If we disengage from the world and forfeit our role as an international force, dictatorial leaders will race to fill the void.
In December 2025 – with perfect timing – Vladimir Putin followed up a September Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit with a two-day summit in New Delhi with Prime Minister Modi. After Modi greeted Putin at the airport with a big bear hug, the two leaders solidified the relationship between their countries by finalizing an economic plan to boost annual trade to $100 billion by 2030 (their bilateral trade was $68.7 billion in FY2025); reinforcing energy security (Putin promised Modi “uninterrupted shipments” of fuel); and signing multiple labor agreements.
Back in China, Xi Jinping is building strength and recruiting allies while trying hard to erode U.S. morale through guerrilla attacks and propaganda. We’ll get to the last part of that – eroding the opposition’s morale through guerrilla attacks and propaganda – in a second, but as for the recruiting allies part, hold on to your hats.
As the Trump/Vance administration withdraws from the world and does super shitty things like shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) – – an agency that cost less than 1 percent of the U.S. federal budget but saved an estimated 5.6 million lives every year by providing interventions for HIV/AIDS, vaccine-preventable illnesses, and emergency/ humanitarian relief alone (this number doesn’t even include interventions for water and sanitation, family planning, and nutrition, which are significant in and of themselves) – – the Chinese continue on with the extensive global outreach they have nurtured for years.
“Gracias China!!!,” Mexico’s foreign minister posted to Twitter after China – now Mexico’s second-largest trading partner in Latin America – sent his country a planeload of masks, testing kits, vaccines and ventilators during the Covid crisis.
China began its global charm offensive in 2013, when Xi Jinping announced what would become the multibillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). One Belt, One Road extends low-cost loans and builds infrastructure for countries across the world – including roads, ports, railways, power plants, 5G networks and fiber-optic cables.
Since then, Xi Jinping has worked hard to convince the world that, even though China has a state-controlled, rabidly protected economy, they are actually the true champions of globalization and free trade – a narrative that the Trump/Vance administration is feeding into with their protectionist policies.
“Pursuing protectionism is just like locking oneself in a dark room. While wind and rain may be kept outside, that dark room will also block light and air. No one will emerge as a winner in a trade war,” Xi Jinping said at the World Economic Forum on January 17, 2017, just days before Donald Trump was inaugurated for his first term.
Most anyone who is paying attention considers One Belt, One Road to be the most aggressive worldwide outreach endeavor in recent history, if not ever – and for good reason.
Between 2013 and early 2019, China dramatically expanded the reach of the Belt and Road Initiative. By March 2019, Beijing had signed 173 cooperation documents with 125 countries and 29 international organizations. Eighteen of the European Union’s 27 members would sign memoranda of understanding with China on the initiative. Between 2013 and 2018, trade between China and Belt and Road countries exceeded $6 trillion, growing by an average of 4 percent annually. Even during the pandemic, Beijing continued pursuing economic agreements.
Ten years after Xi Jinping launched what he would later call his “project of the century,” nearly 150 countries had signed on to the Belt and Road Initiative in some form, while Chinese institutions had committed hundreds of billions of dollars to infrastructure and other development projects around the world.
These deals are alarmingly strategic. In September 2024, in the South American town of Guyana, the Chinese were busy building everything from hotels to bridges to a $150 million international airport – while, offshore, ExxonMobil pumped thousands of barrels daily from a new oil discovery.
Just how deep into the global economy does China’s reach extend thanks to One Belt, One Road? In 2019, the Kiel Institute for the World Economy – an independent, nonprofit economic research institute and think tank based in Kiel, Germany – analyzed “a total of 1,974 Chinese loans and 2,947 Chinese grants to 152 countries from 1949 to 2017.”
The analysis revealed that “China’s direct loans and trade credits had climbed from almost zero in 1998 to more than $1.6 trillion, or close to 2 percent of world GDP in 2018. These loans mostly went to low- and middle-income countries. In total, estimates suggest that the Chinese state now accounted for a quarter of total bank lending to emerging markets. This had transformed China into the largest official creditor, easily surpassing the IMF or the World Bank.”
