The Social World

Tag: Xi Jinping

  • It feels as if Michael McFaul’s audience has long since left

    Since the end of the Cold War, politicians and commentators have been searching for a new paradigm through which to understand international relations. Notwithstanding Francis Fukuyama’s oft-misunderstood The End of History, we have tried various patterns to classify the world order, of which George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil,” first used in 2002, was among the more enduring.

    In Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder, Michael McFaul acknowledges the widespread if nebulous consensus that the challenge presented by Russia and China is a kind of second Cold War – historian Niall Ferguson has labeled America’s relations with China “Cold War II.” But McFaul rejects the easy creation of a model which is reminiscent of past conflicts, arguing that it fails “accurately [to] describe the complex, unique dynamics of our current era of great power competition.”

    While McFaul’s analysis draws on his experience as a social scientist and a historian, he also dons his “policymaker hat” to provide a solution as well as commentary. Whether one agrees with his prescriptions or not – of which more anon – for that, at least, we should be grateful. It is easy enough to lament, to use Seán O’Casey’s phrase, that “th’ whole worl’s in a terrible state o’ chassis,” but considerably more demanding to say what can and should be done about it.

    There is a touch of the straw man around the edges of McFaul’s arguments. When he explains that “China is not an existential threat to the United States or the free world,” for example, he is suggesting a position which few serious foreign policy observers hold. Indeed, it is hard to say what a truly existential threat to the US would look like – at least a foreign one. As a young Abraham Lincoln told his audience in Springfield, Illinois, in 1838: “All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge… if destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

    One current difficulty lies in characterizing the foreign policies of the Trump administration. McFaul notes, correctly, that the President, on returning to the White House, “immediately withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Accords, the World Health Organization and the UN Human Rights Council.” It is hard to think of a multilateral institution that Donald Trump likes or trusts, from the UN to NATO to the World Trade Organization. McFaul sums this up as “an even stronger commitment to an isolationist agenda.”

    But that will not quite do. President Trump authorized major air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June; he is escalating military action against drug cartels in the Caribbean Sea, declaring that the US is at war with the drug cartels and creating a Joint Task Force within US Southern Command to coordinate strikes; he has interposed himself as a “peacemaker” between India and Pakistan, Armenia and Azerbaijan and, most recently, in the Middle East. This is hardly shutting out the rest of the world and focusing on domestic concerns.

    What, then, would the former ambassador and director of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies advise the nation’s chief executive to do? McFaul advocates selective but not complete economic decoupling from China, lifting most of the tariff barriers Trump has imposed and encouraging American investment abroad, attracting Russian and Chinese scientific, technological and entrepreneurial talent to the US. He also argues that “defense is only part of a successful strategy. America needs more offense,” though it is hard to see him and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth agreeing on the implementation of that statement.

    Fundamentally, McFaul believes in international cooperation and in multilateralism, not only for America’s prosperity and security but also as a way of prying apart the ad hoc and transactional alliance which currently holds sway between Moscow and Beijing. I freely confess to being an enthusiast for informed debate and vigorous but respectful exchange of ideas, and someone with McFaul’s background should be listened to as America decides how to approach international relations.

    However, Autocrats vs. Democrats founders on two obstacles. The first is the highly personal and utterly unpredictable nature of Trump’s foreign policy. The President has few guiding principles save his own instincts and his attitudes can turn on a dime, making it very difficult to formulate any coherent kind of framework which can direct American policy. As we have seen with his wildly varying views on Ukraine and Russia, it sometimes feels as if he himself does not know what he will think tomorrow – making it a sheer impossibility for anyone else.

    More broadly, there is a feeling that American politics is not currently amenable to debate, discussion and exchanges of information. While the extent to which the electorate is polarized may be exaggerated, politicians certainly seem to have retreated to entrenched positions and debate can seem like a concession to a sworn enemy. In that respect, there is something slightly old-fashioned about McFaul’s book. He may have prepared an intellectual case and a list of detailed propositions, but it feels as if his audience has long since left, taken up arms and rushed to the ideological barricades.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 8, 2025 World edition.

  • China is holding the West to ransom over rare earths

    China is holding the West to ransom over rare earths

    China’s naked weaponization of rare earths brings to mind Mao Zedong’s “four pests” campaign, the old tyrant’s fanatical effort to exterminate all flies, mosquitoes, rats and sparrows, which turned into a spectacular piece of self-harm.

    Sparrows were always an odd choice of enemy, but Mao and his communist advisors reckoned each one ate four pounds of grain a year and a million dead sparrows would free up food for 60,000 people. The campaign, launched in 1958, saw the extermination of a billion sparrows, driving them to the brink of extinction. But the sparrows also ate insects, notably locusts, whose population exploded, and the ravenous locusts wreaked far more damage to crops than the sparrows ever did, hastening China’s descent into the deadliest famine in human history.

    Nobody is expecting a repeat of that tragedy. But the rare earth controls threatened by Beijing, which could cripple advanced western economies, could and should backfire if they finally open western eyes to the need to urgently address dangerous dependencies on China.

    Rare earths are a group of 17 elements, until recently little known beyond the chemistry lab, but vital to hi-tech industries ranging from fighter jets, submarines and satellites to mobile phones, electric vehicles, wind turbines and batteries. China controls 61 percent of the world’s mining and 92 percent of refining, according to the International Energy Agency.

    In an interview last weekend with CBS News’s 60 Minutes, Donald Trump said of the rare earth threat: “That’s gone. Completely gone.” He explained that his moves to impose an additional 100 percent tariff forced Xi Jinping to back down. In fact, his summit with Xi in South Korea produced a truce at best, and the rare earth controls are merely on hold. It’s a shaky agreement. Later in his interview, Trump claimed he had secured a window to build US (and global) resilience: “This was really a threat against the world. So the whole world has come together, I think, at our behest. And rare earths, within two years, rare earths will really cease to be a problem.”

