The Eurasian Bloc

The Chinese have reached an arrangement with the Russians. The exact details are still unclear, and likely out of reach to the American intelligence community, much less myself. But President Xi’s visit to Moscow was momentous in a symbolic sense. As I watched him and Vladimir Putin enter that cavernous corridor of the Kremlin — one of those engulfing holdovers from the time of the Tsars — and walk toward each other down a blood red carpet to shake hands, I felt as if something had shifted in the ground beneath me. Maybe a soft movement, a tremor, but the earth had changed.

It didn’t have to be this way. The competing powers on the Asian continent have much to fight about, but the squeeze put on them by the American Empire in its global economic war against Russia has finally brought them together. The Chinese and the Russians have had competing interests in Siberia and a wary geopolitical relationship since the United States wedged China way from the Soviet Union in the 1970s. China and India have centuries-old grievances against one another, and have fought off-and-on skirmishes in the Himalayan Mountains for decades. And yet now we have a situation where China stands ready to arm Russia in its fight against Ukraine and the West, and longtime American ally India has more or less declared neutrality and continued trade with the Russians. Elsewhere in Asia, the Chinese are shoring up relations between the Iranians and the Saudis, a situation declared unthinkable by American policy experts as recently as last year.

The largest ancient land powers on the Eurasian landmass — dubbed the “world island” by historian Halford John Mackinder — are forming a giant adversarial bloc against the West. As I discussed in a recent piece, the West is now essentially the American Empire, which consists of the United States, Western Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, Israel, and South Korea, with effective dominion over Latin America and much of East Asia via trade deals. It’s the largest and the most powerful empire in world history, with dangerous naval forces and an extant (if shrinking) technological edge. But it’s also disparate and debt-laden, with a recent string of hubristic embarrassments and a perverse brand of global liberalism that has grated on the cultures it has targeted for destruction. It’s now in its decline, and if the Eurasian bloc forms as expected, the West will not be able to crack it.

The two sides in the Third World War are taking shape, with a buffet of potential flashpoint scattered around the world ready to tip things over the edge. The Ukraine, Taiwan, the Korean peninsula, the Baltic states, the Azerbaijani-Armenian border, the imminent conflict between Israel and Iran. Any of these would suffice as a lit match tossed toward the gasoline tank. The return of global war looms, and its map is coming into focus.