Russia and China are reshaping the world in their interests. Democratic countries need to wake up – Stewart McDonald

The West’s response to the dangers posed by China and Russia has been all tactics and no strategy

A few years ago, as the clouds of war were beginning to gather over Ukraine, I had dinner with some Ukrainian MPs. We talked about the troops massing on the border and the horrors that would come to pass if an invasion were to take place – horrors, it turns out, we could not have imagined. As I hoped aloud that these terrible predictions would never come to pass, my friend Maria Mezentseva, MP for Kharkiv, turned to me and looked me in the eye. “We cannot afford to hope,” she told me. “Hope means waiting for someone else to act.”

On Thursday night, an air raid siren sounded through her city for 16-and-a-half hours – the longest alert since the full-scale Russian military invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. Today marks the end of a week which saw the Russian military launch a major ground assault into the Kharkiv region and force Ukrainian troops to pull back from several villages in the border region. The attack, like the one in 2022, was not a surprise: UK intelligence had passed warning of an imminent attack to Ukraine’s leadership and Russian troops had been gathering on the border for days before.

As the young people of Ukraine were in Kharkiv fighting and dying to protect their country and our way of life, the US Secretary of State was in Kyiv – reliving the glory days of his own happy youth. There can be fewer images that better encapsulate our current moment than Antony Blinken jamming out to the hits of his 20s – the soundtrack to the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War – while the footsoldiers of a revanchist Russia gather outside the walls.

Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping attend an official welcoming ceremony in Tiananmen Square in Beijing on Thursday (Picture: Sergei Bobylyov/pool/AFP via Getty Images)

A few hours to Blinken’s west, as he stood in a bunker bar in Kyiv nostalgically “Rockin’ in the Free World”, the ink was drying on a Sino-Hungarian “all-weather comprehensive strategic partnership for the new era”. To his south, a pro-Russian Georgian government was defying mass citizen protests to drag its country closer to Russia’s political orbit.

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China and Russia – which also have a “comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era” – have made it very clear that they have a vision of a new world in their headlights and are driving at full speed towards it. The leadership of the West, on the other hand, seems unable to take its eyes off the rear-view mirror.

US tariffs on China

The world is changing rapidly as China and Russia seek to remould it in their interests and governments across the West struggle to articulate a collective strategic response. This strategic vacuum was almost comically illustrated this week by President Joe Biden’s announcement of a series of tariffs on goods made in China: 25 per cent on steel, 50 per cent on semiconductors and solar panels, and 100 per cent on electric vehicles. In 2019, the same man told the world that “any freshman economics student” would understand that these tariffs would “crush” domestic American manufacturers.

Governments across the West are now handwringing and grappling with the fact that, having failed to formulate a long-term industrial policy of their own, China is now producing the goods of the future – solar panels, electric vehicles, semiconductors – more cheaply and quickly than any other country on Earth and flooding our domestic markets with them.

Warning over 'third major global conflict' amid fears Russian influence could create instability in Balkans

The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and United States Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen took to the airwaves last week to denounce Chinese “overcapacity” and its export of cheap goods to overseas markets. But let us have some context: Germany, Japan and the US respectively export 80, 50, and 25 per cent of the automobiles they produce. China exports 12 per cent. The reason that China began to explore and encourage the domestic production of electric vehicles in the first place was that it could not begin to compete with the US, Germany and Japan in the production of internal combustion engines.

Industries of the future

Von der Leyen and Yellen’s comments on overcapacity, like Biden’s volte-face on tariffs, sum up the Western response to China and Russia thus far: all tactics and no strategy. Rather than getting mired in reactive micromanagement, the West urgently needs a proactive grand strategy and a geostrategic vision that can credibly defend the rules-based international order across the world – not just in Europe.

We need to pour investment into developing the industries of the future and renew our economic, political, and security partnerships with democratic partners across the world. In other words, we need to do the exact opposite of what this Conservative government has inflicted upon the United Kingdom for the past 14 years.

I feel like I write the words “let this be a wake-up call to the West” every other week in these pages. But if last week’s news from Hungary, Ukraine and Georgia – all in a few short days – cannot show the government of the West that we are grappling with two powers who have the motive, means and opportunity to reshape our world in short order, then I fear that the guilty verdict can only be laid at our door.

It is clear that the revanchist forces are operating with purposeful long-term strategies. Unless the West can catch up, the “new era” that Russia and China seek to build will be here before we know it. I would say that I hope that this will never happen. This week’s events in Kharkiv, however, showed us all too clearly what hope alone can offer us.

Stewart McDonald is SNP MP for Glasgow South