Although these are huge numbers, they added, the actual numbers are much larger because “about one half of China’s large-scale lending to developing countries is ‘hidden’ and not recorded in the main international databases used by researchers and practitioners alike.”
A January 2026 investment report published by Christoph Nedopil – a University of Queensland professor, a visiting professor at Fudan International School of Finance Shanghai, and a professorial research associate at SOAS University of London – found that the Belt and Road Initiative hit a record level of engagement in 2025 (over $213 billion), driven by massive energy, mining, and technology investments, with significant increases in Central Asia and construction deals in Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America.
That said, in recent years, China’s role as global creditor has changed. After two decades of explosive growth, lending for large new overseas infrastructure projects fell sharply, while many developing-country borrowers struggled to service existing debts. Beijing increasingly found itself refinancing and restructuring old loans and providing emergency financing to distressed borrowers. By 2023, researchers had identified more than $1.3 trillion in Chinese official-sector loans and grants supporting nearly 21,000 projects in 165 low- and middle-income countries between 2000 and 2021. And by 2025, researchers had uncovered another feature of China’s lending system: nearly $420 billion in public and publicly guaranteed loans across 57 countries were effectively secured by collateral, often through foreign-currency revenues deposited in accounts controlled by Chinese lenders. So essentially, China has evolved from one of the world’s most aggressive development lenders into something else as well – a major creditor managing the consequences of its own unprecedented global lending boom.
Meanwhile, China has been wooing Russia for years, all the way back to when Presidents Putin and Xi Jinping made pancakes together at a joint military drill in 2018. Declaring their friendship had “no limits,” Putin and Xi Jinping signed an agreement during the Beijing Olympics (just weeks before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine) that rejected NATO expansion and framed Western democracy as some sort of evil plot.
Since then, China has been happily shoving drone parts and other war hardware to its new best friend Russia. In fact, Russia imported $1.9 billion of “high-priority dual-use items” from China in the first half of 2025, including products that can help make armored vehicles, body armor, drones, military jets, and tanks (these are all subject to Western export controls). Chinese components have repeatedly been identified in Russian drones and other weapons, while Chinese machinery, electronics, materials, and other dual-use goods continue to feed Russia’s defense-industrial base.
China has also been Russia’s largest purchaser of fossil fuels during the war in Ukraine. From December 5, 2022, when the Western oil price cap and EU embargo took effect, through July 2026, China bought 50 percent of all Russian crude exports. In July 2026 alone, China bought approximately $9 billion worth of Russian fossil fuels, accounting for 43 percent of Russia’s fossil-fuel export revenues from its five largest importing countries. Crude oil accounted for roughly $6.3 billion of those purchases.
This has provided Moscow with a crucial source of revenue as it finances its war: oil and gas revenues remain an important source of funding for the Russian federal budget, while oil proceeds have also helped replenish reserves that Moscow has drawn upon to finance defense spending.
China, meanwhile, has become an exceptionally important market for oil constrained by Western sanctions. Sanctioned crude from Iran, Russia, and Venezuela probably supplied more than one-fifth of China's total crude-oil imports in 2025 – at least 2.6 million barrels per day. China bought approximately 1.38 million barrels per day from Iran and 389,000 from Venezuela, in addition to at least 800,000 barrels per day of sanctioned Russian crude.
China makes no secret of why they are doing this. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has said openly that his country doesn’t want Russia to lose in Ukraine because it wants the attention of the United States divided between Europe and Asia.
The help between Russia and China goes both ways. Documents obtained by the hactivist group Black Moon – and reviewed by The Washington Post – revealed that Russia is helping prepare China to attack Taiwan, agreeing to provide equipment and training for a Chinese airborne battalion and sharing its knowledge in airdropping armored vehicles.
