We are in an era when the risks of major-power conflict are growing. The most likely contenders are commonly seen to be China, the rising power, and the US, the formerly dominant power that’s now in relative decline. The other worrying contingency is conflict between Russia and US-led NATO.

But what about the third possibility: the prospect of China and Russia collaborating to challenge American power? Zbigniew Brzezinski warned that the most dangerous scenario for America would be a grand coalition of China and Russia united not by ideology, but by complementary grievances.

My new ASPI special report, released today, examines Russian and Chinese concepts of great-power war in the 21st century, their views of the West and its military capabilities, and the risks they might take to regain what they see as their lost territories in places such as Taiwan and Ukraine. It also looks at how America might react, the implications of all this for the West, including Australia, and what sort of armed conflict might be involved.

China and Russia are the two leading revisionist powers leagued together in their disdain for the West. Both these authoritarian states see a West that they believe is preoccupied with debilitating political challenges at home.

Russian President Vladimir Putin dismisses what he sees as a Europe that is weak and divided. Chinese President Xi Jinping believes that China is well on its way to becoming the predominant power in Asia, possessing an alternative and more successful political and economic model to that of the West.

China and Russia are now sharing an increasingly close relationship, especially militarily. If the China–Russia military partnership continues its upward trend, it will inevitably undermine the international security order by challenging the system of US-centred alliances in the Asia–Pacific and Europe.

This is not to argue that we’re going to see a formal Russo-Chinese alliance, but what we’re observing is an ever-closer strategic partnership. Russia and China are economically complementary; they’re both secure continental nuclear powers; and they’re both the dominant military powers in their own immediate regions. They believe that the West’s current disarray favours them geopolitically.

So, what are the chances of Beijing and Moscow concluding that now is the time to challenge the West and take advantage of what they both consider to be Western weaknesses? China and Russia are well aware of the military power of the US. But they both know that the US no longer enjoys uncontested military superiority everywhere.

Recognising this, it may be the time has come when Beijing and Moscow test America’s mettle and see if they can successfully challenge the US in both the European and Asian theatres.

Recently, their partnership has deepened to provide for increasingly advanced Russian military equipment sales to China, as well as joint military exercises in the Baltic and the East China Seas. In July this year, Chinese and Russian nuclear-capable bombers rendezvoused in East Asia and carried out provocative joint operations in air space claimed by South Korea and Japan.

Given Russia’s slow decline and China’s rapid rise, we might have expected that Moscow would support Western efforts to balance Beijing rather than undermine them. But the evidence now is accumulating to suggest that Russia’s relationship with China is strengthening and this carries distinctly negative geopolitical implications for the West. The distinguished American historian Walter Russell Mead has gone as far as describing current Russian and Chinese military activities as ‘the latest manifestation of a deepening alliance between Russia and China’.

What risks might Beijing and Moscow take to recover what both consider to be historical territories belonging to the motherland? It’s important to understand that in China and Russia we have two long-established cultures that are different from the Western tradition. They have long memories of humiliation at the hands of the West. Both Russia and China have experienced historical circumstances when their societies have been weak and when the West has taken advantage of them.

Both China and Russia have effectively used incremental territorial claims recently to their strategic advantage. China’s creeping militarisation of the South China Sea is now an established fact. Russia’s use of military force in Crimea and Ukraine has been imposed without any military challenge from the West. There is every reason why they should both consider these as effective models to continue demonstrating their great-power status.

It now looks as though China and Russia are combining their forces to balance against the US, which they see as the common enemy. China is strong and decisive enough to serve as a strategic partner, while Russia seeks to reassert itself as an independent great power in Europe. Beijing is responding to its newly competitive confrontation with President Donald Trump’s America by deepening its strategic relationship with Moscow. China has no other strong major-power relationship either in Asia or Europe.

There can be little doubt that the build-up of their respective military forces suggests that they’re both increasingly preparing for conflict with the West. The rapid development of China’s military capability, together with serious reforms in Russia’s military forces, is occurring at a time when America cannot fight two major regional wars simultaneously. The US aims to maintain favourable regional balances of power in both the Indo-Pacific and Europe. But that will be a particularly challenging task, given China’s rising power in Asia and Russia’s flexing of its military muscles in Europe.

