Sept. 13, 2025
PUBLISHED BY THE BERGGRUEN INSTITUTE
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Mia Angioy for Noema Magazine (Source images: realdonaldtrump/Instagram, Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images)
The Tianjin Turning Point
The Rest take on the West.
Editor-in-Chief Nathan Gardels
It is no less true for being a cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words. These two images above speak volumes about the state of the world.
One shows the whole panoply of European leaders, most of them under threat of impending tariffs, meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump in the Oval Office, trying to dissuade him from abandoning Ukraine to Russia’s designs. It is an image of doubt, disarray and disunity.
The other photo shows Russian President Vladimir Putin, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping clasping hands to demonstrate unity against “bullying” and “hegemonism” by the U.S. at a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Tianjin, China. It is an image of defiance and resolve against the West by the leaders of the Rest.
If the G-7 is the “steering committee” of the West, as former U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan once put it, this new triumvirate is the nascent steering committee of the non-West.
What the images also portray is strategic inertia against momentum. Exhausted by its burdens despite its superior technological prowess, the U.S. is unwinding the liberal world order it has led for the last 80 years since the defeat of fascism. The China-Russia-India league is seeking to fill the vacuum with its own alternative.
To quote Xi, we are witnessing “great changes unseen in a century.”
History will record the turning point of this shift as last week’s SCO gathering and Beijing’s 80th anniversary commemoration of the end of World War II. Presiding over a seemingly endless display of highly advanced weaponry and goose-stepping troops, with Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un at his side and the Iranian president nearby, Xi deftly appropriated a celebration of the historical moment that gave birth to the liberal world order to signal its encroaching displacement.
As Xi put it at the SCO summit, “Eighty years ago, the international community learned profound lessons from the scourge of two world wars and founded the United Nations, thus writing a new page in global governance. Eighty years later, while the historical trends of peace, development, cooperation and mutual benefit remain unchanged, the Cold War mentality, hegemonism and protectionism continue to haunt the world. New threats and challenges have been only increasing. The world has found itself in a new period of turbulence and transformation. Global governance has come to a new crossroads.”
From Performative Politics To Structural Change
As leader of the league, China is moving beyond the performative politics of “wolf warrior diplomacy” and awe-striking parades to the actual structural changes required to construct the new order it envisions.
Rather than firm associations, except in the case of Russia, China has cobbled together a series of arrangements that expand its circles of influence in many directions at once.
These include a web of initiatives aimed primarily at tying together the global South and Eurasia: the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, the Global Civilizational Initiative and, as announced in Tianjin, the Global Governance Initiative.
Though SCO members are a mixed bag that harbor their own import barriers and fossil fuel fixations, Xi sought to contrast the China-led approach with the unilateralist, summarily protectionist and anti-climate policies of the U.S.
Xi’s declaration read:
“We should step up to take the responsibility for open cooperation across the globe. SCO member states have rich energy resources, big markets and strong internal driving forces, and we are contributing a rising share to world economic growth. We should continue to dismantle walls, not erect them; we should seek integration, not decoupling. We should advance high-quality Belt and Road cooperation, and push for a universally beneficial and inclusive economic globalization.
China will readily share the opportunities of its vast market and continue to implement the action plan for high-quality development of economic and trade cooperation within the SCO family.
China will establish three major platforms for China-SCO cooperation in energy, green industry and the digital economy, and will set up three major cooperation centers for scientific and technological innovation, higher education and vocational and technical education. We will work with fellow SCO countries to increase the installed capacity of photovoltaic and wind power each by 10 million kilowatts in the next five years. We are ready to build with all sides the artificial intelligence application cooperation center and share the dividends of progress in AI. We welcome all parties to use the Beidou Satellite Navigation System and invite countries with relevant capacities to take part in the International Lunar Research Station project.”
The BSNS is China’s proposed alternative to the West’s dominant GPS, aptly symbolic of the global re-positioning underway.
In addition to the SCO, China has taken a leading role with Russia and India in the BRICS, which includes Brazil and South Africa, both now in the crosshairs of Trump’s stiff tariffs. As proposed for the SCO, the BRICs already have their own development bank, and its members have openly discussed how to muster an alternative to the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
Then there is the Belt and Road initiative Xi mentioned, and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, as key platforms to foster connectivity across the developing world, an echo of the glory days of Pax Mongolica and the Silk Road trading routes of Eurasia in the 13th and 14th centuries.
In tandem with these parallel alternatives, China has made it clear, at least in its public professions, that it is more interested in dominating than demolishing the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and United Nations. When the SCO countries and the BRICS say they want to democratize international relations, what they mean is placing these institutions under the new management of the Rest instead of the West.
Though welcome on the face of it, the rhetoric of sticking to “UN principles” and “the sovereign equality of nations” appears to be Orwellian doublespeak when both China and India are collaborating with Russia to sustain the invasion of Ukraine through extensive oil purchases, as well as the supply of drones and other tech support. (To which they would reply that neither the NATO bombing of Belgrade during the Kosovo war in 1999 nor the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the U.S. in 2003 bothered with UN approval).
Multipolarity Means Spheres Of Influence
This historical moment of transition has been a long time coming. In rough sketch, it was American-led post-Cold War globalization that fueled the rise of China and India, the giants of the global South, by integrating them and many others into Western markets, transferring technology and unleashing capital flows across borders.
Contrary to expectations, the growing prosperity of these rising nations did not make them “more like us.” Rather, it provided the wherewithal for asserting a future rooted in their own historical and civilizational identities instead of in the image of the West. In short, economic convergence fostered cultural and political divergence.
Perceiving that this rise of the Rest comes at America’s expense, putting it at more of a disadvantage than not, President Trump is defecting from the liberal rules-based order that enabled their climb up the ladder. To restore American advantage, he has sought to tightly regulate access by others to the largest and richest single market on the planet through the rollout of tariffs on foes and friends alike.
In the process, the solidity of Western cohesion is being fractured by protectionist measures against the erstwhile allies of Japan and Europe, while non-trade-related punitive tariffs on Brazil and India are pushing them further into the China-Russia-aligned camp.
In Tianjin, there was much talk of a “multipolar” world in which every sovereign state is equal. All poles, however, are not equal. In reality, what is re-emerging, as we have written in Noema, are 19th–century-type spheres of influence where the great powers dominate in their own realm and play by their own rules in their own interest.
What binds Russia, China and India in this configuration is not some internal ideological cohesion as during the Cold War, but a common hostility to the West still seeking to make others bend to its interests despite the underlying powershift. Whatever conflicts there may be among the non-Western league, for the moment, those are all subordinated to the aim of forging a united front that pushes the West off the pedestal of its domineering position in shaping global governance.
The Tianjin meeting and Xi’s parade in Beijing codified this global rift. The contest is on.
Going forward, the extent of integration between the West and the Rest will be determined by this new balance of power.
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