TYRANTS ARE SETTING THE GLOBAL AGENDA.

resort town of Davos, where capitalism’s brightest lights and assorted hangers-on have been gathering every year for nearly a half-century. Xi is the first Chinese president to show up at Davos. The gathering this year was equal parts glum, disoriented and amazed.

In his speech, Xi’s tone was triumphant, taking care to present himself as the world’s new champion of free trade, as though the police state he oversees is not a protectionist autocracy run by a corrupt nomenklatura that has flourished primarily by exploitation of a sixth of humanity in a vast pool of cheap, captive labour, and by the beggaring of industrial workers just about everywhere else.

William Browder, the Hermitage Capital Management co-founder and human rights champion, was not so sanguine about China replacing the United States as the principal guardian as a bulwark against Chinese hegemony, has only strengthened Beijing’s hand.

The TPP is now being revived as a bulwark not against Chinese expansionism, but against American belligerence. Just because the United States has bailed from it doesn’t mean the TPP is dead. Whatever Canada does — and Canada’s economy is tied irrevocably with the U.S. — Australia and New Zealand are now proposing the American place in the TPP might as well be taken by China. Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is explicitly backing China’s admission to the TPP.

Beijing has proposed an alternative Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific, along with the Southeast Asia Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. Even little New Zealand reckons that it could handle throwing in its lot with Beijing, now that Trump’s America is devouring