Mara Whitlock In late August, Chinese and Russian submarines ran anti-vessel and drone drills together in the Pacific under an exercise called Joint Sea 2026 — the first time either navy had folded unmanned systems into the routine, according to the Sri Lanka Guardian. No treaty required it. Beijing and Moscow have never signed a mutual-defense pact; the deepest commitment on paper is a friendship treaty due for its next five-year renewal in February 2027.
That gap — deep coordination, zero binding obligation — is the shape of the order replacing the one built after 1945. NATO's Article 5, the pledge that an attack on one member is an attack on all, remains the reference model for collective defense. Most of what is reshaping global power this year instead runs through structures built to avoid that commitment: alignments organized around specific interests and revisable at will.
Chinese officials describe the Russia relationship as "back-to-back strategic coordination"; Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has praised it precisely because it "imposes no constraints" on either country's sovereignty, per the Sri Lanka Guardian. Trade between the two hit $244 billion in 2024, roughly double 2020 levels, and grew a further 25% to $134.5 billion in the first half of 2026. Xi Jinping has kept the relationship short of formal alliance on purpose, to avoid what Chinese strategists call the "hijacking effect" of being dragged into a partner's war.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation shows the same logic taken further, with less to show for it. Belarus became its tenth member in July 2024, but expansion has diluted the bloc rather than strengthened it: its Business Council has not closed a single major deal in two decades of meetings, and its counter-terrorism arm mostly answers attacks with, in one analyst's words, "press releases expressing condolences," per Carnegie Endowment analysis. Moscow has repeatedly asked fellow members to back its foreign policy — recognizing South Ossetia in 2008, the Crimea annexation in 2014, its position at the UN on Ukraine in 2022 — and been refused each time.
BRICS has expanded fastest of all, according to the Council on Foreign Relations — though growth has widened its internal splits rather than closed them. Brazil and India resist becoming the anti-Western vehicle China and Russia want; Saudi Arabia and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia carry their own rivalries into the room. Xi Jinping skipped the 2025 Rio summit, his first absence since 2013; Vladimir Putin, wanted by the International Criminal Court, attended only by video. President Donald Trump has called the bloc "dead" while threatening 100% tariffs over any move toward de-dollarization.
Hypothesis: the common thread is entrapment-avoidance — treaty allies inherit each other's wars; network partners don't. Supporting this: Beijing frames its Russia ties explicitly around dodging that risk, and Moscow's failed attempts to bind SCO members to its own positions show what a treaty ally would have had to surrender instead. Against this: the same looseness may reflect structural weakness rather than design — the China-India rivalry and Saudi-Iran tension running through BRICS suggest some members simply can't agree to firmer terms, whether or not they'd prefer to.
NATO's own guarantee isn't immune to the pull toward flexibility. Sweden joined the alliance in 2024, and this week Geopolitical Futures published an analysis of NATO's future written from Stockholm's vantage point — datelined Gothenburg, the city where Rudolf Kjellén first spoke the word "geopolitics" in public lectures in 1899.
What to watch: whether Beijing and Moscow let their friendship treaty lapse into pure informality rather than renew it; whether BRICS survives Washington's tariff threat without a formal split at its next summit; and whether more NATO members start treating Article 5 as a guarantee worth having, but no longer one to build a whole strategy around.
