Authors: Katy Cojuhari, Brunson McKinley – 16/10/2025
Apéro Géopolitique: “USA-China-Russia: Triumvirate or New War of Civilizations?”
Never since the end of the Cold War has the world seemed so thoroughly reshaped around three rival poles: Washington, Beijing, and Moscow. But the world today isn’t balanced by these three powers – it’s caught in a triangle of fire. The war in Ukraine drags on. In the Middle East, bloodshed continues. In Asia, the situation around China becoming more tense. Meanwhile, Greenland and the Arctic are turning into the new front line of the resource wars. At the same time, tariffs, sanctions and bans deepen the economic war. In this situation, these three big players grinding against each other, each daring the others to back down.
During Apéro Géopolitique conference Amb. Brunson McKinley – Diplomat at the State Department, Former U.S. Ambassador to Haiti, Former General Director of the International Organisation for Migration at the UN in Geneva, Zachary Paikin – Deputy Director of the Better Order Project at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington, DC and Hicheme Lehmici – a geopolitical analyst and a lecturer at the Swiss UMEF, discussed the question: is a new world order will be born, or we are standing on the brink of a Third World War?
Apéro Géopolitique conference on “USA-China-Russia: Triumvirate or New War of Civilizations?”, was organized in cooperation with the SWISS UMEF University of Applied Science Institute at the chateau Dair on September 25, 2025.
Washinton, Beijing and Moscow poles
-What are the characteristics of the three civilizations and what are the relations between them?
Hichème Lehmici: In a few words, when we talk about a clash of civilizations, we refer to a concept advanced by Samuel Huntington in 1996, with his famous book The Clash of Civilizations. It is no longer a particularly fashionable thesis today, because if we take a historical framework and look at the great conflicts in human history, they mostly occur within the same geographical and cultural area. You can see it again and again. Ukraine and Russia share a common civilizational base, yet they are at war. Bitter fighting has also occurred between countries within the Muslim sphere, such as the Iran-Iraq war. In other words, what truly confronts one another are not civilizations themselves, but powers representing major civilizational areas, each carrying its own worldview, shaped by its history, religion, and relationship to power, borders, and sovereignty. To understand these dynamics, we must turn to the three great powers that still embody today’s dominant civilizational poles: the American, the Russian, and the Chinese.
Let us begin with the United States. There we see a population of Puritan Protestants who left a corrupted Europe that did not respect their religion and who saw in the New World a land of conquest and, above all, an opportunity to create an exceptional nation unlike any other. However, the massacre of Native Americans and the enslavement of African populations placed the United States in a messianic logic, based on the concept of manifest destiny, which explains this very American desire to impose abroad a model they regard as the model of Good, sometimes with good intentions and tangible results, such as the creation of the League of Nations, even if the U.S. never joined it, and sometimes for the worst. This Manichaean vision also finds its roots in the Puritan imagination: the first settlers identified themselves with the Hebrew people crossing the Red Sea toward the Promised Land. This biblical analogy profoundly shaped the American political psyche and explains both the moral dualism — dividing the world into Good and Evil — and the unwavering U.S. support for Israel, seen as the historical and spiritual embodiment of this idea of two “chosen peoples” united by a divine mission.
As for Russia, it is characterized by an obsessive fixation on its borders — a “frontier complex” forged by history and geography. The lack of natural boundaries, the repeated invasions — including the long Mongol domination, Napoleon’s campaigns, and Hitler’s invasion that cost more than 25 million Soviet lives during World War II — produced a deep sense of insecurity. This historical trauma, coupled with an old imperial tradition, explains the central importance of the “near abroad” in Russian diplomacy and Moscow’s hostility to NATO’s eastward expansion, seen as a direct threat to its security and territorial integrity. Russians also deeply resent what they perceive as Western contempt and rejection, especially from Europeans, since the collapse of the Soviet Union. They view it as a denial of their decisive role in defeating Nazism and as an attempt to exclude Russia from the European family. This sense of humiliation fuels a powerful desire for symbolic restoration and the reaffirmation of their great power status.