What are the implications of all this for the West? The fact is that the West is entering a period of great political distraction. America’s obsession with looking inward and ‘making America great again’ opens fresh geopolitical possibilities for China and Russia.

The implications for Australia relate not only to the dangers of armed conflict involving China and Russia against the West; some conflicts in the Asia–Pacific region might involve Australia more directly.

And there’s another important issue for Australia: Russia’s supply of advanced weapons to China threatens to undermine our long-held margin of technological advantage. The growing presence of both China and Russia in our region of primary strategic concern must be taken more seriously—especially if they begin to coordinate their activities.

Brzezinski’s warning that the most dangerous scenario facing US security would be a grand coalition of China and Russia is now fast becoming a geopolitical fact.

Joseph Nye’s recent article on a declining Russia provided a stark outline of a country in decline in terms of economics, demography and global influence. According to Nye, Russia can only be an international spoiler but should nevertheless be taken seriously because it remains a significant nuclear power and because declining powers tend to be less risk-averse. However the evidence suggests Nye’s narrow characterisation of Russia as a declining power is problematic.

Russia has the capability and demonstrated intent to do more than just play a spoiling role in international politics. And it represents a genuine and profound threat not just to the US but also to the global order.

Russia is now playing from a different rule book to the one that shaped the Cold War period of great-power rivalry. In addition, today’s geopolitical and geoeconomic conditions create a fertile environment for Russia to assume the role of disrupter on a grand scale. Moscow has already shown that it’s adept at deploying disruptive strategies to undermine those countries it sees as adversaries.

Clearly, Russia is confronting a number of domestic challenges—a shrinking population, weak institutions, a corrupt political elite, pervasive nepotism and patronage networks, unaccountable security services and limited rule of law. But the country also continues to benefit from significant natural resources and a highly skilled and educated workforce and is proving remarkably resilient given the challenges it faces (many of which are self-inflicted).

Despite a deteriorating global economic outlook, fluctuating oil and gas prices, and the impact of sanctions on the Russian economy, real GDP growth in Russia exceeded expectations in 2018, reaching 2.3%. While this performance was largely attributed to one-off effects of energy construction and Russia’s hosting of the FIFA World Cup, growth projections of up to 1.8% over the next three years suggest that the Russian economy remains relatively robust.

Russia’s economy has moved up global rankings when assessed in terms of purchasing power parity, and now ranks sixth, ahead of France, the United Kingdom and Brazil. The World Bank has assessed that Russia is well positioned to respond to external economic volatility and absorb external shocks due to its relatively high levels of international reserves, relatively low external debt and flexible exchange rate regime.

Russia also maintains conventional military capabilities that would challenge even the US military. While some assessments put Russia’s annual defence expenditure at US$64 billion (placing it sixth globally), other analysis places it in the US$150–180 billion range (ranking it third) based on purchasing power parity. Moscow also spends about half of its defence budget on research and development, procurement and repair. And with conscripts making up around a third of its defence forces, Russia also spends a lot less maintaining its armed forces than its Western counterparts.

A comprehensive RAND Corporation assessment tracked substantial improvements across Russian defence platforms and personnel, and concluded that while Russian capabilities are still undergoing a transition, they have improved to the point that a ‘hypothetical … strike [by Russia] against the Baltic states or other US NATO allies would pose a serious challenge to NATO’.

Moscow is pursuing a pragmatic strategic policy that is effectively filling the void created by the US’s increasingly erratic approach to international affairs and also exploiting volatile global political and economic conditions. Russia has embarked on a broader and more active role across the Middle East that is clearly designed to undercut the interests of the US and Europe in the region. In recent years, Russia has reasserted its military dominance of the littoral Black Sea region, and is carving out influence across Africa, again at the expense of the US and Europe.

