Dictators in authoritarian regimes outwit divided West
For most of the Western world, 2020 will be remembered as the year democratic governments concentrated all their available resources on tackling the coronavirus pandemic. Regimes of a more authoritarian persuasion, however, have seen the crisis as an opportunity to shift the global balance of power in their favour.
Take Russia’s recent egregious behaviour. Having initially employed its considerable cyber warfare capabilities to hack into a number of Western drug companies and research laboratories it transpires Russian hackers succeeded in breaking into a range of key US government networks, including the Treasury and Commerce Departments, where they managed to acquire access to the email systems.
Moreover, the cyber assault on the US, which experts believe constitutes the largest attack on the federal government in years, has taken place against a background of increasingly aggressive Russian conduct, especially in Europe. As General Sir Nick Carter, the head of Britain’s Armed Forces, warned in his annual speech to the Royal United Services Institute, this includes Russia deploying a dozen warships and combat aircraft from Russia’s Northern, Baltic and Black Sea fleets earlier this month.
China is another authoritarian regime that has exploited the pandemic to its advantage. Having started the year facing international ostracism over its efforts to cover up the original Covid19 outbreak in Wuhan, Beijing now feels sufficiently emboldened to ramp up tensions in the Indo-Pacific region by sailing an aircraft carrier strike group through the Taiwan Strait for the first time this year. Meanwhile Turkey, where the Islamist regime of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has intensified its repression of secularist opposition groups, has taken advantage of the pandemic hiatus to flex its muscles in the South Caucasus — where Erdogan has provided Azerbaijan with military support for its assault on the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh — and the eastern
Mediterranean — where Turkey’s provocative gas-drilling activities off the Cypriot coast have provoked the European Union’s ire.
Efforts to thwart the rise of authoritarianism across the globe have not been helped by the divisions that have surfaced in the Western alliance, as the lamentable response of EU leaders to the discovery of a new strain of coronavirus in Britain has shown.
Despite repeated appeals for European leaders to combine their efforts to defeat the virus, the willingness of so many to impose draconian measures against the British people makes a complete laughing stock of the concept of European unity. The blatant attempt by more hardline member states to impose what amounts to a blockade against Britain certainly does not bode well for President-elect Joe
Biden’s hopes of reviving the Western alliance when he takes office.
Biden says that one of his key priorities will be to stem the authoritarian tide that is sweeping across the globe. To this end he wants to revive ties with key democratic allies, thereby forming an effective bulwark against attempts by countries like Russia, China and Turkey to shift the global power balance in their favour.
Biden’s hopes of forming an effective coalition to counter the authoritarian threat will be seriously undermined if countries that are supposed to be allies are willing to abandon the principle of mutual cooperation the moment it suits.
So long as profound divisions exist among the leaders of the free world, there will be no one to resist authoritarianism’s relentless march.