Anti-Westernism is the secret weapon for Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin

After months of hearing US President Joe Biden declare that democracy is in mortal conflict with autocracy, China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin are launching an ideological counterattack. Last month, Xi explicitly he complained the US and its Western allies for seeking “constraint from all directions, encirclement and repression against us”. Putin undersigned a 42-page document outlining a foreign policy aimed at curbing Western “hegemony”.

Theirs is hardly a match for Mao Zedong’s fervor and eloquence speaking inaugurating the People’s Republic of China in 1949: “Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation.” Nikita Khrushchev was punch insisting that communism was more durable than capitalism: “We’ll bury you.”