China, by contrast, is first and foremost a civilizational state, heir to a continuous imperial tradition stretching back more than two millennia to the Qin dynasty (3rd century BCE). It has always seen itself as a self-sufficient center of civilization, with no need for expansion — symbolized by the Great Wall, built not for conquest but for protection. China does not seek to dominate the world but to draw it toward itself, following a centripetal logic embodied by the Silk Roads and today’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) — the largest infrastructure project in human history, involving over 2 trillion dollars in investments across more than 140 countries. This preference for exchange over conquest was already evident in the 15th century under Admiral Zheng He, whose vast maritime expeditions — decades before Columbus — aimed at trade and diplomacy rather than colonization. After these voyages, China deliberately withdrew from the seas, consistent with its view of itself as the “Middle Kingdom,” a self-sufficient center of the world. This historical continuity explains modern China’s posture: an economic and civilizational power of attraction, rather than an imperial power in the Western sense.
A three-way balance of power
-Ambassador McKinley, many experts tell us that multipolarity means danger — three nuclear giants colliding, chaos in every hotspot. But you told us already that multipolarity could bring balance, even a kind of peaceful coexistence. Why do you see order where most see the seeds of World War III?
Amb. Brunson McKinley: I think everybody knows that for the time being we are in a kind of multipolarity, as defined by three great powers whose relationship dominates the international relations scene – The US, China and Russia. There is a lot of confusion among observers, journalists especially, who have no experience of a three-way balance of power.
Another point: the three existing superpowers all have some pretty serious internal challenges. Now you may think, as many do, that China has the momentum to become economically, politically, and even militarily the superpower of the 21st century. Don’t be so sure. The Chinese have made an interesting bet. They’ve kept a one-party, autocratic regime, while at the same time adopting capitalism and creating a large middle class, and there’s a tension there and a problem for the leadership of China. The fall of the Soviet Union was an enormous setback for Russia, from which it is still recovering. And the USA too, in its way, although by some measures is still doing pretty well, is clearly not what it used to be in terms of world dominance. If you espouse Make America Great Again, you acknowledge that there’s plenty to fix. So all three countries have big internal problems. Having said that, you don’t want to forget that the three powers are also the ones with the big nuclear arsenals – US and Russia with approximate parity around 6,000 – China fewer but catching up fast. Nuclear weapons are a force for stability. And I would argue here that the foreign policy goals of each of the superpowers are, in fact, more similar than you might think. Today, none of the three powers is overtly seeking world dominance. They want peace. They want time to work things out, both internally and as relates to the worldwide condominium. To be sure, each of the Big Three wants its own sphere of influence. The US will hold on to the Western Hemisphere as best it can. China will do its utmost to resume its traditional role as the dominant power in East Asia by pushing back against the Americans who will seek some form of containment. Russia, the weakest of the three, is in a position to play off against the other two. It follows that the Big Three will cooperate to make sure that dangerous regional conflicts do not spin out of control. They’re doing it already in the Near and Middle East.
The first truly global order
– Zach, it looks like the war in Ukraine will continue…What is the strategy of the European Union in supporting Ukraine? Are they trying to stop Russia from attacking them? Do you believe that Russia wants to attack European countries?
Zachary Paikin: Before I get to those questions, and there’s a lot to unpack there. I just want to provide maybe a little bit of a different perspective to the one provided by the ambassador just now on the question of multipolarity and whether multipolarity is actually the best framework through which to view current developments. When we think of classical multipolarity in modern European history. We think first and foremost of the 19th century and we think of the Pentarchy in particular, which were five powers that were mostly evenly matched. So you had Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and then to a lesser extent, Austria-Hungary. We don’t really have that today. And another significant difference, of course, is that global supply chains are far, far more integrated today, even than they were on the eve of World War I, which was at the high point of globalization historically up until that point. And another point that we should add is that the great powers today don’t have the ability to set terms collectively the way that they did in the 19th century.