    Sweeping new export controls would have required any company that wants to supply rare earths produced in China or which are processed with Chinese technologies – even outside China – to obtain a license from the Chinese government, giving the Chinese Communist party a veto over who uses them and how they are used.

    The dirty little secret about rare earths is that they are not so rare; they are found throughout the world, including in the US, Brazil, Australia, Vietnam, India, Greenland and Canada. Even Britain has small deposits. It is in refining – a filthy business – where China has the greatest edge, and where it tolerates high levels of environmental degradation. Washington is now scouring the globe for alternative supplies, signing deals with Japan and Australia among others.

    The European Union has vowed to break dependencies on Beijing. The European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has warned of a “clear acceleration and escalation in the way interdependencies are leveraged and weaponized.” Canada has announced a flurry of investments and partnerships, and Turkey has touted the discovery of potentially vast reserves.

    In his 60 Minutes interview, Trump appeared to take credit for much of this, boasting of the partnerships he was establishing “with Japan, with Australia, with UK, with just about everybody, frankly.” Yet his wider tariff policy is also alienating key allies. Beijing has been keen to exploit that by presenting itself as a champion of free trade, though that claim, always implausible, is being undermined globally by its aggressive exploitation of its rare earths monopoly.

    It’s hard not to conclude that western democracies sleepwalked into the rare earth crisis. The CCP has long been a master of “war by other means,” using trade, investment and market access as means of coercion, and Beijing has made no secret of its willingness to weaponize its near monopoly.


    As long ago as 2010, it slashed exports to Japan after a territorial dispute, and experts have long warned about the potential dangers. In December 2023, a scathing report from the British House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee warned: “Successive governments have failed to recognize the importance of critical minerals to the UK economy and failed to respond adequately to the aggressive capture of large parts of the market over the last three decades by China.”

    Witnesses complained their warnings were not heeded. Jeff Townsend, director of the UK Critical Minerals Association, told the committee he began raising the issue with the government in 2012 and said he had “been banging my head against a brick wall ever since.”

    Britain, warned by China of “consequences” if its proposed new mega-embassy in east London is not approved, appears to be particularly vulnerable. Rare earths are critical to the technologies of the so-called “green transition.” Attempts to gain a foothold in the rare earths industry – a key platform of the government’s much hyped “critical minerals strategy” – collapsed last month after Pensana, a mining company, scrapped plans for a refinery near Hull, England. The facility was to have processed minerals from Angola, but it is instead to be built in the US, which offered more support.

    China’s rare earth controls go far further than any coercive measures it has taken before. Unlike the often petulant boycotts and bans that characterised past Chinese efforts at punishing countries or companies deemed to have caused offense, China has put in place a systematic licensing system that can be calibrated and targeted at will. It framed its rare earth controls as a matter of “national security,” a response to US restrictions on the sale of powerful chips used for artificial intelligence, but its sweeping nature and potential to bring western hi-tech industries to a standstill go far beyond anything imposed by America.

    They were also well prepared; over recent months the authorities gathered detailed information about how rare earths are used in western supply chains and restrictions have reportedly been imposed on the ability of factories in the industry to shift equipment out of the country and on the international travel of their executives.

    The system may become a model for other areas where the West is dangerously dependent, from critical minerals such as lithium and cobalt, so essential to “green” technology, to the tiny cellular modules that are the “gateway” component for all connected devices, where China is intent on gaining a monopoly – and even pharmaceuticals, where antibiotics and other vital drugs rely on Chinese supply chains.

    Beijing’s economic policy under Xi is explicitly built around the twin goals of self-reliance in technology and building dependencies on China. As Xi himself told a meeting of the Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission in 2020: “We must tighten international production chains’ dependence on China, forming powerful countermeasures and deterrent capabilities based on artificially cutting off supply to foreigners.”

    Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the initial disruption to energy supplies is a stark lesson in the dangers of over-dependence on a hostile state. The controls on rare earths, in effect holding western economies to ransom, should be a defining moment – if, that is, the right conclusions are drawn about foolhardy dependencies on China.

  • A rare earths deal is China’s gift to Trump

    A rare earths deal is China’s gift to Trump

    Donald Trump went nuclear. Before his meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping at an air base in South Korea, he ordered the Pentagon to test atomic weapons on an “equal basis” with China and Russia. Was Xi impressed?

    Probably not. While Russia expressed indignation, China did not permit itself to be distracted by Trump’s nuclear shenanigans. Instead, Beijing aimed to obtain economic concessions from a prideful Trump, which it did. From the outset, Xi sought to bring Trump down a peg, declaring that “both sides should consider the bigger picture and focus on the long-term benefits of cooperation, rather than falling into a vicious cycle of mutual retaliation.”

    Trump seems to have absorbed the lesson. He caved to Xi on a number of fronts, including dropping tariffs to 47 percent (still a staggering amount that is set to punish the American consumer) and dropping port fees on Chinese ships. In return, Xi promised to end his suspension of the export of rare earth minerals for a year and to purchase soybeans from America. How many? Trump said it would be “tremendous” amounts. But during Trump’s first term, China made similar vows and never followed through. The big payoff for Trump, however, was that he and Xi agreed to meet each other next year. According to Trump, “I’ll be going to China in April, and he’ll be coming here sometime after that, whether it’s in Florida, Palm Beach or Washington, DC.”

    For Trump, the prospect of a fresh visit to Asia seems to possess a new cachet. He received no presents from Xi, but was clearly impressed by the numerous gifts that were bestowed upon him in Malaysia, Japan and South Korea. The high point came at South Korea’s Gyeongju National Museum, where Trump received a replica of a tall golden crown that he was told “symbolizes the divine connection between the authority of the heavens and the sovereignty on Earth, as well as the strong leadership and authority of a leader.” Trump also received the Grand Order of Mugunghwa, a civil honor made of a laurel leaf medal. Trump was pleased, indicating that he would “like to wear it right now.”

    So much for No Kings. The truth is that Trump has long had a penchant for viewing himself in monarchical terms. Earlier this year, the White House posted on social media a fake TIME magazine cover of Trump wearing a golden crown with the headline “Long Live the King.” South Korea was simply following Disraeli’s famous adage: “Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to Royalty, you should lay it on with a trowel.” 

    When he returns to America, however, Trump will encounter a less gilded reception. His popularity ratings continue to sink, according to a new Economist poll – 39 percent of American approve of the President and 58 precent disapprove. And for all Trump’s nuclear muscle-flexing, the National Security Nuclear Administration would require about three years to resume nuclear testing and many of its employees are currently furloughed as a result of the government shutdown. With problems mounting at home, it’s small wonder that Trump enjoys cavorting abroad and collecting tribute.

  • Was Trump and Xi’s meeting really a ‘12 out of 10?’

    Was Trump and Xi’s meeting really a ‘12 out of 10?’

    Donald Trump says his meeting with Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the APEC summit in South Korea today was “amazing” and that, on a scale of one to 10, it merited a 12. Which means that on a scale for skepticism, it probably deserves a 13.

    Its biggest achievement appears to have been to at least put the trade war between the world’s two biggest economies on hold, though stock markets, excitable all week as the summit approached, opened flat this morning. Fundamental issues remain unchanged, the momentum towards economic separation will continue, possibly accelerating during the breathing space provided by an extended truce that is unlikely to last.

    The two leaders’ first face-to-face meeting in six years was relatively short, just 90 minutes, endorsing a “framework” agreement hammered out last weekend by officials in Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital. Speaking aboard Air Force One on his way back to Washington, Trump said he had agreed to halve the fentanyl-related tariff on China to 10 percent and Xi pledged to “work very hard” to stop the export of chemical ingredients for the deadly opioid. He also said they had settled a dispute over Chinese restrictions on rare earth exports and that China would start buying a “massive amount” of American soybeans.

    Mutual trade restrictions on maritime, logistics and shipbuilding industries will also be eased, at least temporarily, as will some aspects of America’s “entity list” of Chinese companies sanctioned as a threat to national security. “It was an amazing meeting,” Trump said, earlier describing Xi as a “great leader of a great country.” He said he would visit China in April and that Xi would make a reciprocal visit to the US – though this was not initially confirmed by Beijing.

    Yet on closer inspection it is all rather underwhelming. No formal agreement was signed – that will have to wait for further talks between officials. China’s restrictions on rare earths, a group of elements essential to high-tech industries from fighter jets to computer monitors, and where China has a near monopoly on refining, have been postponed for a year and not scrapped. Beijing’s licensing scheme, which was to have come into effect on December 1, goes far further than any coercive trade measures Beijing has ever imposed before and will remain hanging like a loaded gun over ongoing talks. It would effectively give the Chinese communist party a veto on the way these crucial elements are used worldwide.

    China appears no closer to getting its hands on top-end chips from America (or those made with American equipment) for its artificial intelligence industries, Trump saying that while they did discuss semiconductor exports, they did not talk about the most advanced versions. Again, it was pushed onto officials. Neither did they discuss Taiwan, according to Trump, which will come as a relief to those on the island who feared the US President might be tempted by some kind of grand bargain struck at its expense.

    China’s take on the meeting was more bland. No deals were confirmed, with the People’s Daily, a CCP newspaper, merely stating that Xi and Trump had “agreed to strengthen co-operation in areas such as trade and the economy, energy and the promotion of cultural exchanges,” noting that “both teams should refine and finalize the follow-up work as soon as possible, uphold and implement the consensus, and deliver tangible results.” The newspaper quoted Xi as saying they should avoid what he called a “vicious cycle of mutual retaliation.”

    The most difficult problem is one of trust. Chinese officials see Trump as volatile and unpredictable; meanwhile, there is deep skepticism in Washington that China will stick to any agreement. They point to the so-called Phase One trade deal struck during Trump’s first term, under which China promised but failed to buy $200 billion of extra US exports. A 2015 cyber espionage truce was also ignored, with Beijing continuing to penetrate and steal from western systems on an industrial scale.

    Both sides are unlikely to be deterred from aggressive decoupling of their economies. The US remains determined to deprive China of the most cutting-edge technologies that would give its military and security apparatus any advantage and to cut Beijing out of sensitive western supply chains more generally. Meanwhile, China has reiterated its determination to double down on technology self-reliance and secure a global lead in advanced manufacturing and technology – to which end it recently pledged to take “extraordinary measures” to achieve “decisive breakthroughs.” Perhaps the greatest value of this summit is to at least keep this decoupling process on rails and prevent it veering wildly out of control.

  • Who’s running China?

    Who’s running China?

    Xi Jinping effectively vanished in July and the first half of August. Some China watchers speculated that his unexplained absence was a sign he was losing his grip on power. But he has since reappeared and been very visible again. At the end of the month, he visited Tibet, then indulged in a high-profile, backslapping meeting with Vladimir Putin and the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Tianjin. He capped off his busy two weeks with the September 3 military parade in Beijing and a second meeting with his star guest Putin, this time accompanied by Kim Jong-un.

    So, a great triumph for the neo-Maoist leader and the new Axis of Evil? Not so fast. The lessons to draw from these three events are a sight more nuanced. Here are five take-aways from Xi’s last few weeks.

    Perhaps US intelligence has an idea about who is increasingly the real power behind the throne in Beijing

    First, Xi’s visit to Tibet was peculiar. It lasted just 24 hours. He inspected People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops in Lhasa on August 21, the 60th anniversary of Tibet’s founding as an autonomous state. He went home the next day. On his last visit in 2021 he stayed for four days. Even more curious was his absence from a visit to the biggest infrastructure project of his regime: the $165 billion Yarlung Tsangpo dam, now under construction, which will be the largest dam in the world. These kinds of projects are not only economically significant but provide plenty of opportunity for Xi’s political and military supporters to sing his praises.

    Normally a visit to a project of this importance would be a must for a general secretary. Instead, the visit was made by Xi’s greatest political enemy, Hu Chunhua. Hu is the deposed reformist “crown prince” who was once seen as a potential next general secretary of the Chinese Communist party, until he was thrown off the politburo’s standing committee by Xi in 2022.

    Yet three years after his humiliating demotion, Hu has made a surprise reappearance at the front line of Chinese politics. The PLA Daily even led with his name on its front page. After his time in the wilderness, is Hu back on the “crown prince” track? Maybe.

    Second, the Shanghai meeting between Xi, Putin and Modi was not all it was cracked up to be. Western media seemed taken with the idea that India is now in alliance with China and Russia. Nothing could be further from the truth. Modi is an alpha-male ultranationalist (not unlike Donald Trump) and he is fixed on the idea that India is the emerging dominant world power. He could well be correct. Based on current projections, India, which will have double China’s population by the end of the century, will become a bigger economy than either China or the US.

    For Modi, the meeting could be seen as a middle finger to Trump’s tariff threat if India does not stop buying oil from Russia. But it does not mean India is rolling over to China. As I wrote in The Spectator last year, whereas Russia needs “a big-brother China relationship, India sees itself as the equal of China. A subservient role would not work.”

    When asked whether India sided with the West or with Russia, the external affairs minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar has said: “I think we should choose a side, and that’s our side.”

    Noticeably, Modi did not hang around for Xi’s military parade early this month. Instead, he flew to Japan, a country with which India conducts joint naval exercises aimed at the naval containment of China. In Tokyo, he signed a deal to use Japanese, not Chinese, high-speed trains.

    Third, there was a long delay in announcing who was going to be the parade marshal on September 3. Usually, it is a job done by a full general and head of the Central Theater Command, whose job it is to defend (or control) Beijing. This time the role was given to a junior lieutenant general. The rumor is that Zhang Youxia, vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC) and the general who is supposedly leading the move against Xi behind the scenes, has taken personal control of the Central Theater Command. In a demonstration of strength, Zhang moved the 82nd Group Army – the main PLA unit that put down the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989 – into central Beijing before the parade.

    Placements at the parade also seemed to hint at shifts in power. General Zhang was on the front row with the politburo standing committee members. Even more intriguingly, state television gave a long camera pan on the arrival of Wang Yang, a former standing committee member once discarded by Xi, who is now tipped as a possible next CCP general secretary or premier. Chinese TV is always up to date on who politically is in or out.

    Fourth, although Chinese and western media bigged up the number of foreign dignitaries (26) who attended the military parade, the numbers were down from the 44 who attended in 2015. Ten years ago, attendees included Tony Blair and the former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder. No such grandees this time. Far from China being stronger, as many in the West have concluded, it is more convincingly arguable that China is more isolated now than at any time since the 1980s.

    Fifth, the September 3 celebrations also renewed speculation about Xi’s health. In Tibet he looked ponderous and unsteady on his feet. Likewise at the parade. In addition, comments were made about his puffy and reddish complexion. Some have speculated that this is characteristic of liver disease. It is a diagnosis compatible with his reputation as a heavy drinker.

    But the most revealing takeaway of all from the last month comes from America, not China. According to reports, Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of Defense, has in recent weeks been trying to set up a telephone call with General Zhang. Why would Hegseth call for a meeting with the vice chairman of the CMC rather than with his political counterpart, the defense minister Dong Jun? Perhaps US intelligence has an idea about who is increasingly the real power behind the throne in Beijing.

  • Press-pool stew

    Press-pool stew

    Looking for a good time, sweet’eart?

    Team Trump is back in Washington today after their sojourn to Britain for a state visit. The President took to the Old Country with the gusto of an American girl on study abroad: castles, royals, knights, fancy dinners, all the pageantry. “I saw more paintings than any human being has ever saw, and statues,” he gushed to the press pool on the flight back.

    He even managed to dodge the most difficult question in his joint press conference with Prime Minister Keir Starmer, flatly claiming “I don’t know him, actually,” of ousted UK ambassador Peter Mandelson, who was fired over new revelations of his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. That’s some departure from their Oval Office meeting in May, when Trump complimented Mandelson on his “beautiful accent.” Both Trump and Mandelson feature in the financier’s 50th birthday book; only Trump contests the authenticity of his entry.

    Having a less joyous time in Blighty? Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was spotted by a couple of journalists wandering around the car park of Chequers, the PM’s stately home, without security. The Secretary is shorter than you’d expect, a senior Westminster source tells Cockburn: “He really is Lil’ Marco.”

