Here is what we are up against -- the survival of individual rights ======== On Feb. 4, just weeks before he would invade Ukraine, Vladimir Putin went to the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Beijing. Sitting alone, the Russian president appeared to close his eyes as the Ukrainian team entered. By the end of the month, he would threaten the country’s independent existence
The Olympics wasn’t the only item on Mr. Putin’s agenda in Beijing. He held a high-profile summit meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, in which the two pledged friendship and solidarity. To sum up their vision for what such a partnership could achieve, they issued an expansive joint manifesto.
The world they sought, the statement said, would be ordered very differently than in the past, and China and Russia would cooperate with “no limits” to assume their rightful places in it. They would forge an “international relations of a new type,” multipolar and no longer dominated by the United States. There would be no further NATO enlargement, no color revolutions, no globe-spanning U.S. missile defense system, no American nuclear weapons deployed abroad. Actors “representing but the minority on the international scale”—that is, the U.S. and its allies—might continue to interfere in other states and “incite contradictions, differences and confrontation,” but Beijing and Moscow together would resist them.
The manifesto put in stark, global terms much of what Mr. Putin has pursued for more than a decade. The Russian president wants to prevent Ukraine from aligning with the West and to dominate and absorb the Ukrainian people. He hopes to fracture Western unity, especially within NATO, to stop the alliance’s expansion and to reverse its eastern military deployments. In Mr. Putin’s plans, Russia would regain an expansive sphere of influence that would at once guarantee its security needs and recognize its longstanding imperial claims. After a long period of post-Cold War decline and humiliation, his country would be strong and respected again—a great power treated as such.
In the world order to come, no one would pressure China or Russia on human rights or interfere in their internal affairs. Democracy itself would be redefined and subject to no universal standard. “It is only up to the people of the country,” the manifesto said, “to decide whether their State is a democratic one.” Russia would join with China to oppose both “any forms of independence for Taiwan” and the formation of alliances opposed to Beijing in Asia.
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