By Adolfo Quizon Paglinawan

 

Part 17: An old order gives way to a new one, reshaping global geopolitics

It is now Marcos’ turn to visit the Yusunuki Shrine in Chiyoda, to kneel before all Japanese soldiers who sacrificed their lives on the battlefield since the Meiji Restoration in 1868, most of them during World War II.

Depending on his disposition upon arrival in Tokyo, he could even bow repeatedly, apologizing to Japan, as proxy to the United States,  for the nuclear bombing on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. will visit Japan from May 26 to 29, to meet Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, to attempt to repair whatever damage dealt by the earlier trip of US President Donald Trump to Beijing to a free and open Indo-Pacific and the US pivot to Asia.

Trump’s public statements admonishing the people of Taiwan not to pursue independence from China and his follow-up not to pursue a war 9,500 miles from his mainland, could be interpreted as a dilution of the United States strategic ambiguity on the Chinese province north of the Philippines.

Taken dogmatically, Trump has conceded the “first island chain” to China.

Despite this year’s US legislation favoring a $2.5 billion military aid to its Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement for five years, with a promised $1.5 billion downpayment this year, its National Strategic Strategy released last December 2026 belies the US as a reliable and dependable partner.

The Philippines has not yet received the $500 million  assistance committed by Joe Biden to Marcos in  February 2003, in exchange for adding four additional sites to EDCA.

Artificial Intelligence is referring me to the websites of the US Embassy and the Department of Defense – what’s there to verify? The Gringos keep on raising the ante but deliveries.

Even Japan itself has been made to wait for its order for 400 Tomahawks missiles already prepaid, with approximate fulfillment in 2028 instead of this year as per contract.

Retired Philippine Military Academy generals have hinted that the Americans instead have lined the pockets of Marcos and the military brass to “instill patience” in the chain of command.

Armed Forces of the Philippines Chief of Staff Romeo Brawner is retiring two months in July with the AFP almost empty-handed, when compared the incumbency of President Rodrigo Duterte.

To pre-stage his Tokyo genuflection, Malacañang repeated a canned statement, “The Philippines would likely be involved in any conflict over Taiwan due to its proximity. We do not have a choice because Taiwan is so close to the Philippines and we have almost 200,000 Filipino nationals living and working in Taiwan,”

This view does not have any public support in-country. Of course, the Filipinos have a choice. It is Marcos who has no choice because of the already the pervading perception in Manila that the Americans are running his government.

This month, the Philippine Senate was attacked by armed men garbed with paraphernalia of the National Bureau of Investigation resulting in an exchange of fire. The Office of the President, the Department of Justice and the NBI itself, have denied accountability.

Marcos appears only to serve as a ceremonial president.

On his visit to Japan, he is slated to receive the Grand Cordon of the Supreme Order of the Chrysanthemum, one of Japan’s highest decorations, and his wife, Louise Araneta-Marcos, the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Precious Crown, in addition of being able to rub elbows with Japan’s Emperor Naruhito and Empress Masako.

X tweeted “both countries are expected to expand fishing false starts from the South China Sea onto the Taiwan Straits and the East China Sea.”

In what however appeared to be during a recent lucid interval, Marcos mentioned in an interview with the Philippine News Agency, the Philippines’ adherence to the one-China policy and stressed that the country would not interfere in issues concerning Taiwan island.

Putin goes to Beijing

Compared to the circus Marcos is expected to perform in Japan, President Vladimir Putin’s official state visit to China marked a defining moment in 21st-century geopolitics, for a magnum opus in international diplomacy.

• The “Multipolar” Declaration: Xi and Putin adopted a formal joint declaration on the emergence of a multipolar world order, actively pushing to institutionalize an alternative to the Western-led international system.

The summit underscored a crystallized, institutionalized partnership aimed at actively dismantling U.S.-led hegemony.

