Putin and Xi are in trouble. How fortunes change in a world without a hegemon

Russia’s defeat in Ukraine and China’s Covid failure tell us that the outcome of the struggle between allies and enemies of the liberal global system is not preordained

How quickly geopolitical fashions change. We should get used to it. History will likely record the post-Cold War order as an interlude separating bipolar competition between the United States and Soviet Union from a looser era of great power competition. We can make out the outlines of the new order - Sino-American competition will loom large - but the precise shape and balance are as yet undetermined. The fortunes of the lead actors are anything but fixed. 

Russia’s war against Ukraine has prompted western politicians to frame the contest as one between democracy and authoritarianism. On one side stand the champions of the open, liberal and rules-based order we thought had triumphed in 1989; on the other, a new generation of “strongmen” refusing to sign up to rules they say were written in Washington. 

This is a fair account as far as it goes. But, as during the Cold War, the west’s soaring rhetoric about freedom and democracy will be tempered by a realpolitik separating potential allies and adversaries into “good” and “bad” autocrats. A better description of the new dividing line is one between status quo powers broadly content with the present international architecture and revisionist or revanchist powers seeking to overturn it. 

China and Russia fall most obviously into the second camp. So too perhaps Iran and, in its Ottoman ambitions, Turkey. Many middle-sized nations are sitting on the sidelines waiting to see who wins - witness the reluctance of so many emerging powers to take a definitive position against Vladimir Putin’s attempt to upturn the postwar security order in Europe.

That said, the advanced democracies are not alone in backing the status quo. India’s illiberal Democrat Narendra Modi has refused to criticise directly Putin’s military adventurism, but Delhi’s role in building Indo-Pacific cooperation and as a member, with Japan, Australia and the US, of a new “Quad”, has put it on the side a rules-based system. One defining feature of this new order may well be its fluidity and instability.

As for changing fashions, only yesterday the zeitgeist had it that the west was in retreat. The future belonged to the strongmen. Unencumbered by disgruntled voters and populist leaders in the mould of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson or Marine Le Pen, a revanchist Russia and a revisionist China were setting the global pace.

The analysis seemed plausible enough. Putin had massed the Russian army on the borders of Ukraine. Washington and its European allies, he demanded, must disarm Nato in deference to a new Greater Russia. The democracies looked anything but united. Germany refused to pull its head from the sand; France’s Emmanuel Macron tried and failed to play the role of international statesmen by trekking to Moscow. Even as some leaders simply refused to believe Putin would attack, western strategists predicted that Russian troops could be within Kyiv within a few days.

 Xi Jinping gave Putin his blessing when the two leaders met at the Winter Olympics. In the Chinese leader’s description, they had signed up to a partnership that “knows no limits”.  Xi’s energies this year are focused on the Communist Party Congress, which he intends will scrap limits on his rule and declare him, in effect, Emperor for life. Who knows, Xi may have thought Putin’s adventurism would keep Washington usefully distracted. Russian occupation of the former Soviet space might also be a useful rehearsal for China’s reunification with Taiwan.

None of this, of course, allowed for the possibility that the mighty Russian army would be comprehensively defeated by Ukrainian forces on the outskirts of Kyiv, that Europe would initially show surprising solidarity in following tough US sanctions, and the EU would join an impressive effort to deliver military aid to President Volodymyr Zelensky. Only the selfish prevarication of German chancellor Olaf Scholz now stands in the way of a European embargo on Russian oil and gas.

Western military analysts and intelligence types have a clutch of explanations for Putin’s failure. The famed FSB badly underestimated the resilience of the Zelensky government, while Russia’s military spooks were dismissive of the Ukrainian capacity and willingness to fight. Kremlin foreign policy analysts predicted that western sanctions would be half-hearted and military deliveries to Kyiv limited. The Russian army’s generals misread the terrain and failed to put in place effective logistics. Much of their equipment had seen better days.

If there’s a thread through all these failures it is the unwillingness of the closed circle around Putin to point up the risks. Putin rules through fear. He decided that Russia must reclaim what he insists is its historic territory. None of his nodding courtiers challenged the assumptions. Like autocrats through the ages, Putin has shut himself off from unvarnished advice. 

In dismantling the Communist Party’s collective leadership structures Xi has been heading in the same direction - and making the same mistakes. In the manner of Mao, Xi defied expert opinion to decree that China would remain Covid-free. And now the policy is visibly failing. The latest unrest in Shanghai has exposed the futility of the approach. Lockdowns, draconian travel restrictions, and mass testing have failed to defeat the virus - and delivered a severe blow to the Chinese economy. But the would-be emperor cannot back down without losing face.

The New York Times journalist Li Yuan has drawn a nice parallel with Mao’s infamous 1958 decree  that sparrows be exterminated to prevent them eating newly-planted seeds. The campaign seemed a success - until it turned out that the insects that would otherwise have provided food for the sparrows wrought much greater damage on the harvests. Putin’s war meanwhile has proved an embarrassment for Xi, solidifying the west and offering an object lesson as to how easily a rising or revanchist power can overreach itself.

Of course, we cannot be sure that these setbacks are more than temporary. The war in Ukraine is not over. Germany remains a threat to Europe’s coherence. The Russian military might yet consolidate gains in the Donbas. And Putin seems unlikely to modify his goal of destroying Europe’s liberal order. It is a fair bet too that Xi will eventually accept that, with a decent vaccination programme, Covid can be contained.

We have learned though that fortunes change. The decline of the West is not preordained. Putin has pushed Sweden and Finland to join Nato. Trump is gone, Le Pen seems set to lose and, if my sense of the mood of the Conservative party is right, Johnson is living on borrowed time. Yes, autocrats can act decisively, but the very nature of their regimes leads them into mistakes.  Fortunes, as much as fashions, change. That’s what happens in a world without a hegemon.