What do a Hindu nationalist prime minister, a former KGB autocrat, and communist China’s imperial strongman have in common?

Apparently, enough to walk arm in arm at the recent Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in China — smiling for the cameras, toasting regional “cooperation,” and calling for a new global order that doesn’t revolve around Washington, Brussels, or the International Monetary Fund.

Each of these leaders — Xi, Putin, Modi — believes his country has been talked down to by a West that still sees itself as the default setting of human civilization.

Watching Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Chinese President Xi Jinping embrace in Tianjin earlier this month may strike Western observers as a diplomatic absurdity — a Lovecraftian alliance of contradictions. But it’s only absurd if you’re still trapped in the fog of 1990s end-of-history delusions.

In reality, what we’re seeing is a convergence of deeply rooted civilizations — ancient empires with long memories — asserting that they won’t be subordinated to a West that still believes it owns the future.

To understand this moment, you need to understand history — not just the last 80 years, but the last 800.

Reclaiming ancient identities

China was the “middle kingdom” long before it became the world’s factory. It ruled as a centralized, Confucian empire for millennia — containing its own tributary states, cultures, and contradictions. The current Chinese Communist Party regime doesn’t just govern China; it is consciously rebuilding it as a totalitarian civilizational state aimed at restoring its former glory and avenging its “century of humiliation.” Xi Jinping’s “rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” is a project explicitly rooted in a return to imperial pre-eminence, not democratic inclusion.

Russia, for its part, never really stopped being an empire. Whether it flew the tsarist eagle, the Soviet hammer and sickle, or today’s revanchist flag of Russian Orthodoxy and gas pipelines, it has always been a civilizational project stretching across 11 time zones. Putin’s Russia isn’t looking to export an ideology — he trades in memory, borders, and ensuring it’s never again humiliated by NATO expansion or IMF diktats.

And India — too often misunderstood as just the world’s largest democracy — is in the midst of rediscovering its own cultural core. While India has never sustained a single continuous empire, Modi’s India is assertive, spiritual, and unapologetically Hindu in its civilizational narrative. While he plays nice on global stages, he is keen to shed India’s post-colonial skin and assert its role not as a subordinate in the West’s rules-based order, but as a peer.

Of course, these aren’t natural allies. India and China have come to blows in the Himalayas. Russia and China eye each other warily in Central Asia. Modi can’t forget the border clashes or China’s tech intrusion. Putin sells weapons and hydrocarbons to both. But what unites them now is something the West continues to ignore: a shared rejection of subordination.

Each of these leaders — Xi, Putin, Modi — believes his country has been talked down to by a West that still sees itself as the default setting of human civilization.

A unified front against the West

The SCO summit wasn’t about solving their differences. It was about presenting a united front against a common narrative: the unyielding insistence by Washington and Brussels that there is one set of rules for everyone else and another for the liberal West.

And it’s not lost on anyone in the East that Western Europe has all but collapsed economically — not because of war or invasion, but because of its own self-inflicted obsession with net-zero fantasies. Energy costs have skyrocketed, industries are fleeing, and the once-mighty militaries of Germany, France, and the U.K. are now barely functional. Their foreign policies rest on rhetoric, not strength. They outsourced their energy to Russia and their deterrence to America — and now have neither.

Meanwhile, China, India, and Russia burn coal, build steel, and mobilize armies.

The world is not “deglobalizing”; rather, the world’s center of economic gravity has shifted.

If trade gets blocked in one place, whether by sanctions or tariffs, it reappears in other ones. As Louis Gave explains:

The Western world attempted to trigger a collapse in the Russian economy by blocking access to the U.S. dollar, euro, British pound, and Swiss franc. Unsurprisingly, Russia immediately shifted to selling its commodities for renminbi, Indian rupees, Brazilian real, or Thai baht, and trade between Russia and the world’s major emerging markets went parabolic.

China’s trade surplus has surged by opening new markets for its products. In 2017, the value of Chinese exports to ASEAN economies amounted to 60% of China’s exports to the U.S. Today, China’s exports to Southeast Asia stand at roughly 120% of China’s exports to the U.S.

A multipolar world

The American foreign policy class loves binaries: democracy vs. autocracy, order vs. chaos, good guys vs. bad guys. But history doesn’t care about binaries. It cares about power, memory, geography, and pride.

That’s what brings these “strange bedfellows” together. They don’t need to love each other. They just need to agree that the current world order is not designed with their civilizations in mind.

