The most notorious “hot mic” moment came at the height of the Cold War, when then US president Ronald Reagan declared: “We begin bombing in five minutes” before a nationwide address (which was fortunately pre-recorded, so that the warning was never broadcast). But the bizarre snatches of conversation caught in translation between the leaders of Russia and China this week have to come as a near-second.
If the question is, what do global autocrats chat about when left to make small talk, then the answer here appeared to be organ transplants and the potential they might offer for longer, if not eternal, life. As to whether the whole episode could have been fabricated for propaganda purposes, the utterly leftfield nature of the topic suggests absolutely not.
No one in a million years could have dreamed this up, even if it can be made to fit neatly into a preconception that dictatorial leaders want nothing more than to hang on to power forever, and if advances in organ donation facilitate that, then bring it on! Neither Xi Jinping nor Vladimir Putin face any practical term limits, so physical capacity, as opposed to any legal constraints, could seem their one bar to eternal power.
Either way, the overheard snippets offered a welcome distraction for the Western world from a multi-day demonstration of China’s growing potential for leading an alternative global order to the global West. With Russia essentially pushed into that bloc by what it would see as Western efforts to isolate it, even before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and the prospects for a new US-India alignment shattered by US pressure on India not to buy Russian oil, this China-led non-Western bloc is looking rather more solid now than it did even this time last week.
The massive parade staged by Beijing to show off its military might was just the outward expression of what China would surely like to project as a new reality. But two elements complicated that picture of China as first and foremost a threat to the West and arming for an epic fight with a United States in supposed terminal decline.
The first is North Korea. Kim Jong Un, making his first trip to China in six years and his first-ever appearance at such an international gathering, was seen as now being part of that bigger bloc. What is more, the pictures of the Putin-Xi-Kim troika seemed designed to project a threatening sort of unity towards the West. How threatening, though, really, is what might be seen as the normalisation of North Korea?
This was a process that arguably began with the still-controversial decision of Donald Trump in his first term to meet Kim and treat him as a legitimate national leader. That credibility all but halted North Korea’s risky nuclear attention-seeking, before the trend was reversed by Joe Biden’s ostentatious support for South Korea. To watch Kim in Beijing, however, was to see a leader doing his best to conform to the norm by wearing a smart suit, with his daughter (possibly his heir) as his plus-one. Is diplomatic acceptance, rather than ostracism, the key to neutralising the undoubted threat posed by a nuclear North Korea operating outside all international constraints?
An even more unexpected element came in the way that the United States, or Trump, to be more accurate, responded to this undeniable challenge from Xi Jinping and his guests. The US political establishment has long been hawkish in the extreme towards China as the presumed global competitor and rising power. Instead of rising to the bait and countering China’s display of strength with at least rhetorical ferocity, as Congress may yet do, Trump took a rather different tack.
In his various pronouncements, on social media and to reporters, he took a sometimes quizzical, sometimes respectful tone, while never ceding leadership points to China. To the pictures of Xi, Putin, and Kim together, he responded: “Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un as you conspire against the United States of America.” To China’s parade, he complimented Xi on the “beautiful” and “very, very impressive” ceremony, while noting that “many Americans died in China’s quest for Victory and Glory” and hoping that “they are rightfully Honoured and Remembered for their Bravery and Sacrifice!” Asked about China perhaps trying to form an anti-US coalition, he said he didn’t “see that at all”, insisting that “China needs us much more than we need them”.
The inference was that China still has some catching up to do, which is true, as it still lags behind the US in military might, and its GDP per capita is six times less than that of the United States. The lack of anger or belligerence in Trump’s responses may well prove the most effective way of countering the images from Beijing, while also leaving open the door to better relations.
The spectre of an armed clash between these two titans, which is one message that could have been taken from the military extravaganza staged by Beijing, actually seems more remote now than it did before.
