Raffaello Pantucci

Re-posting a piece from this weekend’s Sunday Times, a slightly bigger picture piece looking at geopolitics and the decline of the west (to put it in grand terms). Have some more stuff like this in the pipeline.

Beyond this, spoke to the South China Morning Post about the Chinese government’s use of the word terrorism in the protests which was also picked up in Inkstone and the Hong Kong Post852, some old comments in the Independent on XRW terrorism were picked up in Pink News, my earlier piece on Kashmir and the impact to the UK for the Telegraph was picked up in the Hindustan Times, and you can hear me talking about daily security issues on Monocle’s briefing.

We no longer lead and all the world knows it

There is a danger that we in the west are becoming bystanders to the great events swirling around the globe. Our inability to articulate a clear response that generates a change in behaviour means a sense of impunity dominates. This shows the limits of power and the absence of leadership that exists at the moment.

Our responses to the current protests going on in Hong Kong and Moscow are the clearest articulations of this problem. Beijing and Moscow have largely behaved as they would like. From their perspective, the protests are dangerous expressions of public anger which might ultimately threaten their power. They are handling them in different ways — but this choice does not reflect their sense of concern about how the rest of world might view things but rather their own calculation of interests.

For China, the protests in Hong Kong are an irritant that merely illustrate to its own population (and large parts of the globe) the disruptive force public dissent can be. As far as Beijing is concerned, this is evidence of what happens when the firm hand of state is not allowed unfettered control. It would interpret the protests as evidence that in the ‘one country, two systems’ structure, its ‘system’ is the one that is able to deliver stability. This is a perspective largely shared in China and Asia, where the general sense is increasingly that the chaos is unsustainable.

It is not inconceivable that Beijing might decide to crack down in Hong Kong, but far more likely is that the leadership is happy to let events play themselves out. China would have a lot to lose if the world’s financial community were to conclude that Hong Kong had truly lost its special status. And the likely opprobrium after a crackdown would damage China. The constant rumble of rhetorical anger from Beijing and posturing across the border in Shenzhen is simply stoking nationalist flames at home which feed a narrative of China against the world and strengthens the leadership.

Moscow is unlikely to let things burn themselves out in the same way. We have already seen some crackdowns on protestors in Moscow and we are likely to see more. While there is lots of evidence of fracturing and tensions around Russia, there is little evidence that these protests are going to break the camel’s back. It is more likely that it will be added to the growing list of protests against President Vladimir Putin’s regime that he will ignore as he continues to rule the country as he sees fit.

In neither case is there much evidence of the west providing an ability to respond. Where we have seen response, it has been a measured one from London matched by a confusing one from Washington. The US administration’s decision to take an increasingly hard line on what China is doing to its Uighur population in Xinjiang is rather contrasted by Donald Trump’s comments that events in Hong Kong are not a concern to the United States. This reflects the president’s erratic general response to world events – where he bombastically scraps a deal with Iran and then talks about setting up a new one, where he raises expectations with North Korea and then loses interest (frustrating Chairman Kim Yong-un and leading him to carry out missile tests like a child seeking attention).

It may indeed be that these are situations in which we have few levers of power, but the stark illustration of this has wider consequences. Others are learning from this behaviour. India’s sudden move in Kashmir is one such incidence. Saudi Arabia’s more brazen pursuit of dissidents is another. Our main non-military tool of sanctions is being deployed in a manner which is not clearly delivering results – attempts by the US to target the Iranian Revolutionary Guard appear to have failed (but hurt the rest of the Iranian economy and unified the country against the west), and while tariffs are damaging China, they are also damaging the rest of the world and creating an environment in which economic warfare is now spilling over between allies.

There is of course a certain arrogance in western powers proffering the correct way for things to happen. But the current chaos has meant that moral leadership is almost inexistent and the world’s downtrodden are losing both effective spokesmen and protectors. A sad state of affairs which we seem only able to exacerbate. The likely slow collapse of protests in Hong Kong and Moscow will stand as a sad testament to this.

Raffaello Pantucci is director of international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute