In a new article for Bloomberg, historian Niall Ferguson has written a grimly fascinating summary of where things stand in the escalating contest between the West (loosely speaking) on one side and the alliance — because that’s what it is — between Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran on the other.
Ferguson’s account is well worth reading, not least for this somewhat (understatement) prophetic passage from a book, The Grand Chessboard, written by Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1997:
Potentially, the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an “antihegemonic” coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances. It would be reminiscent in scale and scope of the challenge once posed by the Sino-Soviet bloc, though this time China would likely be the leader and Russia the follower.
Not bad, not bad at all, not least the way that Brzezinski highlighted the change in the balance of power within the first and second iterations of the partnership between Moscow and Beijing. The first time around, China was the junior partner, a role it did not appreciate, not only for reasons rooted in the (then) present, but also in the past: China still resented the loss of large swathes of territory to Russia in the 19th century. But now, China, as Brzezinski had forecast, is in the senior role.
If Putin were to spend less time reinventing Russian history, and more time pondering his country’s longer-term future, he would do well to think through the implications of Russia’s growing dependence on China. Beijing’s old grievances have not gone away. For now, that doesn’t matter; the partnership between Russia and China is working too well for Beijing to want to disrupt it over land lost in the century before last, but one day a reckoning will come.
And speaking of reckoning, there’s the small matter of America’s debt, something that prompts Ferguson to remind his readers about “Ferguson’s law”:
Any great power that spends more on debt service (interest payments on the national debt) than on defense will not stay great for very long. True of Hapsburg Spain, true of ancien régime France, true of the Ottoman Empire, true of the British Empire, this law is about to be put to the test by the US beginning this very year, when (according to the CBO) net interest outlays will be 3.1% of GDP, defense spending 3.0%.
On our current trajectory, this gap will only widen, until it can’t.