Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping meet in Beijing, Feb. 4.
Photo:
Alexei Druzhinin/Associated Press
Annus mirabilis or horribilis? The temptation to look back on a passing year for clues to a larger historical narrative is irresistible. Despite the inevitable short-termism of late-December amateur historiography, I’m not going to resist it.
For some, 2022 was the year when liberty fought back. After a decade of liberal democratic recession and the seeming supremacy of “strongmen” and their authoritarian style, the world’s top three poster boys of tyranny,
Xi Jinping
and
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
got a reminder of the limitations of autocracy. Russia’s disastrous war in Ukraine, China’s futile war on Covid and Iran’s brutal war on its own women are testaments to the evil and folly of a system in which leaders face no accountability. Their failures and cruelties—and the tragic human cost—call for humility from those in the West who have spent the past few years denouncing liberal democracy and its works.
Still, we should be mindful of that temptation of short-termism. This could prove to be not the twilight of the tyrants but a prelude to a darker era. Neither Mr. Putin, Mr. Xi nor Mr. Khamenei seems especially chastened. Only a real optimist sees the writing on their walls in 2023.
In the West, these reversals have been aligned by the voices of the ancien regime with this year’s setbacks to the supposed existential threat to democracy posed by the rise of populism. In the re-election of
Emmanuel Macron
in France, the ouster of
Boris Johnson
in Britain, the defeat of
Jair Bolsonaro
in Brazil and, above all, the various blows to
Donald Trump’s
hopes of a restoration in the U.S., the establishment sees the cultural and political revolution launched against its rule in the past decade as…
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