By signing a sweeping 47-page policy document on multipolarity with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, both nations positioned themselves as the core pillars of a new global governance model independent of Washington.

• China’s Diplomatic Center Stage: Taking place shortly after a high-profile US-China summit, Putin’s 25th visit to China reinforced Beijing’s self-perception as the pivotal anchor of global diplomacy, courting influence from multiple major powers.

The partnership legitimized Moscow against Western isolation while elevating Beijing as a major diplomatic hub.

• De-dollarization & Sanction-Proof Ties: Bilateral trade has breached a record-breaking $240 billion.

The geopolitical shift is supported by an aggressive economic pivot, with China and Russia conducting nearly all bilateral trade—in their national currencies (the yuan and ruble) to bypass U.S.-controlled financial infrastructure.

China provides a crucial economic lifeline by supplying manufacturing and dual-use technologies, while serving as a massive consumer of Russian energy.

• Long-term Institutionalization: Beyond grand posturing, the summit extended the Treaty of Good-Neighborliness originally signed in 2001, and secured a visa-free regime through the end of 2027, signaling permanent, long-term strategic and regional alignment.

The two powers also agreed to deepen their strategic coordination across international organizations to shift the global balance of power.

Historiography

On July 16, 2001 in Shanghai, Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Jiang Zemin signed the Treaty of Good-Neighborliness, Friendship and Cooperation, a 20-year agreement that establishes the legal and diplomatic foundation for a strategic partnership between the world’s largest country by landmass and the world’s most populous nation.

At the time, most Western analysts dismissed it as symbolism. China and Russia had too much history of mistrust, too many competing interests along their 4,000-kilometer shared border, too many reasons to remain cautious of each other.

The partnership, pundits said, would never become a genuine strategic alliance. That analysis was wrong. And the evidence that it was wrong has been accumulating for 25 years in numbers that are no longer deniable.

Since 2001, Putin has made 25 trips to China. No other bilateral relationship in Putin’s foreign policy history comes close to that frequency.

China and Russia’s defense ties have been deepening steadily since 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and the first round of Western sanctions began the process of pushing Moscow toward Beijing economically and strategically.

And then came February 4, 2022, 20 days before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Putin flew to Beijing for the Winter Olympics opening ceremony. He sat across from Xi, and the two leaders announced something that the world was not ready to fully absorb, a partnership with no limits and no forbidden zones of cooperation.

The words, no limits, were chosen precisely. They were a declaration that the relationship had moved beyond the transactional, beyond the opportunistic, beyond the carefully bounded strategic convenience it had been for the previous 20 years.

They were a declaration of intent. And what has followed has been the systematic execution of that intent in every domain, simultaneously.

Trade

Trade is where ideology becomes real: In 2020, bilateral trade between China and Russia stood at roughly $100 billion. By 2024, it had reached $245 billion, more than double in four years.

In the first four months of 2026, it grew by a further 20%. Think about what that trajectory means in concrete terms.

Every Western sanction imposed on Russia after the Ukraine invasion was designed at its core to isolate Russia from the global economy, to make the cost of the war so economically unbearable that Moscow would eventually be forced to the negotiating table.

They have failed because China absorbed the economic relationship that the West was trying to destroy.

Russia now imports more than 90% of the technology targeted by Western sanctions via Chinese suppliers.

The semiconductors that were supposed to be denied to Russian weapons manufacturers are arriving in Moscow through Chinese intermediaries. The components that were supposed to be cut off are flowing through supply chains that route around Western financial systems entirely.

Nearly all trade between China and Russia are now conducted in rubles and yuan, a completely dollar-free system that both governments explicitly describe as protected from external interference.

The sanctions architecture that America spent years building has been routed around by a bilateral trade relationship that has more than doubled since the invasion began.

Energy

Now understand its most consequential long-term implications in the energy dimension.

Russia is the world’s second largest oil exporter. China is the world’s largest oil importer. That pairing is not a diplomatic coincidence. It is structural economic reality.

