The free world long ago gave up any pretense of putting muscle behind its vision of what makes a government "legitimate."
The authoritarian world, led by China and Russia, are now putting muscle behind THEIR concept of legitimacy through brute strength.
The authoritarian world, led by China and Russia, are now putting muscle behind THEIR concept of legitimacy through brute strength.
Decades ago, we could have made membership in global economic and political organizations conditional on democratic legitimacy. Want to hang with the big dogs of the postwar world? Here's a list of human rights you must respect. It's an exclusive no-dictators, no-savages club.
Instead, we pursued "engagement." We'll let the world's worst actors, its most ruthless dictators and toxic ideologies, have respected seats at the table. We'll make China's tyrants rich beyond belief, but in the process we'll infect their societies with liberalization.
And once we've engaged those ugly dictatorships and dungeon states, we'll gain the leverage to protect human rights and the "rules-based order" through sanctions. They won't dare risk their newfound prosperity by committing dastardly deeds that prompt harsh sanctions!
Obviously, that didn't work. The opposite happened: the tyrants gained leverage over US. The free world became infected with THEIR ideology. They took full advantage of "engagement" to plunder us for technology and riches, and now authoritarianism is the world's rising ideology.
Legitimacy is now defined by dictators. If your regime is useful to Beijing or Moscow, you're "legitimate," and they are working hard to weaken any possible sanctions imposed by the free world against you. If you're a problem, then boom, you're not a legitimate nation.
This applies to cultures and social groups within nations, too. Those with power decide which page of the history books "legitimacy" begins on. The whole point of Wokeness is that America's European-descended cultures are illegitimate and unworthy of respect.
Putin's crazy rambling speech about Ukraine yesterday was all about rejecting both its historic legitimacy as a nation, and the validity of its current government. Putin, as a dictator with physical power in play, will decide what page of history the Ukraine story begins on.
And thanks to globalism, China has the economic muscle to undermine sanctions to a considerable degree. It is a top, and quite explicit, goal of Chinese foreign policy to eliminate sanctions as an instrument of international affairs, especially pertaining to human rights.
The Western world's miseducated, politically correct elites are completely unprepared to deal with a new world order where ethnic solidarity and nationalism are deciding factors. They're busy trying to "fortify" democracy by harnessing authoritarianism for "enlightened" goals.
For generations, we've supposedly been "proving" that international virtue is demonstrated by explicitly rejecting our own national interest. Why, America is barely a nation at all! That's why you can trust us as business and political partners - we're totally selfless!
The authoritarian world responds that our approach makes us unpredictable, easily taken advantage of, and functionally insane as world actors. Instead, you should put your trust in ruthless tyrants who can be counted on to pursue their clearly-stated national interests.
The tyrants spent the past 30-odd years proving beyond all doubt that the new technology of the Internet is no threat to their power. It's not going to destabilize them or facilitate revolutions. No, they've harnessed that power to spread authoritarian ideals instead.
Instead, it's the democracies of the free world that look shaky, destabilized, and tottering on the edge of devastating revolt. Tyranny is strong, it makes long-term plans, it secures its interests. It understand and embraces nationalism for internal security and external power.
Democracies don't even know what their interests ARE. They can't build anything or make long-term plans. They teach their children to loathe their own nations and reject their own history. They're dissolving into ugly tribal squabbles over racial and sexual divisions.
That is the impression we need to work on changing - and it's not just an impression, it's an unfortunately reality. We need to improve both the product and sales pitch for democracy and capitalism, which are inextricably linked. Alas, we begin on the back foot. /end
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