The liberal toolkit didn’t just fail to change the dictators. It’s now being weaponised against the West.
, the wanted war criminal Vladimir Putin was clinking glasses with his “dear friend” Xi Jinping in Beijing. It’s hard to think of a better visual to illustrate where the world is headed.
But the liberal toolkit didn’t just fail to change the dictators. It’s now being weaponised against us.. But if Russia is capable of wrecking, only one regime can remake the world in its image using a cocktail of economic, technological and military tools: the Chinese Communist Party.Even if it was naive, the globalisation project was undoubtedly humane. Helping hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese escape poverty after the policies of Mao put them there was the moral thing for us to do.
In a September essay, the head of Russia’s Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, wrote that “deep, truly tectonic changes” would allow for Russia to replace “the Western-centric” world order and its “pyramid of parasitism”. And like Lenin’s belief that “capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them”, China knows it.