A terrible December for dictators

Too often in the West we suffer from dictator envy, feeling jealous and a bit afraid of the power and decisiveness of today’s autocracies such as Russia and China. This month should act as a corrective for such feelings, for it has been a terrible December for dictators. This does not mean that the liberal West has triumphed. But it does mean that our chances of competing with the autocrats are better than our melancholic form of self-flagellation has led us to believe.

No one need feel sorry for Bashar al-Assad and his family, and the fact that Syria’s brutal dictator has had to swap his palaces in Damascus for humbler premises in Moscow. Let us also not feel pity for President Vladimir Putin for having to act as host to this failed leader whose collapse has exposed Russia’s own weakness, potentially depriving it of its naval and air bases on the Mediterranean.

We also need feel no sorrow for the Ayatollahs and Revolutionary Guards of Iran, who this year have seen their allies in Gaza, Lebanon and now Syria all destroyed, and the weaknesses in Iran’s own defense systems cruelly exposed. Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen can be re-armed and re-born, but the strategy of using these militias to project Iranian power and undermine the Ayatollahs’ enemy, Israel, is in tatters.

We can feel pity for the estimated 12,000 North Korean soldiers who have been sent to fight alongside Russia’s weakened army, as they are now being targeted and many may soon be killed by long-range Ukrainian weaponry. But their dictator back home in Pyongyang deserves no pity for his strategy of supporting Russia. It has gained him some money and some missile technology, but little more.

Across the “Demilitarized Zone” that since 1953 has separated North and South Korea, President Kim Jong-un has watched his democratically elected counterpart, President Yoon Suk Yeol make a fool of himself on December 3 by attempting to use martial law to control an unfriendly parliament, but Kim has little to gloat about. President Yoon’s failed coup d’etat demonstrated the strength and resilience of South Korea’s democracy.

The big question is where these December disasters will leave the global axis connecting Russia, China, Iran and North Korea as opponents of the West. Three of the four have been aggressive breakers of international law, while the real superpower in the axis, China, has tried to present itself as a rising, peace-seeking nation that stands as an alternative to the declining, hypocritical United States. Anyone who stood in awe of China and its fellow-travellers as this year began should now have had their eyes opened to the much-less impressive reality.

Make no mistake: the West has plenty of problems too. Japan has a weak government; Germany, a collapsed government; France, no government; and the United States has re-elected a president who holds America’s own allies in contempt and (like the late Silvio Berlusconi) prefers talking to Putin, Xi and Kim to having to deal with democratic governments. But with such weak opponents the West also has reason to feel optimistic about what could be achieved in 2025.

The first opportunity concerns the war in Ukraine. In military terms, both the Ukrainian and the Russian forces are exhausted. During 2024, both armies made gains: the Ukrainians took and held on to territory in Kursk, inside Russia; the Russians moved slowly forward in the eastern region of Ukraine, but despite huge casualties have succeeded in occupying only a further 0.4% of Ukraine’s territory since January 1. And now the weakness of both Russia and Iran has led to Assad’s fall in Syria.

This has greatly reduced President-elect Trump’s incentive to bully Ukraine into accepting Russia’s extravagant and unrealistic peace conditions. And it has greatly increased Putin’s incentive to weaken those conditions in the hope of avoiding further humiliations. Trump has the chance to begin his presidency by looking like a strong representative of the free world rather than someone begging autocrats for favours.

A ceasefire in the spring of 2025 could be in both sides’ interest. If Ukraine’s European allies, led by Poland, Germany, the UK, Sweden, Finland, and the Baltic States can agree to offer security guarantees and finance, which in Russia’s weakened state looks an easier task than before, there must be a good chance that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will be able to find a deal that maintains his country’s sovereignty, democracy and European future.

The second opportunity, which is more one for Europe and Japan to exploit than Trump’s self-centered America, is to improve relations with the vast, and fast-growing, parts of the world that have preferred to avoid alignments either with China and its axis or with the West. Southeast Asia, the Gulf countries of the Middle East, Africa and Latin America have all avoided supporting the West over Ukraine while welcoming money from China and Russia but not domination.

The proven weakness of the anti-Western axis means that the attractiveness of China as an alternative global leader has diminished. China’s economy remains important but is now suffering from the sort of slow growth and debilitating deflation that made Japan stagnate during the 1990s. Countries of the so-called “Global South” will not want to antagonize China nor to lose its money, but they will be more open to alternative offers from the West.

Italy’s Mattei Plan for North Africa now stands a better chance of success, especially given the regime change under way in Syria, as does Japan’s effort to provide military aid and guidance in Southeast Asia. Russia’s weakness makes it more important than ever that Europe should promote its own values and influence in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, but now with a good chance of being taken seriously. Once a new government is in office after Germany’s February elections, this new agenda can take shape, hopefully with a new confidence about the strengths of the liberal West against these fragile autocrats.

First published in English on the substack Bill Emmott’s Global View, this is the English original of an article published in Italian December 16 by La Stampa. It is republished with permission.