Fortress America

Two Risks to Counter

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni speaking at the Atlantic Council Global Citizen Awards, Sept. 23, 2024: “As the West, I think we have two risks to counter.

The first is what one of the greatest contemporary European philosophers, Roger Scruton, called oikophobia, from the Greek words oikos, which means home, and phobia, which means fear. . .. Oikophobia is the aversion to one’s home. A mounting contempt, which leads us to want to violently erase the symbols of our civilization, in the U.S. as in Europe.

The second risk is the paradox that, while on the one hand the West looks down on itself, on the other hand it often claims to be superior to the others. The result?

The result is that the West is in danger of becoming a less credible interlocutor. The so-called Global South is demanding more influence. Developing nations that are by now largely established are autonomously collaborating among themselves. Autocracies are gaining ground on democracies, and we risk looking more and more like a closed and self-referential fortress.”

With the momentum almost solely on the side of the autocracies, and the response of the West mainly incoherent, the fortress concept is necessary to enable the democratic West to get its collective house in order, so as to respond rationally and strategically to the autocratic world that is in its ascendency.

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The Fault Lines in the Autocratic Axis

Yaroslav Trofimov  is a Ukrainian-born Italian author and journalist who is chief foreign-affairs correspondent at The Wall Street Journal. Previously he wrote a weekly column on the Greater Middle East, "Middle East Crossroads," in The Wall Street Journal. He has been a foreign correspondent for the publication since 1999, covering the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Prior to 2015 he was The Journal’s bureau chief in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are all hostile to the U. S. That doesn’t mean they would go to war for one another—for now. He writes:

“The much-touted axis of autocracies did little to help its only non-nuclear member, Iran, when the Islamic Republic was targeted by Israeli and American strikes last month.

This was no surprise: China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, known on the diplomatic circuit as CRINKs, don’t have the kind of mutual-defense obligations that bind America to defend fellow democracies in Europe and Asia. Still, what unites these regimes is a common hostility to the U.S., and many Western officials caution that it would be a mistake to underestimate their partnership on the basis of the 12-day air campaign in the Middle East.

The four nations have spent several years intensifying their military, technological and intelligence cooperation, filling one another’s capability gaps. That process continues today, especially as the Iranian regime ponders its next steps, including a possible nuclear breakout.

“The CRINKs operate based on shared interests—and their shared interest is an America that is unpopular, that is distracted by various events, and that is therefore unable to focus on any one of them too much,” said Camille Grand, a former assistant secretary-general of NATO and a distinguished policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

China, of course, is by far the most powerful of the four countries, with an economy six times the size of its three junior partners combined. Russia, Iran and North Korea are all under Western sanctions and increasingly depend on China, which is fully integrated into the global economy, for investment and access to modern technologies. For now Beijing doesn’t appear to be interested in starting a war, but it continues to build up its military.

U.S. and allied military commanders and officials worry that if Beijing decides one day to make a forceful bid for control of Taiwan, it would pressure its partners to launch a simultaneous multi-front war across Eurasia. Fighting in the Korean Peninsula, Eastern Europe and the Middle East all at once could overwhelm the resources of allied democracies.

“We understand that the two theaters, the Indo-Pacific and the European, are interconnected,” said Taiwan’s deputy foreign minister Chen Ming-chi. He points to more frequent joint Russian and Chinese naval patrols off Japan and Korea, the deployment of North Korean troops in Russia’s war against Ukraine, and cooperation among the CRINKs in cyberattacks around the world.

Last month, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte told the New York Times that if Chinese leader Xi Jinping were to attack Taiwan, he would call “ his very junior partner” President Vladimir Putin of Russia and ask him to keep America busy by striking NATO territory in Europe. “That is most likely the way this will progress,” Rutte said. Russia’s outspoken former president Dmitry Medvedev, who chairs Putin’s party, replied by posting on X that Rutte should start learning Russian as it “might come in handy in a Siberian camp.”

Many Russia experts doubt that Putin would actually take such great risks for China or for any of its other partners. Russia’s traditional motto, attributed to Emperor Alexander III, is that it has only two allies, its army and its navy. That idea was confirmed by Moscow’s behavior during last month’s war in Iran, said Mark Galeotti, director of Mayak Intelligence, a research and consulting firm focused on Russia. “To be honest, the Russians themselves don’t really work on the assumption that there is anything sentimental about the other countries connected to them,” Galeotti said.

