My Take | US and UK are far more dangerous to themselves than China
- ‘The China threat’ is a distraction and an excuse; the real rot starts from within the leading English-speaking democracies
I cannot imagine being an independent journalist and critic under former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte. Without doubt, Maria Ressa deserves every bit of her Nobel Peace Prize.
This week, she made some insightful observations about the state of democracy in the world today. Speaking at a democracy forum in Jakarta, she said: “If we keep electing authoritarian leaders through democratic elections and if this trend continues, authoritarian leaders will destroy democracy from within.”
Well, that’s one way of looking at democracy.
I think it’s generally true that democracy dies from within, rather than being undermined from without. Bear in mind that the Western democracies and their allies are the richest and militarily the most powerful in the history of the world, so the idea that anyone from outside – China? – could threaten them is basically absurd.
But one particularly bad sign today is that the most powerful democracies have a chronic inability to admit the existence of the rot from within, and prefer to blame the threat outside, which is at best a distraction, at worst a delusion.
