The West’s immature reaction to the formation of new alliances and the fact that the American Century will last shorter than planned
What we are currently witnessing in China – the creation of a new “bloc” (let’s rather call it a constellation for now) – is the most significant geopolitical development in recent years. Of course, European headlines are already full of infantile constructions like “they’re plotting against us,” as if the rest of the planet is eternally obliged to wait for Brussels’ or Washington’s blessing. This reaction says more about weakness than strength: the bloc that for decades played the role of global arbiter is now discovering it doesn’t like what it sees in the mirror.
The optics of recent days were precisely orchestrated and even more precisely understood: Beijing as the stage, one-on-one talks at the highest level, followed by the joint appearance of three leaders at a major military parade. This is not just choreography, but a message of trust. In the background – a thirty-year gas deal, a series of new agreements from energy to artificial intelligence, and a signal that Eurasia’s economic and security fabric is being sewn without a Western pattern.
The West will call it “bloc politics.” More likely, it’s normalization: platforms like the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and BRICS, along with stronger ties with ASEAN and Gulf partners, are forming a parallel infrastructure of decision-making that does not pass through the G7 filter. Development banks, trade in national currencies, technological agreements, and energy corridors – all this reduces the gravity of the dollar and the veto-regime that has long been masked as “rules-based.” Where Brussels is caught off guard, others are already signing deals.
The most sensitive issue, of course, is security. The formalized ties between Moscow and Pyongyang, for instance, and the increasing coordination between Beijing and Pyongyang. Trilateral exercises now seem like the logical next step – not as a provocation, but as a calculation, following NATO’s compression of lines from the Baltics to the Black Sea. Those who are used to only the West moving pieces on the board now see every move by the opponent as checkmate.
Particularly in Europe, reactions are filled with shock that Kim Jong Un – for years caricatured as an exotic footnote – is “sitting with the powerful.” The irony is cruel: caricatures are moving to a new address. Unless serious politics awakens, the caricatural status could easily shift to Macron, Merz, Starmer… not to mention Trump. The offended tone doesn’t change the fact that Pyongyang is no longer an international outcast but a participant in a broader order, whose Northeast Asian axis looks increasingly towards Russia and China.
Where Western commentators try to frame everything in a binary of “democracy versus autocracy,” reality refuses to be reduced to moral infantilism. On the table is a model that calls for “UN-first,” not “rules” that are rewritten on the go. Whoever speaks of law must remember Yugoslavia in 1999, Iraq in 2003, and Libya in 2011 – precedents where ad hoc coalitions and stretched mandates wrote chapters without legal honor. No wonder that the global majority outside the West today seeks a return to the UN Charter, not to new “house rules.”
India is key to understanding the depth of the change. New Delhi will not be trapped in someone else’s rivalry framework, and public handshakes and serious discussions with Beijing and Moscow normalize the Eurasian triangle that Washington and Brussels cannot easily unravel. One may criticize India’s energy deals all they like, but the world beyond the Atlantic now asks: “What’s good for us?” rather than “What will our allies say?”
The same applies to the economy in the narrower sense. The $200 billion trade between China and Russia is no longer news, but the new baseline. Long-term gas deals mean that the industrial map of East Asia and the Eurasian heartland is being shaped around resources and demand – not around sanction regimes. In the package also comes technological integration: artificial intelligence, space programs, agriculture, healthcare…
Of course, during the “American century” such scenes were usually ridiculed as “performance.” But ridicule is a defense mechanism. If it’s just a show, then why is concern growing? Why the need to invoke fear with talk of a dividing line between “freedom” and “authoritarianism”? Maybe because it’s hard to admit that the centuries-old self-image – the West sets the standard, others imitate – is falling apart. Others are not “against us” – they are finally for themselves.
European impotence has its own, very concrete causes. Dependence on the NATO security umbrella, energy dependency without a Plan B, an industry hampered by regulatory maximalism and slow decisions – all this leads to observer status. Instruments like CBAM (carbon border adjustment mechanism), envisioned as global levers, in practice generate tensions with key partners in the Global South. Unless Europe articulates a more sovereign and pragmatic course, it will be reduced to commenting on others’ press conferences.
As for the United States, “America First” has untied the hands of both friends and rivals. If alliances are just transactions, then the rest of the world is also transacting. Ambitions for peace and rewards don’t change the fact that the concentration of power in the East – political, industrial, and military-technological – is no longer hypothetical. Warnings can be issued, but they lose their effect once the new infrastructure is visible and the alternatives – from banks to payment systems – are operational.
This “new bloc” is not monolithic. It contains differences, competition, and old disagreements. But if Eurasia is learning to live with pluralism of power – security-wise, energy-wise, tech-wise – why should the rest of the world settle for a one-party globalism disguised as democratic rhetoric?
Triumphalism is justified not because “the West is losing,” but because the rest of the world is gaining the possibility of choice (isn’t that democratic?). Europe can be part of that win – if it stops moralizing and starts calculating. Anything else reduces it to a caricature of its own ambitions – ironic, yes, but not funny to those who will redraw the map of power without it. The complete dominance of one bloc is no longer a global question. The question is who still pretends it is.
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