Unlike the 19th century pentarchy, today’s powers are much less equal. The US is the only country capable of projecting comprehensive power (diplomatic, economic, military and cultural) with global range. China is clearly number two from an economic perspective, far and away ahead of other powers. So is the world unipolar, bipolar or multipolar? Since the great powers don’t have the same collective term-setting capacity they once had (and they can’t set terms collectively anyways since they have such different normative worldviews), I’m not sure that polarity is going to tell you much about how the world is ordered. Polarity is part of the realist vocabulary. Without getting into the complexities of IR theory too much, realism is usually thought of as being all about how to deal with international anarchy – and as some scholars have aptly noted, all anarchy tells you is how the world is not ordered.
A more useful framing could be that we’re entering the first truly global order. Unlike the 19th century with its imperial core and colonial periphery, the Cold War with its two largely separate international sub-orders, and the post-Cold War liberal international order that sought to set the terms of existence and engagement for everybody more or less unilaterally, we’re now finally entering the first global order of sovereign equals. The question is whether we’ll be able to all live together in a common order. Right now, there is a struggle over what the rules and norms of that order are going to be – no one is verily a status quo power in this struggle.
-How do you think the war in Ukraine will end? President Trump seems to want to leave it to the Europeans and they talk a lot about remilitarizing, but what will really happen?
Zachary Paikin: I think everybody knows what the potential endgame from the standpoint of a comprehensive settlement in Ukraine could look like. It is going to involve Ukraine not being admitted to NATO and some kind of declaration that Ukraine will not join NATO. It is also going to have to involve no foreign troops, Western troops on Ukrainian soil. Perhaps we can make some kind of exception that could be negotiated between Russia and the West in terms of, say, military engineers on Ukrainian soil, you know, for deterrence effect as tripwire. But other than that there will have to be no combat forces of the West on Ukrainian soil. In exchange for that, Russia is going to formally endorse Ukraine in the European Union. Putin has already come out and explicitly said that, actually overruling more hardliners within Moscow, saying that this is something that he would support. And then on top of that, there will be the question of reparations and reconstruction in Ukraine, and whether some of that is going to come from Russia’s frozen assets, and whether some of this is going to be tied as well to questions of arms control limitations, both along the ceasefire line in Ukraine, but also in the broader European theater.
I think the hardest sticking point right now is Putin’s demand that Ukraine needs to vacate the rest of Donetsk. It would leave Ukraine extremely vulnerable to a future Russian attack if it were to withdraw. And so, in exchange for Russia dropping that demand, perhaps the so-called Coalition of the Willing. can drop their demand to place combat forces on Ukrainian soil, and that could be deemed sort of a fair compromise. And then, of course, we have to sort out the size of the Ukrainian military and what sorts of weapons they would be allowed to receive. So that’s what a package theoretically could look like. Are we going to get there? I don’t know. The question is how you get from here to there. There needs to be political will on all sides, and the different parties need to understand that their positions can be reconciled, and the only way to do that is if the United States takes an active role in this process. The United States needs to say, you know, very clearly to the Russians, we can give you something that others cannot give you. We can give you a more favorable security environment in Europe in exchange for you dropping some of your unrealistic demands vis-à-vis Ukraine. The Europeans can’t do that because of the zeitgeist that’s plaguing Europe right now in this drive towards rearmament.
There’s also the issue of restarting arms control talks, given many of Russia’s demands in the leadup to the war had to do with the shape of Europe’s security order. Measures will be needed for the Russia-Ukraine theatre along and near the eventual ceasefire line, but also in the broader European theatre as well.
In a logic of World War III
-We saw recent provocations with drones in Poland and in Denmark. Do you think that the war in Ukraine can expand to other countries? How do you see the connection between the war in Ukraine, the war between Israel and Gaza in the Middle East and the potential conflict with Taiwan and China?
