"Waving beatifically over the crowd of 50,000 spectators assembled in Beijing's Tiananmen Square on Wednesday, Xi Jinping exuded an aura of confidence that many leaders in the west could only envy. To his left stood North Korea's Kim Jong-un, the supreme leader of an increasingly strident hermit kingdom. To his right was the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, Xi's old friend and China's biggest ally in opposing the US-led world order. The last time that the leaders of these three countries were together in public was at the height of the cold war."
"The same day, more than 5,000 miles away, Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his allies assembled in Paris for a summit on the future of Ukraine, a country that has been racked by war since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022. The coalition of the willing, led by the UK and France, did not include the US. The optics of the new global order could not be clearer: an anti-western bloc, helmed by China, on one side, and a western alliance of democracies, lacking its traditional leader in Washington, on the other."
Xi Jinping presided over a massive Tiananmen Square gathering flanked by Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin, projecting confidence. He asserted adherence to peaceful development while overseeing China's largest military parade. More than 10,000 soldiers marched alongside nuclear-capable missiles beneath the Gate of Heavenly Peace as global autocrats watched. Simultaneously, Volodymyr Zelenskyy and allied nations met in Paris to discuss Ukraine without US participation. The events together reveal a deepening geopolitical division: a China-led anti‑Western alignment on one side and a Western alliance of democracies, notably missing traditional US leadership, on the other.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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