Biden, Trump and the leaders of Western Europe have succeeded by their incoherent behaviour in doing what would have been unimaginable 20 years ago: alienating the very nations that they most needed to keep on their side. They are now weeping into their beer (or Diet Coke, in The Donald’s case).

“Looks like we’ve lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest China,” Trump wrote on Friday 5 September on his Truth Social. “May they have a long and prosperous future together!”

Western grand strategy has been abandoned

Trump was smarting at the sight of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Presidents Xi and Putin together at the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation summit in Tianjin, a gathering representing about half the world’s GDP and population. It was, in soccer parlance, an epic own goal.

Western grand strategy in the 1970s, 80s and 90s had as a central tenet the need to keep the Russians and the Chinese apart. Nixon’s opening up to China, the One China policy, and Reagan and HW Bush’s embrace of Gorbachev’s Glasnost and Perestroika, all had sound strategic logic behind them: keep your friends close, but your potential enemies closer.

Geopolitical thinker Zbigniew Brzeziński, national security adviser to Jimmy Carter, said an even bigger threat to US dominance than a rapprochement between Moscow and Beijing was if Russia, China and, heaven help, Iran formed an alliance. Biden and Trump have achieved just this and — for good measure — Trump may also have (and I emphasise may have) driven India off the fence and into the arms of the other great powers of Eurasia.

A new Eurasian order is emerging quicker than expected

At the SCO summit, President Xi said: “Global governance has reached a new crossroads. We must continue to take a clear stand against hegemonism and power politics, and practice true multilateralism.”

Despite the propaganda, the greatest threat Russia poses to Europe is not that it marches west but that it turns its back on the western periphery and builds a brighter future to the east. If Professor Glenn Diesen is right, we are witnessing the emergence of a Eurasian World Order.

Europe’s energy crisis will deepen

Hot on the heels of the SCO summit and the parade to mark the 80th anniversary of victory in World War II, the Russian gas giant Gazprom announced that Russia and China had signed a memorandum for the construction of Power of Siberia 2, a 2600-km gas pipeline that will run between the two countries. Just a few years ago, much of this gas from the vast Yamal fields could have provided cheap fuel to the German and other Western economies – which today are de-industrialising and economically staggering as they suffer under the weight of expensive US LNG used to replace Nord Stream 2.

Insulting friends and adversaries does self-harm

In another fit of self-harm, Trump alienated India by throwing an extra 25% tariff on the country for continuing to buy Russian energy. His economic adviser Peter Navarro poured salt on the wound by saying Ukraine was now “India’s war” because it was funding the Russian war machine. Modi booked his flight to China days later.

Also within days Kaja Kallas, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs, gave a masterclass in how not to conduct foreign affairs when she ignorantly dismissed Russia and China’s contributions to victory in World War II, claiming the countries overstated their roles.

British historian of Russia, Professor Geoffrey Roberts, would demur: “Eighty percent of all World War II combat took place on the Soviet-German front. During four years of war the Red Army destroyed 600 enemy divisions and inflicted ten million casualties on the Wehrmacht (75% of its total wartime losses), including three million dead,” he said in a recent article.

China for its part was responsible for 25% of Japanese casualties and forced Japan to commit a third of their forces to fight them, making US progress in the Pacific easier than it would have otherwise been.

The Ukrainian quagmire and what defines Westernism in 2025

These are just a couple of examples of what has become standard Western behaviour: rude, dismissive and deluded. At its core, three things now define Westernism: a rejection of the international laws and norms that the Americans themselves played so vital a role in establishing after World War II, a repudiation of diplomacy in favour of unilateralism and bullying, and a determination to maintain a primacy in world affairs that it has already effectively lost.

Theorists like Professor Richard Sakwa, author of The Lost Peace, How the West Failed to Prevent a Second Cold War, argue that the failure to integrate Russia into a consolidated peace framework after 1990 — instead imposing an increasingly harsh and chaotic settlement — planted the seeds of the conflict we are now living through. Professors John Mearsheimer, Glenn Diesen, Anatol Lieven, Jeffrey Sachs, George Beebe, Ambassadors Jack Matlock and Chas Freeman and a collegium of other distinguished thinkers provide similar analysis that is regrettably largely banned from the mainstream.

The tragedy is that dialogue of a deep and meaningful kind was spurned in favour of posturing and pushing forward with plans to turn Ukraine into a NATO bastion, including turning the great Crimean port of Sevastopol, home to the Russian fleet since the 18th century, into a NATO port. US Ambassador to Moscow in 2008, William Burns, warned that all levels of the Russian political class were resolutely opposed to this. Ukraine, Burns said in famous leaked cables, was “the brightest of red lines” for Russia and that, for the Russians, “Nyet means Nyet".

“From knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests," Burns cabled back to Washington in 2008.

The state of the Ukraine war today sums up nicely the absurd state of Western elite thinking: the West realises that the war is lost on the battlefield and is therefore demanding there be an immediate ceasefire. Simultaneously, it is flirting with escalation (long-range missiles, threats to Kaliningrad, etc). Normally when a war is being lost, the side that is doing better sets the terms. Yet the West is continuing to suggest harsh terms for Russia. It endlessly denigrates Russia and its leadership, continues to insist on massive reparations, says it is planning for Western/NATO troops in Ukraine and keeps the door open to NATO membership (the single biggest reason Russia says it invaded).

Depending on your perspective, that may all be fair enough, but given that Russia’s long-stated positions are resolutely opposite to all this, it borders on delusion to think the Russians will stop fighting, particularly as NATO generals and politicians have made clear they intend to quickly rearm Ukraine.

If the war drags on, as seems likely, the conflict, as long predicted by Professor Mearsheimer and others, will be settled on the battlefield in Russia’s favour, on terms far harsher than was on offer in 2022 or even today. You don’t have to like Russia or Putin to assess this as the all-but certain outcome; yet the West pushes on, sending Ukraine into an economic and demographic death spiral.

Has the West lost its ability to lead effectively?

Everything above suggests to me that the West has lost the kind of intellectual and strategic firepower at the elite political level that is needed to run a global empire. Today, it is up to its eyeballs in the blood of children, women and men in Gaza while it hectors and lectures other countries about human rights. It preaches the nobility of a chimerical rules-based order whilst tossing around tariffs and sanctions like confetti and illegally attacking countries across the planet. Leaders like Macron, Merz, Kallas, von der Leyen and Starmer have abandoned diplomacy, so vital in dealing with your adversaries — even hated ones — and spend their time grandstanding, insulting adversaries, and endlessly hugging each other. How long this can go on is uncertain because they are simultaneously kicking down the pillars of their own economies and democracies. Where do we think this is leading to?

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.