In an unusually frank exchange with the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, last week, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi said that Beijing doesn’t want to see Russia lose the war in Ukraine because the U.S. and allies would then be free to turn their focus to China itself. (The conversation was first reported by the South China Morning Post.)

Still, China has refrained so far from supplying Russia with lethal weapons for the war in Ukraine— though it does account for the lion’s share of dual-use components, with both military and civilian applications, that are imported by Russian defense industries, according to U.S. military officials.

“China’s priority is China’s interests,” said Neysun Mahboubi, director of the Penn Project on the Future of U.S.-China Relations. “Above all, China is very conscious of its geopolitical competition with the United States, so anything that it does vis-àvis other countries only makes sense through the lens of its positioning vis-à-vis the United States. Everything else is secondary—and if I were any of those countries, I would not get too comfortable with perceived Chinese support,” Mahboubi said.

Chinese officials were pleased by how the weapons Beijing supplied to Pakistan performed against Western equipment in its brief war with India in May: Pakistani forces were able to shoot down at least one of India’s French-made Rafale jets. That success contrasted with the failure of Iran’s Russian-made air defenses to interfere with the Israeli and Ameri--can bombing of Iran—a comparison not lost on the Iranians. Though Tehran sacrificed its relations with Europe to supply Moscow with Shahed drones and other weapons for use in Ukraine, the Iranian regime never received top-of-the-line Russian military gear in return.

“There is a huge degree of disillusionment with Russia. The war reminded both the political elite and the larger public in Iran just how lonely the country is,” said Ali Vaez, director of the Iran project at the International Crisis Group. “And some are now arguing that Iran should almost become a vassal state of China, officially, because there is no other option.”

Out of the four CRINKs, only Russia and North Korea have a bilateral military mutual-defense treaty, finalized last year. “The Russian relationship now is the most important for the North Korean side, which is why they always seek to cooperate with Russia at first,” said Hee Kyoung Chang, an expert at the Institute of East Asian Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany. “From the North Korean perspective, China is not as reliable a military partner as Russia.”

Moscow now sees Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons as an asset in the global confrontation with the West. Sending troops to the war against Ukraine—something that Moscow’s other formal allies, including Belarus, haven’t done—has allowed North Korea to break out of its economic and diplomatic isolation. But there’s no guarantee that Russia would reciprocate by backing North Korea in a war with South Korea, said Alexander Baunov, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “Putin was happy to strike a military deal with North Korea only once it became clear that nobody will attack it because it already possesses nuclear weapons,” Baunov said. “He did it just to ask the North Koreans for help. I have a very hard time imagining him returning the favor.”

As for America’s allies, they are also no longer certain that they can count on military support from the Trump administration, which has unleashed a trade war on European and Asian friends while attempting a rapprochement with Putin’s Russia. “Speaking about the axis of autocracies as a concept only makes sense if you assume that Europe and the United States are still on the same side supporting and believing in liberal democracy, which to put it politely is far from certain,” said Nathalie Tocci, director of the Italian Institute of International Affairs.

This trans-Atlantic discord, as well as a new coolness in Washington’s relations with Japan and South Korea, certainly factor into Beijing’s geostrategic calculations—and perhaps embolden its ambitions. “The Western alliance is basically a military tool for political purposes,” said retired senior colonel Zhou Bo, a former director at the Center for Security Cooperation in China’s ministry of defense who is now a senior fellow at Tsinghua University. “But if this kind of Western liberal democracy itself is declining, then there is no hope that this kind of military alliance will continue to grow with strength.”

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China’s Domestic Economy is its Achilles Heel

Yuan Bing is a freelance writer and independent scholar on contemporary China issues. He writes for The Epoch Times: “The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) finds itself ensnared in a self-inflicted economic imbalance, marked by excessive production and weak consumer demand. Beneath the surface lies a deeper contradiction: an exceptionally hardworking population that sees little return in wages.

