The West needs a new monster, so the ‘Dragon-Bear’ has been created

Pundits love to brand Russia and China as a terrifying axis, but the myth says more about their own insecurities than about any real alliance

Say what you like about Peter Frankopan — he can spin a grand yarn. In the Financial Times this weekend, he dusted off the old silk banners of Eurasia, wrapped them around some talk of empire, and gave us a sprawling picture of Russia and China — two predators, he says, forging a new world order to keep the West awake at night.

But look closer and you see less a calm history lesson than a sermon on Western fears. That whole “Dragon-Bear” tag? You’ll never hear that from a Russian or Chinese official. It’s pure Western fantasy, a think-tank label designed to scare up budgets and keep the worry-pot boiling. Nobody in Moscow or Beijing talks about themselves like that. They see a partnership of sovereign equals — no myth, no monster. It’s the West that needs a villain, so it builds one.

Frankopan writes with polish, no question. But running through it all is one thin thread of panic: that the West can no longer fix the scoreboard. So he reaches for the ghosts of 1940, hinting Moscow and Beijing are lining up like Germany and Japan in the war years. It’s a cheap shot, and he knows it.

Strip away the fine language, and the argument is basic: these two can’t really stand each other. They’re clinging together out of fear, forced into each other’s arms by the West. That’s a tidy bedtime story for London or Washington — but it’s way too neat. It ignores what’s happening in the real world, where Russia and China are working closer not just out of convenience, but from a hard belief that the Western rulebook was never written for them to win.

They’ve said it, over and over: they’re not buying a one-size-fits-all “progress” plan stamped in Brussels or Washington. They’re tired of sermons on “democracy” from people who’ve often used that word as a club. If the world’s changing, it’s because those old frameworks are tired and cracked.

Frankopan tries to wrap the fear in footnotes. But you can see the worry showing through. He digs up 19th-century border deals, trying to smear today’s Russian-Chinese partnership as the same old bullying. That’s a neat trick, but it politely forgets the far uglier colonial record of Britain or France or America. Take away Russia and China’s anti-colonial credentials and you weaken their appeal in the global South, where memories of Western looting are still sharp.

And if the history stick doesn’t land, there’s always the gossip. Whispered experts, mystery leaks, talk of spies — anything to paint this Eurasian story as one bad day from collapse. But hoping for failure isn’t analysis. The West is rattled because, for once, it can’t divide and rule.

Sure, Moscow and Beijing have differences — nobody on either side denies it. But that doesn’t change the bigger truth: they see the last 30 years of Western triumph as a blip, not a forever state. They know the so-called “rules-based order” was drawn up by the winners of one era — and that era is closing.

What really stings, if we’re honest, isn’t pipelines or trade. It’s that these two powers think they can shape their future their own way. That they won’t have their identity written for them by a handful of Western capitals.

Nothing shows that anxiety more than the row over the Silk Road. To a Western mind, that name should stay in a museum — camels, spices, something for a school project. But to Moscow and Beijing, it’s proof Eurasia can be the beating heart of the world again, without waiting on a NATO permission slip.

So Frankopan reaches for the scarecrow — Axis, fascism, creeping evil. It’s easier to see monsters than to face up to shifting ground. But there’s no “Dragon-Bear” nightmare here — nobody in Beijing or Moscow wrote that script. That’s a Western fairytale, spun to soften the shock of losing their grip.

The truth is simpler. Two big nations, with different stories, found common ground in refusing to be told how to live by a system that still wants to run the show. If Western voices want to tell themselves it’s just a marriage of fear, fine. But out on the steppes, and in Pacific ports, another story is taking shape — one built on the right to stand on your own feet, no matter what the old empire thinks.

That’s no monster myth. That’s just history, coming home.