    And while Donald and Melania had the honor of being hosted by the King and Queen at Windsor Castle, the traveling press corps’ lodgings were somewhat less illustrious. They were put up in the May Fair Radisson, a hotel that often receives guests partaking in illicit activities. “Scandalized American reporters were clutching their pearls after being approached by icky pimps and drug dealers on the street outside, who kept mentioning cocaine and women,” one reporter told Cockburn. “One could barely make it across the street to Sainsbury’s for supplies without being propositioned. Prostitutes in fake furs and teeny dresses loitered in packs outside of Sexy Fish, the restaurant catty-corner to the backside of the May Fair.”

    A veteran reporter described the scene inside the hotel to Cockburn: “Worthy-looking American journalists in shirts, chinos, dad sneakers and baseball caps wandering around with their credentials, while shifty-looking clients and their female companions were slinking in for a bit of afternoon nookie. It made for an interesting crowd at the bar.”

    On our radar

    XI TIME President Trump spoke with President Xi Jinping of China this morning. In a Truth Social post, Trump said the pair had “made progress” on issues including fentanyl, trade, Russia-Ukraine and a TikTok deal, agreed to meet at APEC in South Korea and visit each other’s countries.

    AOC TIME Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s team are positioning her to run either for the US Senate or the presidency, per Axios.

    PLAN B TIME Wealthy Americans are acquiring second passports in Latin America and Asia for tax purposes, according to a report in Business Insider.

    ‘Je suis Jimmy’

    It’s all hands on deck for the world of light entertainment after ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel, an act that Hollywood is treating as if it’s part of a Stalinist purge. Panic is only increasing as rumors fly that the FCC is coming for The View next. We should be so lucky. Cockburn doesn’t really care about daytime TV schedules as long as The Young and the Restless is safe.

    Now Jimmy Fallon has mysteriously canceled public appearances, hoping that if he remains invisible, they can’t touch him. Meanwhile, Marvel actor Tatiana Maslany encourages people to unsubscribe their Disney+/Hulu/ESPN bundles, but if her woeful She-Hulk show didn’t cause them to jump ship, then this certainly won’t. Marc Maron, who’s already self-deported from his podcast, warns on Instagram Reels of a Hitlerian-level emergency. Last night Jon Stewart convened an emergency satirical episode of The Daily Show, where he dressed like Donald Trump and appeared with a White House-style gilded backdrop, begging Dear Leader to have mercy on him. “Tonight, we are all Jimmy Kimmel,” Stephen Colbert said on his own canceled show. Speak for yourself, Stephen!

    Adam Carolla, Kimmel’s former co-host on The Man Show, is probably the best person to comment on this situation. On his podcast, he called Kimmel a “very good guy and a generous guy,” even though he thinks Kimmel was “inaccurate” in the Charlie Kirk/MAGA comments that led to this mess in the first place. “I don’t like the government getting involved,” Carolla, a Republican, said. “I just want people to speak and then the ratings will do the talking.” And now, girls jumping on trampolines.

    This week in free speech

    Charlie Kirk died demonstrating his commitment to free speech and open debate. In the nine days since his assassination, America has seen its Attorney General looking to punish “hate speech” and its Vice President using a guest-host slot on Kirk’s show to encourage citizens to call the employers of people they perceive to be celebrating Kirk’s death. It’s not clear who gets to decide what constitutes a “celebration,” versus a crass joke or commentary. The employer? The government? A mob on X?

    Speaking of X, “free-speech absolutist” Elon Musk called for the streamer Steven “Destiny” Bonnell to be jailed for incitement to murder and domestic terrorism. Bonnell has made a series of unsavory comments in the aftermath of Kirk’s murder. And according to reporting from Ken Klippenstein on Substack, “the Trump administration is preparing to designate transgender people as ‘violent extremists’.” Specifically, “Under the plan being discussed, the FBI would treat transgender suspects as a subset of the Bureau’s new threat category, ‘Nihilistic Violent Extremists’ (NVEs).”

    All of this is unfolding in parallel to the investigation and charging of Tyler Robinson, Kirk’s accused assassin, as FBI and state officials in Utah uncover more details about his actions, connections and beliefs – and people online seize on them to prove the Kirk murder reaffirms what they’d already decided about it beforehand.

    Subscribe to Cockburn’s Diary on Substack to get it in your inbox on Tuesdays and Fridays.

  • How powerful is the China-Russia alliance?

    How powerful is the China-Russia alliance?

    This summer’s big security summit in Tianjin, followed by the military parade in Beijing on September 3, has been widely interpreted as a sign of a new global realignment. At a time of growing friction within the US alliances in East Asia and Europe, President Xi Jinping of China, President Vladimir Putin of Russia and about 20 leaders mostly from Central Asia have not just reaffirmed their nations’ close ties. They sought to strengthen the emerging multipolar system, which they see as a rejection of the US-dominated global order.

    This idea is hardly new. Three decades ago – when the bipolar Cold War gave way to what the neoconservative pundit Charles Krauthammer called the “unipolar moment” – the then-leaders of China and Russia pledged to work together to limit American power and influence in the world.

    When Boris Yeltsin visited Beijing in April 1996, the rhetoric on both the Russian and Chinese sides was extraordinarily blunt. The joint communiqué of that visit, signed by Yeltsin and Jiang Zemin, all but branded America a threat to international peace: “The world is far from being tranquil. Hegemonism, power politics and repeated imposition of pressures on other countries have continued to occur. Bloc politics has taken up new manifestations.” A year later, during a five-day summit in Moscow in April 1997, Yeltsin and Jiang signed a “Joint Declaration on the Multipolar World and a New World Order,” which stated: “No country should seek hegemony, practice power politics, or monopolize international affairs.” It was clearly alluding to US predominance in global affairs. Citing the end of the Cold War, the declaration called for promotion of “multipolarization of the world and establishment of a new international order.”