And as America potentially turns back to America First — which is long overdue — it’s worth recognizing that this time, the rest of the world isn’t standing still. Unipolar globalization is no longer the key organizing principle. The East now speaks with a louder voice, and it contains over half the world’s population and represents almost 40% of global GDP. A second Trump term can’t simply reassert American dominance by fiat.

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Photo by ewg3D via Getty Images

America First with guile

The SCO summit was more than a photo op. It was a signal. That signal is this: The old rules-based order isn’t binding any more. The future isn’t unipolar; it’s multipolar and won’t be built only on Western terms.

This is not a call for appeasement. It’s a call to engage with these ancient empires by leveraging our strengths with strategic humility and guile.

America First must deal from strength and with awareness that it no longer holds all the cards. President Trump knows how to read a room. He now needs to read a world where the emperors are back. And this time, together, they’re working on a plan.

​Opinion & analysis, Opinion, Sco summit, Putin, Vladimir putin, Modi, Prime minister modi, Xi, Xi jinping, President xi jinping, Unipolar, Multipolar, National interest, America first 

Over the past nine years, Americans have watched mobs topple, decapitate, and deface our statues. They have threatened our saints and desecrated our graves. Churches have been firebombed, torched, and stoned. Activists, reporters, politicians, and judges have faced threats at their homes. Families have endured harassment, students and speakers have been assaulted, and ordinary citizens have been besieged while police stood by — or looked the other way.

Nine years of warning signs piled up. We ignored them. We sped past every flashing signal, comforting ourselves with America’s deep well of goodwill and tolerance for disruptive behavior. We closed our eyes and hoped the storm would blow over.

I can’t tell you why it came as such a shock, because we all know one thing more: It was bound to happen. They told us so.

It wasn’t just statues and churches under attack — though history shows that when mobs destroy symbols of faith and culture, they soon target people next. Violence on campus offered some of the earliest and clearest warnings. By 2016 and 2017, speakers such as the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, and the Claremont Institute’s Charles Murray required heavy police protection. Others were assaulted outright.

One notorious case at San Francisco State University showed just how far the rot had spread. A mob cut the lights, then chased and trapped former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines. She said a man in a dress assaulted her twice. The crowd demanded a ransom before allowing her to leave. Video showed security rushing her into a classroom as the mob bayed in the hallway.

Despite the testimony and evidence, the university refused to make a single arrest or discipline a single student.

These victims had committed a grievous offense in the mob’s eyes: daring to speak ideas professors and administrators had marked as violent. Campus gatekeepers trained students to treat words as weapons and to defend campuses like fortresses. Conservative, Christian, or dissenting speakers were framed as invading forces to be repelled.

More insidious attacks followed. Swatting — phoning fake emergency calls to provoke an armed police response — goes back to the Tea Party era, but it exploded in the past few years. Targets included elected officials such as Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) and Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), plus legal analyst Jonathan Turley.

By 2025, conservative internet personalities topped the list. In one week in March, attackers mounted 15 known swattings against conservative figures. The threat grew so severe that media companies advised hosts and reporters to pre-register a cellphone number with local police so that responding officers would have a number to call if responding to a “shooting.”

Swatting isn’t a prank. It’s attempted murder. Armed officers are answering a call that claims there’s an active shooter and will enter a home where families sleep. In that chaotic, high-stakes moment, someone can — and often does — get killed.

On the morning of Sept. 10, 2025, the threat we’d been warning about stopped being an abstract danger and became a crushing reality. We knew a sizeable number of left-wing activists had embraced violence as a tactic. We knew too many on the academy-activist circuit treated dissent as a mortal wound to the community. We knew campus administrators shrugged. And yet when a friend, colleague, mentor, Christian, husband, and young father fell to an assassin’s bullet in broad daylight, the world still felt stunned.

We had watched the escalation for years: arson, vandalism, statue-toppling, threats shoved into social feeds and then normalized by influencers and even some officials. We saw mobs target speakers, watched colleges shield agitators and punish critics, and read the posts that cheered harm or called for more. Those warnings were real warnings — not hyperbole. When rhetoric hardens into endorsement, violence follows predictable paths.

Maybe we shouldn’t have been surprised that the violence materialized on a sunny Wednesday in September. Maybe our shock came because the victim wasn’t a faceless “other” but someone many of us knew and respected. That intimacy made this horror intolerable.

I can’t tell you why it came as such a shock, because we all know one thing more: It was bound to happen. They told us so.

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​Politics, Opinion & analysis