The threat to American hegemony is real

Ukraine has about a month before it runs out of artillery shells, and the US Congress cannot agree to ship more. Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny is dead. The slaughter in Gaza continues with no end in sight. The Yemeni Houthis are attacking ships in the Red Sea. The North Koreans are testing intercontinental ballistic missiles. In normal times, pessimism can look like an intellectual fad. In times like these, it becomes a starker form of realism.

The post-1945 world order – written into international law, ratified by the United Nations, and kept in place by the balance of nuclear terror among major powers – is hanging by a thread. The United States is divided against itself and stretched to the limits of its capabilities. Europe is waking up to the possibility that, come November, America may no longer fulfil its collective-defense obligations under Article 5 of the Nato treaty. Faced with this new uncertainty, Europe is cranking up its defense production, and European politicians are screwing up the courage to persuade their electorates that they will need to ante up two per cent of their GDP to guarantee their own safety.

The Western alliance doesn’t just face the challenge of doubling down on defense while maintaining unity across the Atlantic. It also now faces an “axis of resistance” that might be tempted to threaten Western hegemony with a simultaneous, coordinated challenge. The lynchpin of this axis is the Russia-China “no-limits” partnership. While the Chinese supply the Russians with advanced circuitry for their weapons systems, Russian President Vladimir Putin ships them cheap oil. Together they have imposed autocratic rule over most of Eurasia.

If Ukraine’s exhausted defenders are forced to concede Russian sovereignty over Crimea and the Donbas region, the Eurasian axis of dictators will have succeeded in changing a European land frontier by force. Achieving this will threaten every state on the edge of Eurasia: Taiwan, the Baltic countries, and even Poland. Both dictatorial regimes will use their vetoes on the UN Security Council to ratify conquest, effectively consigning the UN Charter to history’s dustbin.

This partnership of dictators works in tandem with a cluster of rights-abusing renegades, led by Iran and North Korea. The North Koreans provide Putin with artillery shells while plotting to invade the rest of their peninsula. The Iranians manufacture the drones that terrorise Ukrainians in their trenches. Meanwhile, Iran’s proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis — are helping Russia and China by tying down America and Israel.

Unless the US can force Israel into a long-term ceasefire, it will find itself struggling to control conflicts on three fronts (Asia, Europe, and the Middle East). Not even a country that outspends its rivals on defense by two to one can maintain a war footing simultaneously across so many theatres.

The idea that democracies around the world will join up with America and Europe against the authoritarian threat seems like an illusion. Instead of joining with the embattled democracies of the Global North, the rising democracies of the Global South – Brazil, India, and South Africa – seem unembarrassed to be aligning with regimes that rely on mass repression, the cantonment of entire populations (the Uighurs in China), and shameless murder (Navalny being only the most recent example).

To be sure, the authoritarian axis currently is united only by what it opposes: American power. It is otherwise divided by its ultimate interests. The Chinese, for example, cannot be overjoyed that the Houthis are blocking freight traffic through the Red Sea. The world’s second most powerful economy doesn’t have all that much in common with an impoverished Muslim resistance army or with theocratic Iran.