The rehabilitation of Putin

More worrying was the presence of other leaders who are meant to be friends of the west. The Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, an important ally in Asia, attended the summit and was seen embracing Vladimir Putin. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was also there, the president of Turkey, a Nato member state.

The following day, Putin travelled with Xi and Kim to Beijing, where he watched on as China showed off its latest military technology in a grand parade. In an address to the crowd of more than 50,000, Xi said: “Today, humanity is again faced with the choice of peace or war, dialogue or confrontation, win-win or zero-sum.”

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Let’s take a moment to unpack all of that. China’s brutal dictator, who happens to run the world’s second-largest economy, a powerful military, a growing stockpile of nuclear weapons, major parts of the global supply chain and who controls access to critical minerals, is lecturing the rest of the world about global peace. He is doing so while standing alongside his closest international ally Vladimir Putin, a man who has invaded Ukraine and is currently trying to dismantle its government and steal its sovereign territory. 

Xi has used China’s economic and geopolitical might, as outlined above, to bring other world leaders – including countries that should be Western allies – into Putin’s orbit. What we are watching is an effort to rehabilitate Putin, one of the most gruesome monsters of a generation, to bring him back into the international order. 

There is an alternative universe in which Xi would think twice before doing this. For the past few decades, China has tried to present itself to the West as a solution, rather than a problem – as the nation that can provide cheap goods, and use its influence to achieve shared geopolitical objectives. It was hard to imagine a world in which Putin would become an outright pariah. However, now, with such limited pushback from the US, it is clearly worth it for China to reintegrate such an important ally into the global community. 

Here, we return to Trump’s erratic and authoritarian behaviour back in America. Whatabouttery, the political strategy of deflecting blame from oneself by pointing out the hypocritical flaws of someone else, is pretty easy for China at the moment. 

Trump’s crackdowns on protestors, rounding up of migrants, assaults on journalists and all the rest makes it easy for China to brush off criticism of its own human rights practices. 

But when Trump invited Putin onto American soil and rolled out a red carpet, how can he criticise any other leader for doing the same?

The bar has been lowered for Putin and other leaders are no longer fearful of meeting, or embracing him. Robert Fico, Slovakia’s leader, met Putin in Beijing, where he said “we are extremely interested in standardisation of relations between the Slovak Republic and the Russian Federation.”

Slovakia, for what it’s worth, is a member of the EU, Nato and a party to the Rome Statue of the International Criminal Court – which currently has an arrest warrant out for Putin. 

Whatever Trump might think, America is already fighting a war for the hearts and minds of smaller countries. For global powers, collecting allies can be very important at big moments in history. Right now, it is clearly in China’s interest to increase its influence in areas that have historically been seen as allied to America. Achieving that goal becomes even easier when Xi can pose with Putin by his side.