in its simplicity, commonality of language, and doctrine—fit for the 21st century.
In any event, for the AUKUS powers plus France (at least), there was a growing recognition that China’s power projection in the Indo-Pacific had begun to exceed Japanese Imperial prepositioning in the creation in the 1930s of the Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) warships and auxiliaries routinely plied the Torres and Timor straits, which separate Papua New Guinea from Australia.
But numerous other treaties, some discreet and some not, were also being created by the pro-U.S. states to counter China.
Perhaps the most significant two existing treaties in the region have been the ANZUS Treaty, signed on Sept. 1, 1951, which has been overlaid on the UKUSA Accords (intelligence exchange between the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand: otherwise known as “Five Eyes”); and the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between Japan and the United States, signed on Jan. 19, 1960.
The U.S.-Japan Security agreement paved the way for a series of additional accords, discreetly called “Reciprocal Access Agreements” (RAAs), which facilitate strategic cooperation.
Australia and Japan, which had been building military and intelligence links in 2013-15, signed an RAA in January 2022. The UK negotiated a similar RAA with Japan, likely to be signed into effect before the end of the year. A Japan-Philippines RAA was also under discussion in late 2022.
So a web of security alliances was being defined or redefined to constrain China’s strategic expansion, quite apart from the Quad.
Beijing has maneuvered around these alliances because it has been fighting by different ground rules: the “new total war” doctrine that seeks strategic success on the ground before the need is seen to utilize military operations. The CCP’s doctrine of “Unrestricted Warfare” has shown that military alliances are no match for Beijing’s doctrine.
In Central Asia, the five major states that had been part of the Russian Empire since the 19th century began to reassert themselves to shake off Moscow’s revived domination and resist new domination by China. The five states—Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan—built a new framework of strategic cooperation between 2019 and 2021 to find a way to trade and seek security without having to go through Russia or China.
Theirs is a delicate security alliance based on carefully avoiding security challenges to their great neighbors, Russia and China. This bloc highlights the reality that security alliances need more than mere military partnerships.
Meanwhile, Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles said on Aug. 31 that Papua New Guinea had proposed a security treaty between Australia and the PNG after China struck a security pact with neighboring Solomon Islands.
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations agreed, in principle, on Nov. 11 to admit Timor Leste as the group’s 11th member state. But ASEAN faced massive “new total war” offensives by China to break up the efficacy of ASEAN as a security bloc. This year’s G20 summit saw China and Indonesia agree to resume joint military exercises.
So far this year, considerable counter-alliance diplomatic warfare has been underway to break up opposing blocs.
This occurred, too, during the Cold War, particularly highlighted by the 1972 diplomacy of the Nixon administration to break up the Sino-Soviet pact. It worked. Moscow did not accept this defeat gracefully and mounted a successful campaign to topple the U.S. administration.
Then-President Richard Nixon had created a U.S.-China (tacit) alliance to break up the Sino-Soviet alliance. But with Nixon removed, the U.S.-China alliance continued to the point where it made China a viable strategic competitor to the United States, far more potent an adversary to Washington than the USSR had been.
We must know when the life of an alliance has ended or should end.
