AUKUS is Australia's message to China that the Western alliance is strong. Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin aren't buying it

The meeting between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin proves the end of the so-called rules-based order.

The leaders of China and Russia can thumb their noses at the "order". They can boast of their friendship, strengthen their trade ties, embed their own diplomacy and seek to build their own networks of power in defiance of Washington and its allies.

They may as well be saying: Just try to stop us!

Like it or not, this is not a unipolar world, it is a multipolar world. It is not a Western order, it is a contested order — brutally contested.

Order is not pre-ordained; history shows that order follows power. So it is again.

Economically, militarily and politically the world is being pulled off its Western axis. We should not have needed Xi and Putin to provide any more proof. The "order" has long gone.

The rules, institutions and values of the late 20th century simply do not meet the challenges of the 21st century.

In truth, it was never a global order anyway — it was always a Western-dominated order, an order that favoured the West, whose rules were made and broken by Western powers.

Post-World War II it was a contest between liberal democracy and Soviet Communism. The end of the Cold War was heralded as the ultimate triumph of liberalism — the "end of history" — but it was short lived. It succumbed to its own hubris.

As Singaporean diplomat and political scientist Kishore Mahbubani said, the end of whose history?

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Watch Duration: 1 minute 11 seconds 1 m 11 s 'Dear friend': Xi praises Putin during their meeting in Moscow.

The engines of history have gone into overdrive

Mahbubani said Western minds suffered "a lot of brain damage" in the 1990s. Western leaders, he said, did not see that the triumph of the West heralded the end of the West.

History did not cease, it shifted. In China, the engines of history have gone into overdrive and Xi Jinping believes time is on his side. Is he right? The last three decades have not been great for the West.

Post Cold War, the West has been assailed from without and within. Its institutions have been eroded. Its banks have collapsed. Its social fabric has frayed.

Faith appears to be in terminal decline. Politics at its worst resembles tribal warfare. Democracy is in decline.

And a hideous wealth gap mixed with racism has fuelled resentment exploited by political populists who have often triumphed at the ballot box.

Within a decade of the Soviet flag being lowered over Moscow's Red Square, Osama bin Laden orchestrated his attack on the United States.

The 9/11 terror attacks precipitated war in Afghanistan and crucially — damagingly — Iraq.

These conflicts have drained the West, particularly the United States.

It has eroded American prestige and leadership and led some — like journalist and political commentator Fareed Zakaria — to talk of a "post-American world".

That's a far cry from 1991, when US president George H.W. Bush, crowning victory over Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War, proclaimed a new world order.

Bush was not talking about a world where big powers pleased themselves but an order where rules constrained the worst of nations.

But his son trashed his father's vision. President George W. Bush's disastrous Iraq invasion in 2003 undermined America's virtue.

The invasion ignored UN principals; then secretary-general Kofi Annan in 2004 called it an illegal war.

Together with the UK and Australia, Bush launched a war that led to what retired British senior diplomat Peter Ricketts calls a "calamitous occupation".

Writing in the New Statesman this week, Ricketts says the war "trashed the US and UK's reputation for using military power judiciously and in accordance with international law".

Former US president George W. Bush's 2003 invasion of Iraq was later described as an illegal war. ( AP: J. Scott Applewhite )

He says the war sparked "cynicism among non-aligned countries about a rules based international system increasingly seen as little more than a construct to preserve Western dominance".

The Iraq War was Western hubris writ large and it has backfired.

Philosopher John Gray, writing in the same edition of the New Statesman, says the war revealed "liberal intervention as a self-defeating project".

George W. Bush claimed the war would lead to a flowering of democracy across the Middle East. Instead, it has been two decades of turmoil, violence, terrorism, untold deaths, millions forced from their homes.

Yes, the tyrant Saddam Hussein is gone — few would cry for that. But Iraq and Syria also got Islamic State.

Authoritarians everywhere thought if the rules did not apply to America and its friends then those same rules could be broken with impunity.

Xi Jinping has claimed the disputed islands of the South China Sea and launched a crackdown — allegations of genocide - against Muslim Uyghurs. Vladimir Putin has invaded Ukraine.

Those decisions are Xi's and Putin's. The West is not to blame. But the West has to deal with the world it created. Now it is seeking to rejuvenate the old order.

Indeed, the defence of Ukraine is represented as a defence of the order itself.

Certainly, Putin has unified and strengthened the resolve of Western nations. But the West is not the world — it is only about 20 per cent of it.

India, supposedly a partner in democracy, has not joined the condemnation of Russia. Its trade with Russia has soared since Putin's invasion.

Russia is among India's biggest arms suppliers. Last year India joined China and Russia in Moscow's Vostok war games.

India and China — the world's two most populous nations — have not ostracised Russia. As journalist and writer Thomas Fazi has pointed out in the online news site Unherd, much of the world is standing on the sidelines of the Ukraine conflict.

Fazi says only 33 nations — just one-eighth of the global population — have imposed sanctions on Russia. That's 90 per cent of the world's population that has not sanctioned Putin.

And China is filling Russia's coffers, rapidly boosting Sino-Russia bilateral trade.

Yes, Fazi says, 141 countries supported a UN resolution calling for a Russian withdrawal from Ukraine. But he notes, the 32 nations that abstained account for 40 per cent of the global population.

As the world watches and waits, Australia has chosen

The world is divided. Putin and Xi have a no-limits pact. The West and allies like South Korea and Japan are rallying together.

But much of the world is watching and waiting. Hedging their bets. Where's the global rules-based order? There isn't one right now.

That doesn't mean the old notion of a rules-based order is not important. It does not mean the values of liberal democracy are not worth strengthening.

Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping shake hands during a signing ceremony after their talks at the Grand Kremlin Palace. ( Sputnik: Vladimir Astapkovich )

Those values are important to the nations for whom those values are important.

They are not important to everyone. They are not likely to constitute a 21st-century global order.

We are in a world of weight and counterweight. At best, it holds an uneasy and patchwork peace. At worst: conflict spreads.

Clearly Australia has chosen. The AUKUS deal is our message to China that the Western alliance is strong. But is it enough?

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin don't think so.

Stan Grant is presenter of Q+A on Mondays at 9:35pm and the ABC's international affairs analyst.