Importantly, Russia’s improving conventional military capabilities and renewed strategic reach are potentially of less consequence to its ability to exercise de facto ‘great power’ influence globally than its demonstrated capacity to deploy ‘new-generation warfare’ to advance its strategic and foreign policy objectives at the expense of its global rivals.

Moscow has moved its military calculus away from deploying force to physically destroy its enemies to a strategy of engaging in information and influence operations to undermine its adversaries. This doctrine is based on the idea that ‘new-generation wars are to be dominated by information and psychological warfare … [that] reduce the necessity for deploying hard military power to the minimum necessary, making the opponent’s military and civil population support the attacker to the detriment of their own government and country’.

Russia is an innovator in this area and has sought to redefine the rules of global politics by deploying what are best defined as strategic information assets that are low cost but high impact. Russia’s embrace of ‘new-generation warfare’ also reflects a foreign policy that emphasises disruptive strategies focused on ‘interference in political processes, economic and energy exploitation (particularly in Africa), espionage, and media and propaganda manipulation intended to create social discord and undermine legitimate democratic processes’.

And in this context, the danger that Russia poses to liberal democratic states and the rules-based global order becomes clear. Yale professor Timothy Snyder distilled Russia’s foreign policy down to the principle of strategic relativism, which stipulates that Russia can become stronger only by making other countries weaker or more like Russia.

Moscow actively seeks to undermine democratic countries because the mere fact of their existence poses a security challenge to the Kremlin: functioning democracies prove to the Russian population that there are actually alternative models to the corrupt autocratic regime imposed upon them by Moscow.

Unfortunately for those tasked with developing a strategic approach to Russia, the Kremlin’s efforts to subvert or suborn democratic processes in a number of countries—ranging from the US and the UK to Madagascar, Macedonia and Montenegro—are both persistent and effective. These tactics, when interpreted through Snyder’s concept of strategic relativism, highlight the challenges posed by Russia’s undeclared ‘new-generation war’ on the West.

The true strength of Russia’s position is that the Kremlin has long understood how to manipulate people and populations and also that a country doesn’t have to be the strongest, richest or most popular to be a key player in global politics. If Russia is actually in decline, then its doctrine of strategic relativism means it intends to take much of the rest of the world with it.

Suddenly, opinion polls find that Ukrainians are more optimistic about their future than are citizens of most other countries. That will come as a surprise to many, given Ukraine’s manifold challenges. And yet it is justified by the country’s current political trajectory.

For the first two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine was one of the most poorly governed of the successor states. Whereas Russia initially underwent liberal economic reforms and has long benefited from high oil and gas prices, and the Baltic states were admitted to the European Union in 2004, Ukraine was left in the dust. Neighbouring Poland’s per capita GDP is now almost five times higher than Ukraine’s, even though the two started post-communist life on roughly the same economic footing.

Although Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution revealed a popular yearning for change, it soon ended in internal disputes and disappointment. By the time the country’s long-held desire for closer alignment with the EU began to materialise politically, a newly ambitious Russia had re-emerged to challenge Ukraine’s shift to the West. Making matters worse, Ukraine’s financial situation was a disaster. Endemic corruption and the absence of serious reforms had essentially disqualified it from receiving help from the International Monetary Fund or Western governments, leaving then-president Viktor Yanukovych heavily dependent on the Kremlin (probably much more so than he would have wished).

In late 2013, Yanukovych acceded to Russian demands that he scuttle Ukraine’s EU Association Agreement (with its promise of a deep and comprehensive free-trade area). Ukrainians exploded in anger and the Yanukovych regime responded with violence, killing some 100 people in the streets of Kyiv. But, failing to stop the protests, Yanukovych eventually fled to Russia, which intervened militarily.

By the spring of 2014, Ukraine was in limbo. Russia had occupied and annexed Crimea, had backed and recognised two breakaway regions in the eastern Donbas, and was conducting a thinly disguised operation to carve off Ukraine’s southern regions for incorporation into a ‘New Russia’ (Novorossyia). With its very survival in question, the country was also quite literally broke.

