The Chicom-Russia pact against NATO

 Washington Examiner:

China and Russia have forged a relationship “superior” to the ties that bind NATO, according to their leaders, who called for “a new kind of relationships between world powers” in a challenge to the United States and its Western allies.

"The new inter-State relations between Russia and China are superior to political and military alliances of the Cold War era,” the two governments said in a joint statement released after a meeting between Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin. “The sides reaffirmed their intention to strengthen foreign policy coordination, pursue true multilateralism, strengthen cooperation on multilateral platforms, defend common interests, support the international and regional balance of power, and improve global governance.”

That boast followed a call for NATO to stop admitting any new countries into the alliance, which the pair accused of maintaining “ideologized Cold War approaches." Xi made an overt show of support for Putin’s position in the ongoing Ukraine crisis, while the Kremlin chief offered a corollary endorsement of the Chinese Communist Party's desire to control Taiwan — exemplifying their broad-based challenge to the ideas about international affairs that have characterized Western foreign policy debates since the end of the Cold War.

"It’s not quite an alliance agreement, but it sure smells like one,” U.S. Army War College research professor Evan Ellis, a former member of the State Department's policy planning staff, told the Washington Examiner. “It's almost like a coordinated strategic concept ... on a scale that is only possible through the collaboration of the globe’s two principle anti-democratic powers.”

The statement opens with a preamble that forecast the “transformation of the global governance architecture and world order.” And the joint statement implies an evolution of Russian and Chinese approaches to foreign policy, as the two leaders adopted positions that would have been untenable in previous decades.

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 “NATO has never forced any country into our alliance. But many countries have actually, through democratic processes, decided that they want to be part of NATO,” Stoltenberg said Friday afternoon. "So this is about respecting independent sovereign choices of independent nations, not returning to an age of spheres of influence where big powers decide what small neighbors can do or not do.”

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This looks like another negative product of Biden's weakness.  It also looks like a prelude to potential aggression against Ukraine and Taiwan.