Strongman leaders are on the rise. Blame it on the West’s moral cowardice
- Christopher Johnson says double standards and hypocrisy have undercut the erstwhile moral authority of the West, leaving the door open for authoritarian rulers to strut on the world stage
A clear pattern has emerged in recent years as strident nations such as China, Russia, Turkey and Saudi Arabia increasingly exploit weakness in the doormat diplomacy of the United States, Canada, Germany, France and other Western nations losing clout on the world stage.
Machiavellian strongmen such as Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Mohammed bin Salman are taking advantage of voters’ fetish for “cute” compliant leaders: the boy wonders Emmanuel Macron, 41, and Justin Trudeau, 47; the impish media circus clown Donald Trump; and so-called progressive, “open-minded” wunderkinds such as Angela Merkel, blamed for upsetting the post-war status quo in Europe.
These hypocritical, wishy-washy Western leaders lack moral authority. They say one thing, do the other, and evade responsibility. Why should China and others respect that?
Putin has little reason to fear the West. After his post-Olympic invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, the Russian president merely had to shrug off Merkel’s pleas in a hotel room, at their meeting in 2015, then circumvent the financial sanctions. Merkel is the chief architect of doormat diplomacy. Her embrace of Muslim war victims created havoc across Europe, fuelled neo-Nazi movements, gave false hope to millions of migrants and led thousands to watery deaths in the Mediterranean, not to mention almost weekly terrorist attacks in European cities.
In Meng’s case, Trudeau has found a convenient excuse for inaction by claiming that politics has no sway over the justice system. But Canada, like the US, is selective about when it applies the “rule of law”. Like Merkel, Trudeau gave thousands of illegal migrants false hope that they could walk over the US border to begin new lives in Canada, and now his government – amid public outrage – is rounding them up for deportation. Lawmakers and police agencies have long ignored intelligence officials and cybersecurity experts’ accusations that foreigners are smuggling money, guns and opioids into Canada and hacking and ruining local telecommunications firms such as Nortel and BlackBerry Limited.
Ignorant Canadian politicians have wrongly suggested that Chinese officials probably don’t understand the workings of our democracy. In fact, Chinese increasingly travel the world and study at prestigious Western universities. Competing to build the 5G network, Huawei employs former Canadian politicians, receives tax breaks and funds research and development projects at universities.
Based in Asia since 1987, Christopher Johnson (www.globalitemagazine.com) is author of Siamese Dreams, Kobe Blue and Freedom’s Rainbow