Western political leaders must re-discover their own values in 2022
The “Unipolar Moment” is a distant memory as I write this on January 6, 2022, the first anniversary of Insurrection Day. Any claim by the United States to be the world’s dominant superpower was smashed by the mob, which stormed the US Capitol in support of Donald Trump’s big lie that he had won re-election.
America is staggering into a mid-term election year without resolving any of the polarising issues ripping the nation apart. Inflation is now of greater concern to the public than the Covid pandemic, even as Omicron infection rates soar and Donald Trump is attacked by his liberation supporters for having a booster vaccine.
Republican states are mounting a sustained push against abortion rights in the hope of backing the Trump appointee-stuffed Supreme Court. A majority of Republican voters now endorse the delusion that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen.
Trump, who will turn 76 this year, looms over the Republican nomination for 2024, even as Joe Biden’s upcoming eightieth birthday saps his credibility as a candidate. Far from fighting their opponents, Democratic radicals and centrists are turning on each other, with one prominent former aide of Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez dismissing the President as “unpopular, ineffective and old as s**t”.
Biden is struggling to make good on his oft-repeated boast that “America is back” at a time when the need for a true “leader of the free world” seems urgent. Europe is in no position to represent the West. The UK government has taken the vote to leave the European Union as the cue to turn its back on its nearest allies, except, it appears, for the rising autocracies in Hungary and Poland.
President Macron is so locked into self-interest in his Presidential re-election year that he wants to demote his entire diplomatic corps for resisting his desire to cosy up to Russia. As Russia rattles its sabres in Ukraine, the new German government is paralysed by its awkward dependency on Russian energy. And, as if to symbolise political divisions in this part of the world, the EU is now demanding that it should be represented separately from NATO (to which almost all its member states belong) in talks over Ukraine.
Leaders of the West’s rival powers sniff an opportunity to consolidate their grip and to foment further mischief. As Tim Marshall noted on Reaction a few weeks ago, Russia and China are forging a Cold War-style alliance of convenience against Western Democracies. Neither Taiwan nor Ukraine have been attacked as yet; instead, Moscow and Beijing used the quietness of the holiday season for domestic repression.
Memorial, Russia’s leading human rights organisation and documenter of Stalin era crimes, was shut down. The de facto opposition leader Alexei Navalny languishes in a Russian prison, officially designated a “terrorist”.
In Hong Kong, there was a similar move against Stand News, and similar arrests and prosecutions. More than 50 civil rights organisations have now been banned in Hong Kong. After an election excluding opposition parties, the new legislative assembly is now packed with Beijing loyalists. In another move to erase historical fact, the statue commemorating those massacred in Tianamen Square was removed by night on the grounds of “public safety.”
The Unipolar moment was a generation ago when George Bush talked of a “New World Order” after the fall of the Berlin Wall. There was a widely shared consensus in the West that the rest of the world would inevitably become market democracies like us.
In Europe, this proved right up to a point. Central and Eastern European countries threw off the Soviet yoke and aspired to join the EU and NATO. Except for Former Yugoslavia, which opted for ethnic civil war and Russia, which endured kleptocracy and then autarchy.
In the Middle East, it was a delusion. The Arab Spring and Iraq and Afghanistan ultimately enfranchised Islamists with less interest in pluralism than their “strong man” predecessors.
Increased prosperity has not made China more democratic. Instead, President Xi has been made leader for life, so powerful that the World Health Organisation ducked naming a Covid variant after the Greek letter similar to his name. Duly emboldened Xi’s China is now to flexing its muscles against neighbours, including Taiwan, Vietnam and India.
The West’s response so far has been ambivalent at best. If France and Germany want better relations with Russia, it is not so long since the Tory government, then led by David Cameron, was promising a “golden age” of relations with China. Boris Johnson’s Global Britain remains deal hungry.
With his instinct for vulnerability, President Putin ended last year by demanding Western agreement to two interlocked and far-reaching treaties, in which Moscow seeks “legal security guarantees from the United States and NATO”.
The Russians want the withdrawal of NATO forces and US nuclear weapons from the fourteen Eastern European and Balkan states which became members in 1997 and a guarantee not to conduct military activity in Ukraine, Eastern Europe or Transcaucasia and Central Asia. Tellingly Moscow wants to deal with the US and NATO and ignores the EU.
Unless the West comes to terms, Russia’s explicit threat is to act militarily in Ukraine and perhaps with a pre-emptive strike with its new Zircon hypersonic missiles, which were tested on Christmas Eve.
If there are no concessions, the Kremlin will attempt to portray the West as the expansionist aggressor to its audience at home and in the rest of the world. It is straight out of the totalitarian playbook, from Hitler to Kim, and already adopted by China. How far can you push before a demoralised west pushes back?
The treaties obviously overreach but they are designed to intimidate and to spread discord on the other side. So far this has backfired – Finland, Sweden, and other directly threatened states want closer ties to the Western bloc. But President Biden, who shares some isolationist instincts with Trump as shown in Afghanistan, has already said that he wants “an accommodation” with Russia.
Optimists hope that Putin and Xi’s viciousness are signs of weakness not strength. Both men are frightened by internal unrest and hate the example set by freer societies. Both their economies are cooling, though China remains a global leader.
Both are finding hard to recruit allies, other than each other. Recipient nations increasingly identify China’s belt and road initiative as a Trojan Horse. Chinese occupation of the strategic port of Gwadar has enraged fundamentalists in Pakistan, and the mistreatment of the Uighurs could yet spark a Jihad.
As 2022 opens, the world as we know it is as much under threat from politics as it is from pollution. Putin, Xi and other autocrats are winning as the people of many places from Hong Kong to Belarus know to their cost. We in the West don’t know what to do and are turning on each other as displacement activity.
We should start by putting our own house in order. Rather than opportunistically, and sometimes admiringly, copying moves from autocrats, Western political leaders must re-discover their own values.
That depends above all on the country formally known as the only global hyperpower: the United States. A new book, “How Civil Wars Start” is a current best seller in the US. Former President Jimmy Carter says he is “afraid for democracy”.
Even his allies thought Donald Trump’s planned news conference on the anniversary of the 6th January insurrection was a mistake and he cancelled it. The Congressional Committee investigating the Attack on the US Capitol is assembling the evidence. The refusal to appear by many allies of Trump is incriminating in itself. There could still be a reckoning.
In 2022, the United States has the chance to recognise, reject and correct the road it has been going down these last few years, whoever prevails in the mid-term Congressional elections – Republicans don’t have to be Trumpers.
But if what is still the world’s most powerful and influential nation doesn’t change course, then, Hello Darkness.