This is not a small development. In October 2024, Russia agreed to sell the People’s Liberation Army Air Force 37 BMD-4M light amphibious vehicles, 11 Sprut-SDM1 self-propelled anti-tank guns, and 11 BTR-MDM airborne armored personnel carriers, in addition to command and observation vehicles and special purpose parachute systems designed to airdrop heavy loads from high altitudes.
And now Russia and China are both helping Iran fight against the United States. In March 2026, three U.S. officials told The Washington Post that Russia was providing Iran with targeting intelligence to attack American forces in the Middle East, including the locations of U.S. warships and aircraft. The assistance reportedly included satellite imagery and other intelligence that could help Iran target American military positions, radars, and command-and-control facilities. Russia did this even as Moscow publicly called for an end to the war, which it condemned as an “unprovoked act of armed aggression.”
This helped Iran … A LOT. Iran subsequently demonstrated a striking ability to hit American military facilities: a Washington Post analysis of satellite imagery found that Iranian attacks damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment at 15 U.S. military sites across the Middle East. Russia has also reportedly shared drone tactics and technology developed during its war in Ukraine with Iran.
China has continued supplying Iran with materials critical to its ballistic-missile program. In March, The Washington Post tracked two ships operated by Iran’s sanctioned state shipping company, the Shabdis and Barzin, as they left the Gaolan chemical-storage port in Zhuhai, China, loaded with cargo and headed for Iran. Both ships had taken on cargo at a port known for handling sodium perchlorate, a key precursor used to manufacture the solid propellant in ballistic missiles.
Those shipments were not isolated. At least four sanctioned Iranian ships believed to be carrying sodium perchlorate from China subsequently reached Iranian ports, while a fifth was tracked near Iranian waters. All had departed from Gaolan. These shipments continued even as Iran was firing ballistic missiles and drones at American forces and U.S. allies across the Middle East.
And this was part of a much larger pipeline. European intelligence sources reported that China had already supplied Iran with roughly 2,000 tons of sodium perchlorate in several shipments beginning in September 2025, as Tehran attempted to rebuild its ballistic-missile arsenal after its war with Israel. Earlier shipments in 2025 reportedly included roughly another 2,000 tons – about 1,000 tons in February and another 1,000 tons in June. The U.S. Treasury has sanctioned Chinese and Iranian companies involved in procuring sodium perchlorate from China for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The evidence that Russia and China are both helping Iran fight against the United States is only getting stronger. Russia’s help didn’t stop at satellite intel. The Wall Street Journal reported Moscow also sent Iran upgraded Shahed drone parts – better navigation, better targeting – plus tactical playbooks straight from the Ukraine battlefield: how many drones to send, what altitude to fly. One Carnegie analyst put it bluntly: Iran barely has its own military satellites, so Russian imagery is a massive force multiplier. The irony isn’t lost on Ukraine, which is now sending air-defense specialists to the Gulf to help U.S. partners shoot down the exact same drones Ukraine has spent years learning to counter.
Even Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is admitting this reality, telling Congress that both Russia and China are helping Iran “to some extent.” UK Defense Secretary John Healey has said Britain suspects Russia of helping Iran improve its drone tactics, including techniques developed in Ukraine, while Volodymyr Zelensky himself says Ukraine has its own signals intelligence proving Russia is still feeding Tehran targeting data.
China’s role is murkier but no less alarming. Experts told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) a Chinese firm may have used A.I. to analyze satellite imagery of Prince Sultan Air Base days before Iran hit it hard.
The Guardian reported that Iranian missiles were displaying increasingly sophisticated capabilities, including steerable warheads and improved terminal guidance, while analysts pointed separately to Chinese electronics and imagery and tactics resembling those Russia developed in Ukraine. And leaked documents shared with Iran International revealed Chinese trading firms allegedly lining up a shipment big enough for 2,500 missiles. So, all this means that the sodium perchlorate pipeline from March wasn’t a one-off, it was a preview.