In 2023, China topped the world in manufacturing value- added— a key measure of manufacturing activity— reaching $ 4.8 trillion. This accounted for nearly 29 percent of global output and surpassed the combined total of the next four largest manufacturing economies: the United States ( 17.2 percent), Japan ( 5.1 percent), Germany (5.1 percent), and India (2.8 percent), according to data from the United Nations Statistics Division.

Driving this level of productivity are China’s employees, who log some of the longest working hours in the world. In 2024, Chinese workers averaged 46.1 hours per week, compared with 38 hours for American workers, according to the International Labor Organization. In China, “ 996” has become a well-known shorthand for the grueling work culture—9 a. m. to 9 p. m., six days a week—that is particularly prevalent in the technology and manufacturing sectors.

These figures point to one undeniable reality: The Chinese people are not just hardworking—they are, by statistical measure, among the most industrious in the world. Yet that tireless effort has not translated into proportional income or economic security.

In 2020, then- Premier Li Keqiang publicly acknowledged that 600 million Chinese citizens—nearly half the population—lived on an average monthly income of just 1,000 yuan (about $ 140).

A 2019 study by the China Institute for Income Distribution at Beijing Normal University found that, among these low-income citizens, 220 million earned less than 500 yuan (about $69 per month), highlighting the severity of poverty affecting a substantial segment of the population.

Meanwhile, according to the latest official data, elderly residents in rural areas rely on pensions averaging just 123 yuan (about $ 17) per month, barely enough to cover even the most basic living expenses. It’s worth noting that the wave of Chinese tourists flocking to luxury stores in the United States and Europe before the COVID-19 pandemic represented only a small fraction of China’s 1.4 billion population; even a small percentage amounts to millions— and enough to create the illusion that most Chinese citizens have become wealthy.

Then how can a country that generates the world’s second-largest GDP, and whose people are among the hardest working on the planet, still have nearly half its population living in poverty?

The answer lies in how wealth is distributed. According to the China Statistical Yearbook 2024, the total wage bill in 2023 was 19.74 trillion yuan (about $2.7 trillion), spread across approximately 740 million employed individuals. That translates to an average annual wage of just about $3,644. In the same year, China’s GDP reached 129.43 trillion yuan (about $ 17.7 trillion), meaning that wages accounted for only 15.3 percent of GDP—far below the ratios seen in developed economies and closer to levels observed in low-income African countries.

This striking disparity indicates that the wealth generated by China’s working individuals is not flowing back to them. Instead, a disproportionate share is absorbed by the state.

And where does that wealth go? A significant portion is spent abroad as so- called foreign aid, with Chinese citizens humorously referring to it as “ lavishly throwing money around.”

This spending is widely viewed as a strategic move to secure diplomatic support from countries in the Global South, particularly as the CCP faces mounting criticism over its human rights violations and breaches of international norms.

Another major destination for state funds is military expenditures. China has the world’s second-largest defense budget, officially set at 1.78 trillion yuan (about $296 billion) for 2025. However, analysts believe the actual figure could be much higher, anywhere from $ 471 billion to $700 billion. In comparison, the U. S. defense budget for 2025 is projected to reach about $850 billion. Even more concerning, however, is the rise in internal security spending— referred to as “stability maintenance” in the CCP’s discourse— which has already surpassed military expenditure.

According to research by Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research, since 2009, China has allocated vast sums to domestic surveillance, censorship, policing, and social control, with these “stability” expenditures consistently outpacing defense budgets in the years that followed.

Administrative costs are similarly outsized, with China’s bureaucratic spending ranking among the highest in the world.

According to data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics, public sector employees—including civil servants—made up about 18 percent of the workforce in 2013, rising to 23 percent by 2021. This means that by 2021, nearly one in four employed individuals in China drew their income from public funds. It’s noteworthy that in recent years, China has stopped publishing data on the size of its public sector workforce— a move analysts suggest is intended to avoid triggering public concern.

At the same time, widespread corruption and elite capture continue to drain public wealth.

In summary, while the Chinese people are among the most industrious in the world and contribute to the second-largest economy globally, much of the wealth they create is diverted by the CCP— an entity that generates no economic value itself. This fundamental imbalance lies at the heart of China’s persistent income gap: Roughly 600 million citizens live on an average monthly income of less than $ 140, with an estimated 220 million living on less than $3 a day.”

Next time: Trump Reorganizes Chess Board Against China