The past decade has looked good for authoritarian regimes and difficult for democratic ones. Cybertools, drones, facial recognition technology, and social media all seemed to make efficient authoritarians even more efficient and make democracies increasingly ungovernable.
The West lost self-confidence — and Russian and Chinese leaders rubbed salt in the wound, telling anyone who would listen that these chaotic democratic systems were a depleted force. And then something entirely unexpected happened: both Russia and China took a step beyond their legs.
Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and, to his own dismay, provoked an indirect war with NATO and the West.
China insisted it was smart enough to have its own local solution to a pandemic, leaving millions of Chinese people insufficiently protected or unprotected and, in effect, sparking a war with one of mother nature’s most contagious viruses: the Sars-CoV omicron mutation. -two. That led her to impose a lockdown on all of Shanghai and parts of 44 other cities, involving an estimated 370 million people.
In short, both Moscow and Beijing suddenly find themselves facing forces and systems far more powerful and implacable than they ever anticipated facing. And the battles are exposing the weaknesses of their own systems to the world and their own populations. So much so that the world now has to worry about the instability in these two countries.
Be afraid.
Russia is a key supplier of wheat, fertilizer, oil and natural gas to the world. And China is at the origin of or a crucial link in thousands of global manufacturing supply chains. If Russia is isolated from the world and China spends an extended period under lockdown, every corner of the planet will be affected. And it is no longer a remote possibility.
Let’s start with Putin. He became convinced that because his army had crushed a bunch of disorganized military adversaries in Syria, Georgia, Crimea and Chechnya, it would be able to quickly devour a country of 44 million, Ukraine, which in the ten In previous years it had been closing in on the West and was being tacitly armed and trained by NATO.
It’s been a military and economic debacle for Russia so far. But, just as importantly, the war has exposed precisely how deeply Putin’s so-called “system” is founded on bottom-up lies – everyone telling their superiors what they want to hear, right up to Putin – and drilling down, or that is, the extraction of Russia’s natural resources, enriching a few Russians, rather than harnessing the country’s human resources and empowering the many.
Putin’s Russia was built primarily on oil, lies and corruption. This is not a resilient system.
This has been evident since the eve of the war, when Putin held a televised meeting with his top national security advisers and none other than Sergei Narishkin, the head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, appeared unsure what lie Putin wanted to be told. .
Putin said that the Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk should be allowed to become independent states, and then asked his advisers to confirm theirs. But Narishkin appeared to have thought that Putin wanted to be told that the two provinces should be annexed to Russia.
As he stammered the incorrect answer, Putin, without a hint of irony, bristled and twice ordered him to “speak directly”—as if that was still possible in Putin’s Russia. It was only after Narishkin told Putin the lie he obviously wanted to hear that the president growled, “You can sit down now.”
How many Russian soldiers, watching that humiliation, would be willing to tell Putin the truth about Ukraine when the war started to go wrong? When Moscow faced adversaries in Georgia, Syria, Crimea and Chechnya, it could simply solve any problem by bombing indiscriminately.
But now, as Putin’s forces have found themselves at war with the Ukrainian army — highly motivated and with a domestic arms industry backed up with training and some of NATO’s best precision weapons — Russian decrepitude has begun to show. Russian tanks and logistical forces were torn apart in western Ukraine, turning to burning junkyard.
China is a much more serious country than Russia: it is built not on oil, lies and corruption (although it has plenty of the latter), but on the hard work and manufacturing talent of its people, led by a Communist Party that rules from the top down, with an iron fist, but is always willing to learn from the outside. Or that it was always willing in the past, but not so much more recently.
China’s economic success and the sense of pride it engendered seem to have persuaded the country’s leadership to think it could basically tackle a pandemic on its own.
By producing its own vaccines, rather than importing better ones from the West, and redirecting its highly efficient surveillance and authoritarian control system to prevent travel, carry out mass testing and quarantine any individuals or areas where the coronavirus had appeared, China bet on a “zero Covid” policy. If she could get through the pandemic with fewer deaths and a more open economy, it would be another signal to the world — an important signal — that Chinese communism was superior to American democracy.
But while mocking the West, Beijing has acted with shocking little case in vaccinating its own elderly. This didn’t matter as much when she was able to use tight population controls to stop the spread of earlier variants. But it matters now, because China’s Sinopharm and Sinovac appear to be far less effective against the micron than Western-made mRNA vaccines — although they are still effective at reducing hospitalizations and deaths.
The Financial Times recently reported, citing a study by the University of Hong Kong, that today in China more than 130 million people “age 60 and over have either not been vaccinated or received less than three doses”, which puts them “at risk greater risk of having severe symptoms or dying if they contract the virus”.
That fact led Beijing to opt for a complete lockdown of Shanghai, something that has been so poorly managed that residents are reportedly having a hard time getting food.
David L. Katz, an American specialist in public health and preventive medicine, explained to me that the problem with the kind of draconian lockdown imposed by China is that you ensure that the population develops little natural immunity from having contracted and survived the virus. So if the virus mutates globally, as it did with the omicron, and you have “an ineffective vaccine, virtually no natural immunity in the population, and millions of unvaccinated elderly people, you’re in dire straits, and there’s no easy way out.” .
You don’t play with mother nature or make political propaganda – she is relentless.
Moral: Highly coercive authoritarian systems are systems based on little information. That’s why they go blind more often than they realize. And even when the truth reaches the upper echelons, or when reality in the form of a more powerful adversary or mother nature smacks them in the face so hard it can’t be ignored, their leaders have a hard time changing course. their claims to be presidents for life are based on their claims to be infallible. And that’s why Russia and China are in trouble.
I am deeply concerned about our democratic system. But as long as we can still vote out incompetent leaders and maintain information ecosystems that expose systemic lies and defy censorship, we can adapt in an era of accelerating change.
And that’s the biggest competitive advantage a country can have today.
