By Andrew L. Jaffee

China and Russia’s relationship has come full circle. Warm. Cold. Now warm again. This warming is a strategic threat to the democratic world, to be ignored at its own peril. Just yesterday:

Russia and China have signed an agreement to pipe large quantities of gas from fields in Siberia to China. …

The agreement came as part of a raft of economic deals signed between the two sides during the visit to Beijing of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization accord of 2001 seems to have slipped under the radar, at least in the popular press. Hopefully it was not ignored in the capitals of the Western World. As Lev Navrozov points out:

If the SCO jointly develops post-nuclear superweapons to annihilate the West or enforce, by the threat of annihilation, its unconditional surrender, the further development of SCO relations (”who whom,” as Lenin used to say) will be purely academic history for the West if any history will be studied in the colony once called the West except the history of the glorious global victory of communism as predicted by Marx, Lenin, Mao, Hu and Putin – until Hu destroys Putin, or vice versa.

What bigger strategic threat could there be than an anti-democratic, ex-KGB Russian autocracy aligned with China’s billionaire dictators? Yesterday’s gas deal will serve to cement these dictators in power, and unfortunately impede the spread of democracy — perhaps threaten its very existence.

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Related: Dictator Watch, Economy, China

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