In December 2025, China became the first buyer of LNG from Russia’s sanctioned Portavaya plant, a move that was a direct and deliberate signal that Beijing is willing to circumvent western restrictions when doing so serves Chinese energy security.

Chinese LNG imports from Russia nearly quadrupled between 2019 and 2025.  Russian oil exports to China grew 35% in the first quarter of 2026 alone, driven in part by the Iran war’s disruption to Gulf energy supplies.

Caveat

Top on the table during Putin’s visit was the power of Siberia. To pipeline the project that would give Russia a new route to deliver gas to China through Mongolia, replacing the European market that Russia lost after Ukraine, and cementing an energy relationship so deep and so structurally embedded that no change of government in either country could easily reverse it.

For now, China did not agree to the pipeline because Beijing’s calculation is that Russia needs the pipeline more than China as the Iran War rattled the markets.

By withholding it, China maintains leverage. But Russia remains optimistic.

The 47-page declaration, the 40 cooperation agreements, the extended friendship treaty, China gives Russia everything it needs politically and symbolically, while keeping the one economic concession that would give Moscow genuine energy security for a future date.

That is not partnership. That is Beijing managing Moscow with a precision and a patience that tells you everything about who the senior partner in this relationship actually is.

Read: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/putin-xi-gas-pipeline-power-of-siberia-iran-war-.html

Security

Now, understand the military dimension, because this is the part that the mainstream press describes most cautiously, and for good reason.

China and Russia both officially deny a formal military alliance. They insist on a principle of non-alliance and non-confrontation that targets no third party.

That is the official language. The operational reality is more complex.

China has significantly expanded supplies of drone components, dual-use goods, and satellite intelligence to Russia throughout the Ukraine war.

Russia has transferred advanced military technologies, including Ka-52 attack helicopter contracts and weapons production know-how to Chinese defense firms.

Joint military exercises between the two countries have expanded in frequency and geographic scope, covering the Western Pacific, the Arctic, and the Indian Ocean in a pattern of coordination that is increasingly difficult to distinguish from genuine operational integration, even while falling short of the formal alliance structures that NATO represents.

In June  2025, the Center for European Policy Analysis documented that while China has stopped short of providing heavy weapons and artillery ammunition to Russia, a limit it has maintained carefully to avoid direct Western economic retaliation, the overall military cooperation between the two countries has deepened substantially since 2022 and accelerating.

Read: https://prismua.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04

RU-CN-Mil.-Coop.-EN.pdf

And at the May 2026 Beijing summit, Putin and Xi signed a joint declaration specifically pledging to expand military, technological, trade, and economic cooperation. That language, military and technological, is not ceremonial.

It is programmatic.

Summation

Everything becomes a commitment to a specific direction the next 40 cooperation agreements will continue to implement starting with the 47-page declaration on building a multipolar world and a new type of international relations.

They renewed the Treaty of Good Neighborliness, Friendship, and Cooperation, extending it into its second quarter century.

They committed to coordinating their positions across BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the G20, the WTO, the World Bank, and the IMF, meaning that in every institution where global rules are written and global resources are allocated, these two countries will now present coordinated positions.

Putin said bilateral relations had reached an unprecedentedly high level. Xi called them the highest level in history and held the relationship up as a model for relations between two major powers.

Seventy-nine percent of Russians surveyed by the Levada Center immediately after the summit called it a personal success for Putin.

Beijing and Moscow also launched long-term academic and cultural integration between the two countries. This is serious – 80 universities in Russia teach Mandarin, 100 institutions in China teach Russian.

This people-to-people initiative anchors all other bilateral consideration to build, not just an era of peace, but a civilization. #

Acknowledgment: My outflowing thanks go to Zara Prescott, a UK-based marketing professional @ the ASH Group and Astech Projects for providing the historiographics for the trade, energy and security implications of this article, too deep even for former diplomat like me to catch up.

   

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