    Once bitter rivals, Moscow and Beijing were united by their fear of Washington’s interference in their domestic politics for purposes of promoting democracy as well as its plans to expand NATO toward Russia’s borders and reaffirm its alliance system across East Asia. These developments reflected the belief in Washington that, having just won a great victory which left the US as the sole great power on the planet, America should exploit its primacy to shape the world in its own interests. “Some are pushing toward a world with one center,” Yeltsin said. “We want the world to be multipolar, to have several focal points. These will form the basis for a new world order.”

    Former US cabinet secretary James R. Schlesinger caught the significance of the prevailing mood in 1997 when he cited “the historic tendency” of rival powers – in this case, China and Russia – to “cut a leader down to size.” The logic was clear: if a great power tries to achieve global hegemony, other states will feel threatened and combine against it. Intriguingly, Washington at the time welcomed the growing closeness between China and Russia. President Bill Clinton described the development as “positive,” saying: “I don’t think we should approach these things with paranoia.”

    There are limits to even US power, especially when Washington spends more servicing its debt than on defense

    From today’s perspective, such remarks appear Pollyannaish. Back in the 1990s, however, neither Russia nor China was able to challenge American military supremacy because Russia, which succeeded the mighty Soviet Union, was militarily weak relative to the United States – as was China. Given American dominance, neither Moscow nor Beijing could afford to alienate Washington, especially since they were both increasingly dependent on western trade and investment. These were the salad days of America’s “unipolar moment.”

    But it was just a moment. Before the 1990s were over, challengers began to appear. Moscow began moving toward Beijing after Russia’s honeymoon with the West ended over the decision to expand NATO eastwards, which united Moscow’s diverse political factions unlike any other issue. Even Western Europe, resentful of its dependence on Uncle Sam during the 45 years of Cold War, set out to make itself an equal of the US. For instance, when fighting broke out in Yugoslavia in 1991, Jacques Delors, then president of the European Commission, declared: “We do not interfere in American affairs. We hope they will have enough respect not to interfere in ours.” A few years later, after Europe had failed to end the wars in the Balkans, Brussels called on the US to intervene and stop the fighting.

    Three decades later, Europe remains disturbingly dependent on the US for security, but the efforts of Russia and China to create a more multipolar world have succeeded and have altered America’s position in the global balance of power. Although Russia is the weakest of the three great powers, it has made clear with its brutal invasion of Ukraine that it will not tolerate a western bulwark on its border.

    China, on the other hand, is a rising great power that is determined to challenge US preeminence. By converting its economic power into miliary might, Beijing is increasingly imposing its influence across East Asia to ensure its future security. For the Chinese Communist party, a sphere of influence is a badge of great-power status. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s doubling of tariffs on Indian goods to 50 percent appears to have driven New Delhi into the arms of the Chinese.

    But for all the talk of a new global realignment in Beijing, there is a danger in overstating. The US remains the most powerful economic and military power whereas China and Russia have their fair share of serious problems. Moreover, both still have reasons to forge closer relations with Washington. Moscow wants to end crippling sanctions while Beijing seeks a reduction of US tariffs. Nonetheless, the days of unipolarity, where the US could maintain a large military footprint in almost every region of the world, are long gone. There are limits to even US power, especially when Washington spends more servicing its debt than on defense.

    In a multipolar world, it makes strategic sense for the US to place less emphasis on Europe and the Middle East and instead fully pivot toward East Asia. Keeping China’s regional ambitions in check is in America’s national interest. The US cannot afford to be the global policeman, but it can and should be heavily engaged in the region that is of the greatest strategic importance: East Asia.

    Read David Whitehouse on the coming space wars in this issue.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.

  • China intends to set the rules of a new world order

    China intends to set the rules of a new world order

    Beijing gave us a glimpse of the future this week. Across Tiananmen Square rolled column after column of tanks, missile launchers and robot dogs. Above, sleek new J-35 stealth fighters cut through the smog, together with drones and surveillance aircraft. The centerpiece was unmistakable: gleaming hypersonic and ballistic missiles, designed to extend China’s military reach across continents. Reviewing all this was Xi Jinping, flanked by Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. It was military theatre, yes. But it was also a declaration: China is no longer just a regional power. It intends to set the rules of a new world order.

    This was no isolated spectacle. It was the third act in a carefully choreographed summer. First, in July, the BRICS summit in Rio: a “Rio Declaration” with 126 commitments, called for reform that would see less Western influence and more involvement from the BRICS nations – and the general Global South – in international decision making.

    Then, in August, the China-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s largest-ever meeting in Tianjin saw Beijing reaffirm the call for a new model of global governance, one that aspired to “true multilateralism” in a clear swipe against the Trump agenda. This included plans for an SCO development bank which analysts saw as yet another move to develop an alternative payment system that could circumvent the US dollar and the power of US sanctions.

    The role of the Victory Day parade was to support Beijing’s political ambitions with a show of its military might. The post-war US-led order has long been underpinned by America being the pre-eminent military power. Now this is no longer the case (at least in terms of quantity, if not quality, given China’s lack of war-fighting experience), the premise of American global leadership and the global application of its liberal order is no longer secure.

    Overall, the message to the world of the last few months is clear: the center of gravity is shifting to Beijing.

    China and Russia, supported by other authoritarian states, are now attempting to build what might be called a Counter-Alignment: an alternative set of rules, laws, values and institutions underpinned by their combined power, but dressed in the rhetoric of multipolar fairness. They seek to achieve this not only through diplomacy but by harnessing technology, geography, and ideology. China’s drive to command the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the Counter-Alignment’s grip on key Eurasian trade routes, and Beijing’s cultivation of dependent states through infrastructure and digital standards all lend substance to a sovereignty-first order that challenges Western primacy.

