We should know by now that the heart of the 21stCentury Great Game is the myriad layers of the battle between the United States and the partnership of Russia and China.

Even the U.S. National Defense Strategy says so: "The central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security is the reemergence of long-term, strategic competition by … revisionist powers." The recently published assessment on U.S. defense implications of China's global expansionsays so too.

The clash will frame the emergence of a possibly new, post-ideological, strategic world order amidst an extremely volatile unpredictability in which peace is war and an accident may spark a nuclear confrontation.

The U.S. vs. Russia and China will keep challenging the West's obsession in deriding "illiberalism," a fearful, rhetorical exercise that equates Russian democracy with China's one party rule, Iran's demo-theocracy and Turkey's neo-Ottoman revival.