But Ukraine staged a remarkable recovery. In May 2014, Petro Poroshenko won the presidency in an electoral landslide that was unprecedented in the country’s short democratic history. Ukraine started to fight back, and Russian President Vladimir Putin was forced to deploy regular Russian Army forces into Ukraine’s eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. A ceasefire and political process outlined in the Minsk Protocol that September served as a face-saver for Putin and his misbegotten Ukraine project, though the conflict remains unresolved. According to United Nations estimates, the fighting has claimed some 13,000 lives and forced millions of people to flee.

The latest chapter in Ukraine’s saga started early this year, when Volodymyr Zelensky, a popular comedian with no political experience, clinched a surprise victory in the presidential election. And in parliamentary elections a few months later, his new political party won an absolute majority. When it comes to pursuing difficult reforms, Zelensky and his team are better positioned than any other government in Ukraine’s post-Soviet history.

Zelensky’s election reflects a deep-seated yearning for radical change. His campaign focused on corruption, economic malaise and the ongoing conflict in the east, and it’s these issues that will loom large during his presidency. Although Ukraine has adopted more far-reaching reforms than any other European country in recent years, voters want more, and they have come to believe that Zelensky and his young team are the ones who can deliver it.

Zelensky has outlined a (still-vague) program of radical policies aimed at expanding the size of the Ukrainian economy by 40% in the coming years. As he and his advisers have made clear, this will require a substantial increase in foreign investment, which will not be forthcoming until the judiciary is seen to be clean and efficient. A vigorous crackdown on corruption is a key prerequisite for economic growth.

One particularly promising economic proposal would expand private ownership of land, in order to encourage competition and innovation in agriculture. As home to a third of the planet’s super-fertile ‘black earth’, Ukraine has already surpassed Russia as the world’s top grain exporter and is the EU’s third-largest food supplier after the United States and Brazil. It could accomplish much more with growth-enhancing reforms in place.

Zelensky and his team are benefiting from strong tailwinds for now. But Ukraine’s future will depend on how well they use their political honeymoon to implement difficult reforms. Headwinds will inevitably arrive. But the initial signs are encouraging. Ukrainians are not wrong to be optimistic.

America’s relationship with Turkey deteriorated sharply early this month, when Washington gave Ankara a deadline of 31 July to cancel its purchase of the Russian S-400 air defence system or face having its participation in the F-35 fighter jet project discontinued. The US also threatened Turkey with sanctions under the Countering American Adversaries Through Sanctions Act if it decided to go through with the S-400 purchase.

Washington has stated that it opposes the purchase because it ‘does not want to have the F-35 in close proximity to the S-400 over a period of time because of the ability to understand the profile of the F-35 on that particular piece of equipment’. It has also noted that the S-400 procurement would hinder Turkey’s ability to enhance or maintain cooperation with the US and within NATO and would lead to ‘Turkey’s strategic and economic over-dependence on Russia’.

Ankara has since doubled down on its commitment to buy the S-400. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan maintains that it is a ‘done deal’ and that he hopes that the system will be delivered to Turkey in July. Erdoğan also indicated that he would seek answers on Turkey’s exclusion from the F-35 project for ‘reasons that have no rational or legitimate basis’.

The financial ramifications of Turkey’s US$2.5 billion purchase of the S-400 system are significant, and the procurement will jeopardise Turkey’s membership of NATO and its relationship with the US. Turkey is seeking to purchase up to 100 F-35s and has already invested around US$1.25 billion in the project. Turkey’s defence industry produces more than 900 components for the F-35, and its participation in the co-production element of the F-35 program is estimated to be worth US$12 billion. Ankara’s apparent willingness to risk all of this by purchasing the S-400 is therefore curious, particularly given that Washington has offered Turkey the Patriot PAC-3 MSE missile system for US$3.5 billion, less than half the cost of an earlier offer, if Ankara cancels its S-400 order.