    India’s position is the most striking. Long cast in the West as the democratic counterweight to Beijing, New Delhi has in fact been leaning into both BRICS and SCO with new enthusiasm. In Rio, Narendra Modi signed up to the bloc’s AI governance framework and echoed calls for equal rights in global rule-making. In Tianjin, he nodded along with Xi on cooperation against cross-border terrorism.

    True, he skipped the martial theatrics of the Beijing parade – unlike Putin and Kim – but the direction of travel is unmistakable. One reason is personal. Donald Trump has repeatedly needled India with fresh tariffs and treated Modi less as a partner than as a supplicant, a humiliation the Indian prime minister has not quickly forgotten. And India is hardly alone. Brazil, South Africa and a clutch of other Global South powers are embracing these Chinese-led forums, giving the Counter-Alignment a veneer of legitimacy that Western capitals dismiss as posturing but much of the developing world hails as overdue reform.

    The contrast with Trump’s own parade in Washington in June could not be starker. Ostensibly marking the US Army’s 250th anniversary, it was a brash, inward-looking jamboree: tanks parked on the Mall, fighter jets roaring overhead, a speech heavy on domestic grievance. Not a single foreign leader attended; the audience was largely red-capped supporters, not heads of state. Beijing’s extravaganza, by contrast, was outward-facing and international, with more than two dozen leaders in attendance. Trump staged a piece of political nostalgia; Xi orchestrated a global summit with missiles attached. One was a rally. The other, a manifesto.

    This all carries an uncomfortable lesson. The institutions and rules of the Western-led order – the UN, NATO, the Bretton Woods system – are being steadily co-opted, challenged and, in places, duplicated. What western politicians still wave away as talking shops, the summits of BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization are quietly evolving into something more substantial. They now produce development banks, alternative payment systems, and even draft frameworks for AI governance – the slow but deliberate scaffolding of a parallel order.

    Taken together, these initiatives form the basis of a new world system: one that borrows the architecture of the West but seeks to rewire its foundations around sovereignty, multipolarity, and Chinese leadership.

    The parade in Beijing was not simply a display of new hardware. It was a declaration of intent, a projection of power and a plea for legitimacy, delivered in front of a carefully curated international audience.

    We should recognize the deeper struggle unfolding: the fight over who writes the rules of the 21st century. Power, as history teaches us, only endures when it is coupled with legitimacy. China and Russia, with India and Brazil and others in tow, are betting they can assemble both. The West, distracted and divided, may soon find itself living in a world not of its making.

  • Putin doesn’t really want to live forever

    Putin doesn’t really want to live forever

    Rejuvenation is unstoppable, we will prevail,’ blared the editorial in the Chinese newspaper Global Times. The subject was China’s resurgence, but it looked oddly apposite in light of an inadvertently overheard conversation between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

    Biotechnology is continuously developing,’ commented Putin as the two men walked towards the podium in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square during the military parade to mark 80 years since Japan’s surrender in World War Two.

    “In the past, it used to be rare for someone to be older than 70 and these days they say that at 70 one’s still a child,” the 72-year-old Xi replied to his similarly-aged counterpart.

    “Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become, and even achieve immortality.”

    “Some predict that in this century humans may live to 150 years old.”

    This was, of course, a gift to sketch-writers, satirists and anyone looking to poke fun at Putin in particular. Putin wants to be immortal! After all, there had already been the tales of his bathing in blood from the severed antlers of Siberian red deer as a rejuvenate folk remedy, and last year Putin established the New Health Preservation Technologies research centre, dedicated to developing “technologies that prevent cellular aging, neurotechnologies, and other innovations aimed at ensuring longevity.”

    We should hardly be surprised that an aging autocrat with the means to do so would support such research. I dare say many 70-year-olds might want another 70 years, if physical and cognitive decay can be kept in abeyance.

    There is also a powerful political dimension. In a personalistic system like Putin’s, so much depends on the health of the monarch. As soon as he anoints a successor, he risks becoming a lame duck – and he also recognizes what he is still trying to deny, that there can be a Russia without Putin.

    Putin’s family, his clients and his cronies also face a potentially bleak future, given that their security and pampered lives depend on his presence. Indeed, a cynic might wonder whether New Health Preservation Technologies was also a vessel for nepotism – that acceptable form of immortality-by-proxy – given that Putin’s eldest daughter, Maria Vorontsova, is an endocrinologist working on a genetic research program to boost longevity. Besides, is this that different from those tech bros like Bryan Johnson, who spends $2 million a year in a strict regime intended to stop or wind back his metabolic clock?

    As an opportunity for a more light-hearted Western reporting, it was a gift. But it was even more appreciated by Russians, who already have indulged their subversive spirit at the expense of Putin’s efforts to mask the ravages of age. Indeed, there was for a while a fashion for posting historical pictures “proving” that he is already immortal, following the publication of photos of a Bolshevik Red Guard from 1920 and a Soviet soldier from 1941, who did in fairness resemble a younger Putin.

    But while some Western journalists have mistaken this, and separate claims that Putin has a time machine or is a clone, as evidence of his hubris and his personality cult, they are, rather, example of styob. There’s no neat way of translating this Russian word, which has its roots in “lashing out.” It is essentially fanciful conspiracy theory mobilized as a parody of some orthodoxy. It is not meant to be enjoyed, but savored for its very transgressiveness and outlandishness.

