Moscow in 1941 witnessed a particularly impressive parade on Mayday. Besides Worker’s Day festivities throughout the old Soviet Union, a five-hour procession of two million advertising their ‘love and loyalty to Josef Stalin’ passed through Red Square. Apart from those in military uniform, youth groups, students, musicians, artists, factory workers, mothers and farmers from across the USSR carried banners reading, ‘we are ready’, ‘peace-through-preparedness’, and ‘we will sacrifice our lives for the Motherland’.

Designed to deter Berlin, visiting German defence attaché General Ernst August Köstring, his deputy Oberst Hans Krebbs, ambassador Friedrich-Werner Graf von der Schulenburg, and intelligence officer Walter Schellenberg noted new tanks and long-range guns trundling past, as well as an aerial display of 300 warplanes. Dive bombers descended from high altitude towards the densely packed square below, but above all, the spectacle was designed to impress and reassure the frightened Soviet populace, amongst whom rumours of impending German invasion rippled.

Seven weeks later, Russia found itself at war in a long, bitter struggle that concluded only on 9 May 1945. Subsequently, on 24 June 1945, Red Square witnessed the gathering of 40,000 Red Army soldiers, cavalry brigades, artillery, 38 military bands totalling 1,300 musicians, plus 1,850 military vehicles, tanks, motorcycles and armoured cars to celebrate Soviet victory. Led by Marshal Zhukhov on a white stallion galloping across the rain-soaked cobbles (some say Stalin hoped his potential rival would be unseated in the poor weather), its high point came when NKVD combat troops threw down Wehrmacht and SS banners captured in Berlin at the foot of Lenin’s mausoleum, on whose roof Stalin was saluting. This parade was to acknowledge the extreme sacrifice of 30 million, savour the perseverance of the Soviet people in defeating Hitler’s Reich, and cement the position of their leader, Stalin. Tsar Nicholas I’s old maxim of ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality’ had triumphed, albeit in new clothing.

Thereafter, Moscow’s annual victory day parades, temporarily killed off under Yeltsin but resumed under Putin, have attracted Western experts, who minutely scrutinise every passing vehicle and soldier to upgrade knowledge of their foes. It is a tradition designed to exude power. Indeed, as any visitor will tell you, Red Square is tailor-made for parades: its cobbled surface and surrounding buildings magnify and reflect the squeal of tanks tracks and thud of multiple jackboots.

Not so in Washington, DC. President Donald Trump found that Constitution Avenue failed to create the same martial atmosphere. Instead, the tarmac-surfaced and tree-lined boulevard dissipated military noise, when tanks, helicopters, bands and drones, plus 6,600 soldiers in historic and modern uniforms, celebrated the US Army’s 250th anniversary on 15 June this year, by happenstance also President Trump’s 79th birthday. Methinks that DJT was secretly aching for the Moscow version, rather than Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth’s modest 8 CH-47 Chinook and 16 UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, World War II-era P-51 Mustangs, pair of Sherman tanks and six modern M1A1 Abrams tanks that flew or clanked past spectators at a cost of $25-45 million. Some Americans baulked at even this heavy equipment in their capital, never mind the cost. Who was the parade for? As the president insisted on it, the celebrations appeared to be mostly for his benefit.

However, President Xi’s People’s Liberation Army 3 September parade in Beijing was of a different order. Designed as a follow-on from the 25th Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) annual economic summit attended by the ‘Big Four’ of Putin, Xi, Turkey’s Erdogan and India’s Modi, it is noticeable how the Turkish and Indian leaders did not stay, but headed home to Ankara and Delhi before Xi’s excessive display of hardware began to trundle through Tiananmen Square. Both Erdogan and Modi are wedded to Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), designed to link Asia with Europe, but which they see as a strategic alternative to trade routes dominated by Russia.

Ostensibly held to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, in which China lost 20 million people, Xi’s 15,000-strong military assemblage was allegedly to ‘signal that China upholds peace and will firmly defend international fairness and justice’. Really? Tell that to the Taiwanese. Just as parades elsewhere in time and place have contained important subtexts, Beijing’s had several important aims. Apart from the ‘terrible threesome’ of Xi, Putin and Kim Jong-Un in the front rank, China’s guest list advertised Beijing’s growing influence in what used to be known as the Third World, now the Global South.

There were no surprises that Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian, the Belarusian Alexandr Lukashenko, Zimbabwe’s Emmerson Mnangagwa, the Republic of Congo’s Denis Sassou Nguesso, and Cuban Miguel Díaz-Canel walked and chatted as equals with Putin and Kim. From Europe came a pair of pro-Kremlin bad boys, Serbia’s Aleksandr Vučić and Slovakia’s Robert Fico. Though Hungary’s Victor Orban visited Beijing in July 2024, he was absent for Xi’s extravaganza on 3 September.

It was puzzling that no one else came from the Americas or Africa, and the remainder of national leaders originated from the old USSR or Asia. They included those from Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan and Vietnam. From Central Asia came the presidents of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro sent fraternal greetings, and flashed his Huawei phone given by Xi, commenting that ‘neither the gringos, nor spy planes, nor satellites can intercept it’, which is surely tempting fate. Analysts will deem this line-up of rascals to be tomorrow’s trouble-makers.

What else was China’s carnival designed to achieve? It was a meeting of minds for Putin and Xi, who unusually wore worker’s suit of the kind once sported by Chairman Mao. Both modern leaders are actively revising and upgrading their national histories of the Second World War, while downplaying the wartime help received from their allies. However, with Russia and its equipment well and truly busted as a paper tiger, the show was also created for Xi to advertise his military power, both its awesome size and hi-tech appearance.

This may actually worry Putin. He must know that China and Russia are partners only of convenience, bonded by their antipathy to the West. Any day, a resurgent Beijing might shift its military gaze at Moscow, and with most Russian combat power sacrificed pointlessly in Ukraine, then what? Some, like India’s Modi, will hedge their bets and try to ride both tigers. Having lined up his potential customers, Xi’s event was also an unsubtle arms emporium, showcasing China’s latest weaponry to potential buyers, particularly those who have bought embarrassing quantities of now-questionable Russian kit, or want cut-price copies of modern Western equipment.

Should we be worried? At present, not in the slightest. The unmanned land, sea and air fleets, submarine drones, high energy laser projectors, military platforms, sensors and shooters, missiles and ladder-climbing ‘robot wolves’, designed to dazzle or unnerve observers of the 3 September display, may have been shiny and new. They are obviously more modern than those equivalents found in the arsenals of G7 democracies. However, it is important to remember that most western military equipment has been extensively road-tested under arduous conditions in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Ukraine – unlike China’s.

Remember that some may be plastic mock-up concept weapons, and that highly synchronised music, singing and marching do not an army make. Instead, realistic combat exercises, tests of joint theatre commands with integrated logistics, information, cyber and space activities, are the only true way to assess a nation’s military strength. We have seen little of this on any large scale, and China would be most unwise to indulge in an expeditionary operation against Taiwan without such preparations and rehearsals.

Featuring in the 160 aircraft flypast were three Chinese YY-20 aerial tankers, the first indigenous design of this type, but a combat capability the UK and USA have possessed for the last 70 years. Likewise, Xi has two active aircraft carriers, a third undergoing sea trials and a fourth under construction, with two more planned by the 2030s. New to China, these are warship types that navies in the West have possessed for over a century. Additionally, the People’s Liberation Navy has few carrier aircraft and no doctrine or experience in their operational use. Its air-to-air refuellers and its carriers, as with the rest of its army and air forces, are combat virgins, a fact that the spectacular 3 September parade could not conceal.

We should not tell Xi or Kim that multiple brass bands, acres of precision-orchestrated, bayonet-wielding soldiers and long columns of freshly painted tanks do not equal warfighting effectiveness. In fact, the 1941 Moscow Mayday version so lulled Stalin into a sense of false security that Russia almost lost the war. Hitler, too, had an eye for a good ceremony and polished perambulations. His Wehrmacht’s thumping triumphal march down the Avenue Foch in Paris of 14 June 1940, directly copied the route of the allied victory procession of 14 July 1919. Both events created false narratives which ultimately did neither force any good.

Perhaps the main concern was President Xi’s 3 September rhetoric. In stating that ‘Today, humanity once again faces choices: peace or war, dialogue or confrontation, mutually beneficial cooperation or zero-sum games’, it is disturbing to observe that China and its 27 friends think that, by bullying and threatening war, they will achieve their geostrategic objectives for the 21st century. President Trump caught the mood in his post to Xi on Truth Social: ‘Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against The United States of America.’ While the parade is a coded warning that the West must rearm, we should perhaps be relieved the scoundrel nations still think that big parades designed to terrify will do the job for them.