Ankara may be thinking that Washington won’t go through with its threat to suspend Turkey’s participation in the F-35 program and that US President Donald Trump will overrule the Pentagon’s position. Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, alluded to this view during a press conference on 13 June. Çavuşoğlu referenced a Turkish proposal for a two-way technical committee to study the impact of the deployment of the S-400 on Turkish soil on the integrity of the F-35 platform and noted that ‘President Trump says “Yes” but other institutions say “No”’.

It’s also possible that Ankara is committed to the S-400 purchase because it addresses its strategic objectives better than the Patriot alternative. The S-400 has a significantly greater range than the Patriot and provides Turkey with an anti-access/area-denial capability that would give it a significant strategic advantage over regional rivals such as Greece or Syria.

Nevertheless, Erdoğan’s administration is increasingly antagonistic towards Washington, and Ankara’s broader behaviour is aggravating other NATO partners. Issues such as Washington’s arming of Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in northern Syria and its refusal to extradite Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen have also not helped relations. Given this context, it is possible that the S-400 procurement is a deliberate move by Ankara towards closer alignment with Moscow, at the cost of its partnership with NATO and the US.

In some respects, Erdoğan and Russian President Vladimir Putin are natural bedfellows. They share similar authoritarian tendencies and have pursued domestic programs that have marginalised the media and undermined the rule of law. Erdoğan and Putin also arguably share a scepticism of Western policies and political systems.

Turkey and Russia are also increasingly interlinked economically. Turkey is heavily reliant on Russian gas for its energy security—it uses natural gas to produce 60% of its electricity and gets over half of that gas from Russia. And it will become more dependent on Russian gas as a consequence of Russia’s partnership in the TurkStream gas pipeline project.

But Turkey and Russia have also long been strategic competitors and historically their relationship has been characterised by conflict rather than cooperation. Turkey and Russia have disagreed on Syria more than they have agreed, and Turkey’s downing of a Russian warplane on the Turkish–Syrian border in 2015 saw tensions between the two countries escalate and Moscow retaliate by imposing sanctions on Ankara.

The two countries have since reset relations but sources of tension remain. Ankara is still not reconciled with Moscow’s support for the Assad regime in Syria. Turkey has also refused to recognise Russia’s annexation of Crimea and is concerned that Russia’s militarisation of the Black Sea and its expanded military footprint in Syria, Armenia and Georgia’s secessionist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia will lead to encirclement. Russia and Turkey also support opposing sides in the frozen conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh. The relationship is defined by an asymmetry that clearly gives Russia an advantage over Turkey, which Moscow will likely exploit. Moscow probably sees the S-400 sale as a tool for driving a wedge between Turkey and its NATO allies.

Ankara’s current disposition towards Moscow reflects a marriage of convenience rather than the consolidation of a durable partnership. The US, in developing its response to Turkey’s S-400 purchase, needs to recognise that this issue is a symptom and not the cause of the fundamental problems at the heart of Turkey’s alliance with the US and NATO. Washington must decide whether Ankara is a reliable partner and balance that assessment against the cost of losing Turkey as a key ally in the Middle East. More effective use of diplomacy and defence assistance may help the US preserve its alliance with Turkey, but the window of opportunity to do so will soon close.

Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping met in Moscow last week and agreed on many things. They agreed on their positions on the Middle East, on Iran, Venezuela, trade and energy, and even on literature and art. They united in their criticism of US policy and decision-making on trade, Iran, North Korea and the Middle East.

But the biggest thing they did was to move the Russia–China relationship a big step closer to a working alliance.

Policymakers, analysts and intelligence agencies have long debated the limits of Russian and Chinese cooperation. The common line has been that the partnership is a marriage of convenience driven by shared interests in pushing back against American power and global institutions founded on Western liberal democratic values and concepts.

They have also pointed to the very different Russian and Chinese civilisations. And they have talked about both countries’ shared borders and the tensions that might come over time from that, particularly noting the expansion of China’s presence and influence through Central Asia to Europe as part of Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Finally, they have noted the growing ‘power asymmetry’ between the Russian and Chinese states, driven by Russian economic and demographic decline, contrasted with Chinese economic expansion and mobilisation of its enormous—albeit rapidly ageing—population.

