Democracy is not equipped to fight this new, pragmatic Axis of Evil

It is scarcely surprising that the West finds it difficult to agree on a consistent foreign policy. The world in which it operates no longer makes sense in the terms to which it had grown accustomed. Clearly, we are in the midst of a second Cold War, but the enemy of free democracies is not – as it once was – a power bloc based on ideological principle and consistent argument. In fact, it offers no argument at all.

Where once there was, at least officially, a global debate over whether capitalism or communism was the solution to the eternal dilemmas of social organisation and political virtue, there is now unbridled nationalistic chaos.

The West does not have one enemy in various guises: a single competitor for the allegiance of what used to be called the Third World. The great confrontation between liberty and its enemies is no longer a philosophical dispute about which system of government offers the better – which is to say, happier, more fulfilled – life to the greatest number of people. That’s over. Indeed, some of the forces engaged in the current contest for world domination do not even accept that this life has any inherent value at all, believing that it only functions as a moral test for the afterlife.

So what is this new force and how can it be addressed? Somehow we must adjust to the fact that we are not facing a unified enemy with an identifiable objective. The members of this anti-Western alliance are so wildly disparate and incompatible in their ideals and principles that any common ground between them can only be opportunistic which, paradoxically, makes this a much harder problem to confront.

Who – and what – are the new combatants? First there is Russia. Having divested itself, in the most traumatic and humiliating way, of its commitment to communism, it is now reinventing a medieval sense of nationhood based on a mythical historic legacy. Its territorial claims are bizarrely rooted in a fairy tale of its leader’s invention which is being used to justify military aggression. This is a notion of statehood and a motive for war which goes back to the pre-modern era when all disputes were about naked power and territory.

Then there is China, which proclaims itself as the great inheritor of the Communist idea. But China now, unlike the old Soviet Union or even the Chinese republic under Mao, is an active – indeed, hyperactive – player in global markets. Its super-capitalist enterprises compete for domination of whole production sectors in the West and its cynical policy of making loans which can never be repaid to developing countries is guaranteeing indefinite influence in an expanding world.

But Xi’s China, unlike its precursors, does not want to convert those developing countries to a belief in communism: it wants to buy them up and exploit their resources. Much of this ruthless world-beating competition is made possible by slave labour and intellectual property theft, while at the same time China is permitting the accumulation of private wealth among a rising bourgeoisie. This is not communism in any sense that Marx would have recognised. It is actually state capitalism – which is the technical definition of fascism. But the promise of China’s economic miracle contains a fatal flaw: it cannot afford to damage the economies of its Western countries too severely. If you want to succeed as a capitalist, you must not bankrupt your customers.

In spite of the profound differences in their intentions and outlook, China and Russia are presumed to be allies even though the only common ground between them is their determination to undermine the dominance of the West economically and militarily. That overwhelming imperative is, for the moment, concealing the contradictions and incompatibilities in their respective policies but this cannot last. It must come to be the long term priority of Western defence and foreign policy to expose and exploit those incompatibilities but the need to avoid the immediate traps of allowing the Chinese to dominate Western commercial markets, and Russia to threaten Nato is postponing that challenge.

Then there is the Iranian regime for which the word “medieval” is scarcely appropriate. It was the Arab and Persian world in the Middle Ages that preserved the writings of Aristotle which Europe had abandoned. Tragically, the degree of murderous repression and pathological misogyny which currently prevails in Iran exceeds almost anything in recorded history. The suppression of femaleness, which goes far beyond simply the subjection of women to male dominance, has no justification in the teachings of the Koran. It is a historical anomaly – a rejection not just of Western values but of the modern world itself. And, most to the point here, it should be alien to Putin’s newfound mission for recreating a Christian Ancient Rus. But Iran is useful to Russia because it supplies it with the weaponry it needs for its gratuitous assault on Ukraine, and it is fully signed up for its own reasons to spiritual war against the West.

Last of the quartet is North Korea which continues to exist because of the protection of its neighbour China, and by making itself useful as a source of munitions to the big players. It has divested itself almost completely of any recognisable Marxist principle and become purely a vehicle for one despotic family. Its model of inherited absolute power should have no place in a developed country but by a glitch in the historical proceedings, it survives.

So how do you devise a foreign policy to fit all these contradictory threats which have nothing in common except a hatred of freedom? The nation which should exemplify this idea of liberty – the United States – the embodiment of the 18th century Enlightenment, is so deranged that its integrity is visibly collapsing. It now faces the realistic possibility of giving another presidential term to an infantile narcissist whose absurd utterances would have ruled him out of any public office a generation ago.

It begins to look as if the way to undermine democracy is not to argue with it, but to refuse to argue. That is the one challenge which it is not equipped to fight.