China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are obviously doing anything and everything possible to solidify their “We Hate America” club, and we can’t allow this to get any worse than it already is. Individually, these countries pose constant challenges to our national security but, together, their collective capabilities improve their resilience against our efforts to constrain and/or deter their activities.
The disruptive and destructive collateral damage of tyranny knows no borders. Authoritarian powers will always try to expand their control by sabotaging the democratic sovereignty of other states. And they will zealously join together to do it. That’s just a fact.
Can you imagine what would happen if Xi Jinping had a free pass at Taiwan, then decided he wanted to reshape the entire Indo-Pacific order, starting with the Philippines? Or if Putin had free reign to charge through the rest of Eastern Europe, and then through the Balkans?
We can imagine these things, which is one of many reasons why we're completely bewildered by the thought process of Donald Trump, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, congressional Republicans, and many others in this administration. The new China, Russia, Iran, North Korea Fight Club makes it essential we have as many countries on our side as possible.
China’s increasingly aggressive military posture toward Taiwan and its massive military buildup in the South China Sea make strong U.S. alliances in the Indo-Pacific an urgent priority.
China claims enormous portions of the South China Sea are within its famous “nine-dash line,” but in 2016 an international tribunal ruled that there was no legal basis for China’s sweeping claims of historic rights beyond those allowed under international maritime law. Unsurprisingly, Beijing simply rejected the ruling, still claiming Taiwan as its territory, saying that roughly 90 percent of the South China Sea has belonged to them since “ancient times.” They again pointed to waters within the “nine-dash line” that, oddly enough, appears only on Chinese maps. Maybe Xi Jinping would like to borrow Donald Trump’s black Sharpie! : ) Because of its staunch position, China has repeatedly pledged to take Taiwan “back,” by force if necessary.
In any event, the scale of China’s buildup is staggering. A Washington Post analysis estimated that the replacement value of Chinese military infrastructure on Hainan Island and across its South China Sea positions exceeded $50 billion as of 2022. About $15 billion of that was on its fortified artificial-island bases, which now feature long runways, hardened aircraft shelters, missiles, radars and other military infrastructure. Hainan – sometimes called China’s Hawaii – serves as a major launching pad into the South China Sea, hosting warships, aircraft, missiles and submarines, including ballistic-missile submarines that carry nuclear weapons.
And China is still expanding. In August 2026, satellite imagery showed that Beijing had completed the first stage of reclamation at disputed Antelope Reef, creating a roughly six-kilometer artificial island with a harbor and indications of a future runway.
China has also developed an enormous state-supported maritime militia operating partly through ostensibly civilian fishing vessels. In December 2025, roughly 2,000 Chinese fishing boats assembled into enormous formations in the East China Sea. Weeks later, about 1,400 vessels formed another floating formation stretching more than 200 miles – demonstrating a remarkable ability to coordinate civilian vessels that could potentially obstruct shipping or support a blockade.
In May 2026, The Wall Street Journal reported that “about 200 Chinese fishing boats – part of China’s state-directed maritime fleet – recently pushed further east in the Yellow Sea. Some came within 150 miles of the Japanese city of Sasebo, home to a core U.S. naval base.”
The elaborate system being built is designed to allow China to restrict who has access to the Western Pacific – and it’s working. For decades, analysists have worried that China would eventually be able to extend its reach to what is known as the “Second Island Chain,” a route that connects Japan, Guam, and Papua-New Guinea. This is a huge deal because this area is up to 3,000 kilometers away from China.
Well, we're sorry to report we have now let this happen. While it’s not evident China has built permanent bases there yet, China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) crossed into the Second Island Chain in June 2025, demonstrating the growing ability of the People’s Liberation Army Navy to project power thousands of kilometers from China.
Clearly, Beijing is steadily acquiring more ways to threaten, surveil and potentially deny access to U.S. and allied forces across a much larger area… which brings us to Taiwan. For years, China has used significant pressure to force Taiwan to accept its “One China” vision, which essentially gives China complete control of Taiwan.
We need as many allies as we can get.