It’s time now to question all of this. And to throw it away. Because if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and waddles like a duck, then the thing you’re looking at just might be a duck.

The evidence is that Russia and China have now formed a close working strategic alliance over the seven years since Xi became leader of the Chinese Communist Party. We can see that in the big decisions they took this week, which are being rapidly followed up by Chinese and Russian companies, no doubt working very closely with counterpart agencies of government.

We can also see that in their continuing unity in their work to diminish the power and influence of the United States, Europe and other liberal democracies in global governance and economics.

Their cooperation builds on military exercises like last September’s Vostok 2018 that involved Russian and Chinese troops, as well as their quiet diplomatic support to each other as Moscow annexes territory on its periphery and as Beijing seizes and militarises disputed areas of the South China Sea.

The biggest new indicator of the depth of this alliance relationship, though, is technology. Both Xi and Putin have made public statements about the national power—strategic and economic—that will come to the states that dominate key future technologies, especially artificial intelligence and communications technologies. For example, from Putin: ‘If someone can have a monopoly in the field of artificial intelligence, then the consequences are clear to all of us—they will rule the world’.

Xi made high technology the core of his ‘Made in China 2025’ program. Putin called on Russian agencies and companies in February to produce a master plan for developing digital-economy infrastructure, following through on statements about high technology in recent years.

At last week’s meeting Xi and Putin put real meat on the bones of Russian–Chinese cooperation on digital infrastructure. Specifically, the leaders’ discussions set the scene for two important technology-centred announcements, the biggest being on 5G.

Huawei will become the supplier of 5G technology to Russia through its partnership with Russia’s biggest mobile operator, MTS. And Alibaba completed its joint-venture discussions with Russia’s Megafon and Mail.ru to create a large e-commerce and social commerce provider to serve Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States. Alibaba is a leading applier of artificial intelligence to its business, and, like other Chinese tech companies, must work closely with the state to serve its needs if it is to survive and prosper.

Putin will have chosen Huawei for the same reasons Australia didn’t: the company is the Chinese state’s 5G national champion and is adept at working within Chinese state policies and laws, which are centred on contributing to the very broad notion of ‘state security’ through cooperation with Chinese authorities and intelligence agencies.

This flows from the nature of the Chinese state, the presence of influential CCP committees throughout Huawei, and the legal obligations on Chinese companies. As a result, Putin is no doubt confident that Huawei will work well in his similar authoritarian environment and cooperate well with Russian intelligence and security agencies, as a key element of the strategic partnership with Xi’s China.

Another Russian telecommunications company, Tele2, has been pursuing a relationship with Ericsson on 5G for a while now. Tele2, which split from its Swedish parent in 2013, must be wondering about what the strategic trends set out by Putin and Xi mean for its business choices and future.

The Huawei announcement is a big brand endorsement from both Putin and Xi. It cements Huawei as the 5G provider of choice for the world’s digital authoritarian rulers, and shows that Xi and Putin are proud advocates for their system of authoritarian government, enabled by high technology that helps control their populations and repress dissent.

It also shows the mutual benefit that Russia and China derive from their partnership, which has led to its becoming the working alliance we now see. Russia continues to be a critical source of advanced military systems and technology for China’s military, but now China is reciprocating with its own technology flow to Russia, particularly in the area of internet and communications technologies.

Both Russia and China are ‘sophisticated state actors’ in the world of cyber power. Russia is the poster child for cyber-driven election interference, while the Chinese state is notorious for cyber intrusions into companies, universities, government agencies, and political parties and institutions.

Each can add to the other’s expertise and capability—in protective measures and in more successful approaches to foreign interference.

So, this deepening high-technology partnership is bad news for much of the rest of the world, particularly those who create technological dependency on China by buying into its global technology expansion.

The overall message from Xi and Putin is clear: digital authoritarianism depends on partnering with firms that enable it—and Huawei fits the bill for the Russian and Chinese states.

That’s a timely and sobering clarification for other governments pondering their own 5G futures. Non-authoritarian technology alternatives are viable but require foresight in decision-making and decisive effort in implementation.