    The most infamous was the tongue-in-cheek claim that Bolshevik leader Lenin had consumed so many magic mushrooms that he had actually become one himself. In what was a seemingly serious documentary broadcast on Leningrad TV in 1991, musician Sergey Kuryokhin played the role of an historian defending his thesis with all kinds of non sequiturs and fake “evidence.” It was the last year of the Soviet Union, and the Party’s grip on culture had loosened enough for this to be possible, but strong enough that this was still deliciously transgressive.

    This seems to be how most Russians are treating the whole “Putin wants to live forever” story. (Indeed, Xi himself seemed to be treating the conversation rather light-heartedly.) If we take it too seriously, well, then the styob’s on us.

  • Don’t hold your breath for a Chinese-led world order

    Today’s vast military parade in Beijing is the climax of three days of political theatre orchestrated by President Xi Jinping, with supporting roles played by those pantomime villains Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un. The smirking North Korean and Russian dictators joined Xi to witness the People’s Liberation Army’s goose-stepping soldiers and shiny weaponry rumbling through Tiananmen Square. “Today, humanity is again faced with the choice of peace or war, dialogue or confrontation, win-win or zero-sum,”  Xi told the crowd of some 50,000 carefully selected spectators (which roughly matched the number of soldiers). He said the Chinese people “firmly stand on the right side of history.”

    Xi warned that China was “unstoppable” and is “never intimidated by bullies” before climbing on the back of an open-top car to inspect what seemed like miles of hardware lining Chang’an Avenue, warplanes flying overhead. China’s military expansion and modernization is racing ahead at a rate rarely seen in peacetime, and today’s show, reckoned to be China’s largest-ever military parade, was a showcase of some of the results, designed to throw the gauntlet down to the West.

    Western military attaches will no doubt be doing their own forensic inspections of Xi’s new kit, which included sea drones and multiple missile systems, among them intercontinental ballistic missiles designed to reach the United States. It also included cruise missiles and an array of anti-ship missiles, dubbed “carrier killers,” whose purpose is to deter American involvement in a war over Taiwan.

    It was the first time Xi, Putin and Kim had met together publicly, and in many ways it was a clarifying moment to witness as they walked shoulder to shoulder, the three protagonists of the Ukraine war. Putin, its architect; Kim, who is providing weapons and soldiers; and Xi, who is underwriting the whole enterprise through his economic support for Moscow.

    The parade, which lasted around 90 minutes, was supposed to mark the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender and the end of the Second World War. In fact, the Chinese Communist Party played only a marginal role in defeating Japan, with its rivals, the nationalist Kuomintang, doing most of the fighting. Mao Zedong cynically calculated that Japan would weaken his opponents, who could then be more easily defeated in the Chinese civil war. Mao would later confess that the communists would never have won without the Japanese invasion, going so far as thanking Japan’s prime minister Kakuei Tanaka for his “help” in defeating the nationalists, according to a memoir by Mao’s personal physician.

    Even the stars of today’s show – Xi, Putin and Kim – have deep mutual suspicions

    In the run-up to the parade, a propaganda blitz has attempted to portray the victory over Japan as a “people’s war of resistance” against Japan, whipping up a frenzy of nationalist sentiment, which has resulted in Tokyo expressing concern for the safety of its nationals in China. Last month, a Japanese women and her child were attacked in a subway station in Suzhou, one of a growing list of violent anti-Japanese incidents, which included the stabbing to death of a 10-year-old Japanese boy near a Japanese school in the same city.

    The 26 world leaders who attended the parade were mostly a familiar line-up of authoritarian faces, though they included Serbia’s Russia-friendly president Alexandar Vucic and Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico. Sharp-eyed Australians also spotted Daniel Andrews, a former Labor premier of Victoria, standing sheepishly at the back of a family photograph, with Xi, Putin and Kim to the fore. This is causing a storm down under.

    Today’s parade follows a meeting in Tianjin of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), a usually dozy talking shop, whose members include Russia, China and countries of central and south Asia. Xi used the platform to make his most audacious bid so far for world leadership. He criticized “bullying” and gave a woolly vision of a new China-centric world order to challenge the United States. The most significant images of the event were those of Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister cozying up to Putin and Xi.

    Some commentators have been quick to proclaim this week’s theatre as a seminal moment, of Donald Trump’s comeuppance, and Xi’s new world order becoming a reality. Not so fast. Wily and transactional leaders of the “global south,” while hardly enamored of Trump, are not about to ditch the American “hegemon” in favor of a Chinese one. Modi feels bruised and intimidated by his treatment by Trump but is sending a message to Washington, playing a game. His suspicions of China, with whom India fought a brief border war just five years ago, run deep and won’t be salved by Xi’s empty words at Tianjin. The SCO itself is riven with divisions; the former Soviet States of central Asia, each with big Russian-speaking populations, are deeply uneasy about Russia’s aggression in Ukraine.

    Even the stars of today’s show – Xi, Putin and Kim – have deep mutual suspicions. Putin was very much the supplicant in Beijing, bringing a host of officials with him from the oil, gas and arms industries, and even the governor of Russia’s central bank. All an expression of just how dependent he has become on Chinese support. Russia was quick to announce new deals on a much-delayed gas pipeline; China said little, since much of the detail, notably the price of the gas, has yet to be worked out.

    It’s fair to speculate as to whether Xi felt any unease today about the loyalty of the troops he was inspecting, having purged a swath of top military leaders in recent months – including the top echelons of the Rocket Force, which oversees those shiny new missiles. Today’s display, and Xi’s fiery words, certainly invoked visions of 1930s Germany, but it would be premature to proclaim the start of the new world order that China’s leader so craves.