Daniel Johnson on Statesmen and Nations

There is an excellent piece by Daniel Johnson on The Article which begins with an assessment of President Zelenskyy's speech to the House of Commons and goes on to highlight how democracy is performing when compared to dictatorships.

The West has a tendency to lurch between complacency and panic. For too long all parties have been complacent about the threat posed by Putin's dictatorship in Russia and Xi's in China.

But the fact that these disruptive and autocratic states are dangerous does not mean that they cannot be beaten. If the West stands up to them, we can win the new Cold War which will be in place for as long as Putin remains in power, except when, as now, he is waging a hot one. Johnson writes:

"Now, in this trial of strength, it is becoming clear that the democratic world still has the better of its autocratic adversaries.

Russia is visibly falling apart, about to default on its debts and become an outcast from the global economy, a beggar on a par with Venezuela. China, too, is for once lost for words, incapable of playing the part of honest broker due to its serial dishonesty. Suddenly “wolf warrior diplomacy” is redundant and the once and future superpower finds itself sidelined in the present. The impotence of omnipotence, once the besetting weakness of the globalised West, now condemns China to irrelevance.

Despotism no longer looks so dynamic, as the arsenal of democracy is mobilised against the Kremlin with a speed that has confounded Putin and his partners in crime. Xi, too, is damaged by association, however much he may now seek to evade his own complicity in catastrophe. Their sinister summit at the Beijing Winter Olympics, on the eve of the invasion, was the last chance to forestall the whole scheme; instead, Xi stands convicted of a joint enterprise in evil."

You can read the full piece here