A Great Week for Tyrants

I have long asked those who decried US influence abroad whether they would prefer the alternative. It is telling that as Beijing's long-awaited flourish of soft power began, Vladimir Putin saw fit to one-up them with a display of a more traditionally Russian variety. Because this, my fine left-leaning friends, is what we now have: a China ascendant, and a Russia resurgent, and neither particularly concerned with Enlightenment pieties about the relationship of the individual to the state.

Indeed, with Russia now operating largely as a more libertine version of Saudi Arabia, while China gobbles raw materials for its mills, it is not at all clear why they should not remain happy neighbors for some years to come. Russia's traditional zone of dominion runs from the -stans through the Caucasus and up the the Baltic, while China's eyes are on the Pacific rim from Japan south to New Guinea. It seems to me a neat and easy division.