There was a gathering of the ghouls in Moscow yesterday as Russia held its own commemoration of the end of the Second World War in Europe 80 years ago.

Somewhat ironically for an event meant to mark the final surrender of a terrible tyranny, President Putin was surrounded in Red Square by some two dozen of today’s worst tyrants (among whom he can include himself) from the likes of Belarus, Venezuela, Cuba, Zimbabwe and Republic of Congo.

Pride of place went to China’s President Xi, on whom Putin has come to depend for so much as he continues to wage unrelenting war in Ukraine. The two dictators sat side by side smiling as a massive display of military might passed before them, including a contingent of crack Chinese troops and truckloads of Iranian drones.

North Korea’s very own ‘Rocket Man’, Kim Jong Un, didn’t make it to Moscow. But he paid a symbolic visit to the Russian embassy in Pyongyang with his daughter, describing Russian-North Korean relations as the ‘invincible alliance’. Putin showed how much that means to him by warmly embracing the North Korean general whose troops helped Russia take back the Ukraine-held Kursk region.

These images coming out of Moscow brought to life, in stark and symbolic fashion, the theme of the London Defence Conference which was taking place at King’s College on the Strand this week as the tyrants mingled in Moscow. This theme was that an alliance of the autocrats – most notably those of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, collectively referred to as the ‘Crinks’ – is taking shape. It represents the most serious geopolitical threat to democracy in the 21st century – at a time when the democracies are in no shape to deal with it.

The extent to which the Crinks are a de facto alliance is not widely appreciated in the West outside defence circles. But it is already operating with deadly effect in Ukraine.

President Vladimir Putin at Russia's Victory Day parade in Moscow

Thousands of Russian servicemen took part in the parade

The celebration marked the 80th anniversary of the 1945 victory over Nazi Germany

Iran has provided Russia with hundreds of Shahed-136 attack drones, used for strikes on Ukraine’s towns and cities. It has helped Russia build a massive drone factory in Tatarstan with the capacity to pump out 6,000 drones a year. Tehran has also sent Russia more than 400 Fateh-110 short-range ballistic missiles, another deadly threat to Ukraine’s urban population.

North Korea is an even bigger supplier of military hardware to the Kremlin. By last October it had dispatched 20,000 containers packed with artillery shells, short-range missiles and anti-tank rockets to replenish Russia’s stockpiles. But ‘Rocket Man’ went further than that.

He deployed 12,000 North Korean troops to help Russian forces take back the Kursk region after a surprise Ukrainian incursion. Remarkably, the huge significance of North Korean troops fighting on European soil to help snuff out a European democracy – and what that portends – still seems lost on Europe’s complacent leaders.

China has so far avoided providing Russia with lethal weapons. But its contribution to rebuilding Putin’s war machine has been immense. More than 70 per cent of the machine tools and 90 per cent of the microchips Russia is using to rebuild its defence industrial base come from China. The two dictatorships also engage in regular joint military exercises, most recently in the Gulf of Oman, with its crucial sea lanes.

China is also replenishing the Kremlin’s depleted coffers by buying more than two million barrels of Russian oil every day, accounting for almost 50 per cent of Russia’s crude oil exports and worth billions to Putin, whose regime is being squeezed by sanctions. China also obliges by taking 30 per cent of Russia’s gas exports by pipeline and over 20 per cent in the form of liquefied natural gas.

And, as if to demonstrate that the autocrats are all in it together, by the second half of last year China was also buying 1.5million barrels of oil a day from Iran – more than 90 per cent of Iran’s oil exports and as much a boon to Tehran’s empty coffers as China’s purchases of Russian oil are to the Kremlin.

The consequences of all this for Europe are terrifying.

Undeterred by the carnage Russia has endured in Ukraine, Putin is intent on building an even bigger military. His navy and air force are largely unscathed by the Ukrainian conflict. Nato’s top general says he’s restocking his army with men, weapons and ammo at an ‘unprecedented pace’.

Putin with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un last year

China's president Xi Jinping shakes hands with Putin before the military parade

In recent testimony to the US Senate, he revealed that Putin’s factories will produce 1,500 tanks this year, 3,000 armoured vehicles and 250,000 shells per month – ‘on track to build a stockpile three times greater than the United States and Europe combined’. He is creating a 1.5million-strong army, much of which would be deployed on Russia’s western front with Europe, with the active support and aid of China, Iran and North Korea.

The world is an especially dangerous place because the alliance of the bad guys is growing closer, stronger, more intimidating – just as the alliances that bind together the good guys are in disarray and threatening to unravel.

Above all, we face an increasingly united evil at the very moment that doubts are growing about the commitment of the most important democracy of all – America – to the various democratic alliances that have kept us free since the fall of Hitler’s regime eight decades ago. We are at a watershed, facing some historic choices.

Do we proceed on the basis that despite all Donald Trump’s bluster, America will remain the essential ally as we confront united and re-energised autocrats?

Or must we realise that we have to adjust existing alliances and build new ones without America’s central involvement? It would surely be prudent to reconfigure our defence and security capabilities on the basis that America cannot be relied on as she has been – and be prepared to be pleasantly surprised if that calculation proves wrong and the US is still with us.

Most of Europe’s politicians don’t get this. Complacency still stalks Paris, Berlin and London. They know Europe has to rearm but they remain oblivious to the scale and speed required. President Macron is capricious and unreliable, missing in action when it comes to rearming France. Germany’s new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is untried and untested, his accession to power this week a shambles. Only Poland, the Baltic states and Scandinavia really get it, perhaps because they are on the front line.

Keir Starmer opened the London Defence Conference with his usual mixture of robotic platitudes and petty party politics, unsuitable for such a distinguished gathering. He claimed, unconvincingly, that his minuscule increase in defence spending – rising from 2.3 per cent of GDP to 2.5 by 2027 – would strengthen our military and rebuild our industrial base.

Tellingly, he framed the benefits in terms of what it would do for what he calls ‘working people’. But the purpose of rearming is not to pander to a demographic Labour thinks it needs to be re-elected. It’s to secure the defence of the realm, which is above party politics.

His rhetoric soared far ahead of reality. The extra money for defence amounts to a mere £6billion a year after allowing for inflation – chicken feed compared with what’s needed. The ambition for 3 per cent of GDP is vague, kicked into the next parliament. There are no plans for 3.5 per cent, which experts I spoke to at the conference thought the bare minimum required to equip our military for these dangerous times.

Times in which we need to reconfigure Nato without America – or at the very least diminished American participation – to make it clear to the alliance of autocrats we will be no pushover. Times in which we will need new structures to guarantee our security, for a divided and slow-moving European Union most certainly cannot pick up the slack.

Britain, as Europe’s most formidable military power, could play a pivotal position in all this. We should be taking the lead in creating, on the back of Nato, a military coalition of like-minded nation-states: the major EU powers plus the UK, Canada and Norway. But our allies will only follow us if we lead by example, which means being serious about defence spending. Everything else is mere political posturing.