Lisa Van Dusen

March 3, 2022

In his speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, 2017, three days before Donald Trump’s inauguration as America’s first authoritarian president, Xi Jinping presented himself as a calm, free-trading, globalization-friendly alternative to the chaos actor about to fill the other half of the superpower split-screen.

The democracy degrading one-two punch of Trump as a reality-show nutter in the Oval Office and a Chinese president presenting himself the same week as a kinder, gentler authoritarian portrayed a shift that had not actually happened beyond two speeches. But in an era of psychological warfare that specializes in contrast for propaganda purposes, the message was unmistakable.

“The political motivations behind Xi’s speech are not hard to discern: at a time when global leadership is in worryingly short supply, Xi offered up China, and more specifically himself, to fill the gap,” Thomas E. Kellogg wrote in The Diplomat at the time. “If the United States under President Trump is going to pull back from the world, Xi wanted to reassure his audience that China could step forward.”

As reality would have it, Trump’s role as the aspiring new world order performative lunatic who would usher out American democracy as we know it took on Norma Desmond proportions of scenery chewing, with a little help from a strategically corrupted Republican Party and a vindictive finale starring a horde of, among other thugs, out-of-work actors who stormed the US Capitol.

That attitude has captivated the world — from President Volodymyr Zelenskiy refusing to capitulate to a tyrant to citizens blocking Russian convoys to explicit signage advising incoming tanks where to go and what to do to themselves when they get there — as the country rallies to defend democracy.

As reality would have it, Xi Jinping’s pitch of a benevolent China unraveled in a spiral of coercive diplomacy, “wolf-warrior” diplomacy, hostage diplomacy and other forms of belligerence. Beijing’s cover-up of the origins of a pandemic that has killed, at this writing, 6 million people and disrupted the global economy hasn’t helped.

Into that catalogue of time- and reality-dispelled misrepresentation, enter Vladimir Putin. Trump’s presidency failed to obliterate America’s status as the democratic superpower and instead produced the — predictably besieged — pro-democracy presidency of Joe Biden. The pandemic failed to catalyze a telescoped demise of the liberal, rules-based international order some were predicting. The aspiring world order is now evidently betting that Putin’s manufactured war on Ukraine will provide the decisive blow required to irrevocably upend the status quo, in part by leveraging the same reprehensibility-rationalizing irrationality that became a Trump trademark. So, a preposterous invasion.

And, as reality would have it, Ukrainians.

Per Ukraine’s outsized representation in the realm of professional boxing, Ukrainians tend to punch above their weight. The current world heavyweight champion, Oleksandr Usyk, has joined the fight against Putin’s army, as have two-time world champion Vasiliy Lomachenko (above) and previous-champion brothers Wladimir and Vitali (from his post as mayor of Kyiv) Klitschko. “Our strongest force is the will and desire to live in a free country,” Wladimir Klitschko said this week, “and we have chosen the direction we want to go.”

That attitude has captivated the world — from President Volodymyr Zelenskiy refusing to capitulate to a tyrant to citizens blocking Russian convoys to explicit signage advising incoming tanks where to go and what to do to themselves when they get there — as the country rallies to defend democracy.

Whether that bravery comes from generations of defending a national identity and culture from a larger, predatory neighbour or from an appreciation of freedom nurtured over the three decades since independence, it’s not performative.

In a global war that pits not country against country but borderless brutality against human freedom everywhere, Vladimir Putin has now clarified those existential terms.

And Ukrainians have responded, on behalf of humanity.

Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor of Policy Magazine. She was Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.