Hichème Lehmici: The United States is one of the great winners of the war in Ukraine from an economic point of view. As for the question of Europe, we must understand the evolution of things in the logic of reconfiguration of the great strategic blocks, the great geopolitical blocks of our planet. Europe is a spectator, with elites who do not seem to take into account the gravity of what is happening. I would just invite you to do one thing: I am, in quotes, trying to keep an eye on all the great strategic and political debates that we find at the same time in the United States, Russia, India and China. What I see is that on the question of war in Russia, we have been talking about the Third World War since at least 2014-2015 in all television programs, and it is a discussion that is quite common in political debates and in exchanges in Russia. This means that Russia is already prepared, not that it wants this conflict, but it is mentally prepared. We see how sanctions, instead of ruining the Russians, have had the opposite effect; that is to say, that Russia is constituted in a logic of relative war with an economy that works very well, while Europe is sinking economically… The world is changing, and if we talk about Chinese, we are still at another level, and we have seen it in the confrontation between Pakistan and India, where it was a technological shock, especially for the French, who saw how the Rafales were defeated with disconcerting ease.
These are not crises that are necessarily directly related, but in any case, they have a common point that they are inserted today in the logic of contestation. Here we have an element where we are in this logic of opposition – West vs. the rest of the world. If we take Taiwan, then you will tell me that it is a crisis that is old, that is linked to the fact that China considers Taiwan as simply China and that anyway one day or other Taiwan will rejoin China. In Gaza we are witnessing the definitive and absolute destruction of the entire Western narrative of values, the narrative of rights… We must always remember the words of Clausewitz, who said war is the continuation of politics by other means. In reality, today we are in a logic of total war.
A new Yalta order?
-What should happen so that Washington, Beijing and Moscoe find peaceful coexistence, so the New Yalta will happen?
Amb. Brunson McKinley: I don’t see that the big powers have any interest in going to war with one another. Of course, there’s plenty of room for dirty tricks back and forth. There’s plenty of room for propaganda and cultural conflicts. But to risk what each of those three countries is trying to build by going to a war which could turn nuclear, I think you can be very, very, very sure that Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump have no interest whatsoever in that, none whatsoever. There are a few little hiccups on the way to a peaceful multipolar world. Ukraine is one and Gaza is another. But these are, in the big picture and in the long term, relatively minor, and they will sort themselves out. In fact, they are sorting themselves out, 3-4 years from now, they will be sorted out.
Looking a bit more closely at the three existing superpowers, which I think are probably the only ones that we’ll have to deal with in the 21st century, Russia is the smallest of the three, but it has a key position, an absolutely key position, because tailoring its support to the other two can swing the balance of power… For now, Russia and China are joined in the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, two bodies dominated by China. But it would be an error to consider that relationship permanent. Both BRICS and SCO were conceived as rallying points against the US in the now defunct unipolar moment. I don’t think Russia wishes to be long-term dependent on the much larger and more dynamic Chinese economy. I think Russia will very quickly seek to have other options. That means deals with the United States so that it can have an intermediate position.
Russia and the US have much in common in terms of historical parallels and attitudes. They will find it easy to cooperate on Arctic issues, space, nuclear non-proliferation, countr-terrorism and the need to make sure regional conflicts are suppressed. The true face of US-Russia relations was on display at the Anchorage summit. Take the long view and you will see it clearly.
Regarding the US and China, there is of course the peer competition that has the two powers facing off against each other, but there is also a long history of mutual sympathy, interrupted to be sure during the Mao Zedong era, but very strong before 1949 and not insignificant since the reforms of Deng Xiaoping. It was the US principally that engineered Chinese access to the world market and the two great economies are inextricably interwoven. Franklin Roosevelt’s dream was to make the Pacific Ocean an American lake, with China as America’s partner on the other shore. Who knows if in the long-term FDR’s dream might not come true?