The last decade looked like a good one for authoritarian regimes and a challenging one for democratic ones. Cybertools, drones, facial recognition technology and social networks seemed to make efficient authoritarians even more efficient and democracies increasingly ungovernable.

The West lost self-confidence — and both Russian and Chinese leaders rubbed it in, putting out the word that these chaotic democratic systems were a spent force.

And then a totally unexpected thing happened: Russia and China each overreached.

Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and, to his surprise, invited an indirect war with NATO and the West. China insisted that it was smart enough to have its own local solution to a pandemic, leaving millions of Chinese under-protected or unprotected and, in effect, inviting war with one of Mother Nature’s most contagious viruses — the omicron mutation of SARS-CoV-2. It has now led China to lock down all of Shanghai and parts of 44 other cities — some 370 million people.

In short, both Moscow and Beijing find themselves suddenly contending with much more powerful and relentless forces and systems than they ever anticipated. And the battles are exposing — to the whole world and to their own people — the weaknesses of their own systems. So much so that the world now has to worry about instability in both countries.

Be afraid.

Russia is a key supplier of wheat, fertilizer, oil and natural gas for the world. And China is the origin of, or a crucial link in, thousands of global manufacturing supply chains. If Russia is locked out and China is locked down for a prolonged period, every corner of the planet will be affected. And that is no longer a remote possibility.

Let’s start with Putin. He lulled himself into thinking that because his army had smashed a bunch of ragtag military opponents in Syria, Georgia, Crimea and Chechnya, it could quickly devour a country of 44 million people — Ukraine — that over the last decade had been moving to join the West and was tacitly being armed and trained by NATO.

It’s been a military and economic debacle for Russia so far. But just as important, it has exposed precisely how much Putin’s “system” is built on both lying upward — everyone telling superiors what they want to hear, all the way up to Putin — and drilling downward, tapping Russia’s natural resources, enriching a few Russians, rather than unleashing the country’s human resources and empowering the many.

Putin’s Russia is basically built on oil, lies and corruption, and that is not a resilient system.

You could see it right from the eve of the war when Putin conducted a nationally televised meeting of his top national security advisers, and none other than Sergei Naryshkin, chief of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, appeared confused over which lie Putin wanted to be told.

Putin said the eastern Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk should be allowed to become independent states, and then he polled these advisers for confirmation. But Naryshkin seemed to think Putin wanted to be told that the two provinces should be annexed to Russia. As Naryshkin stammered over the wrong answer, Putin, without a hint of irony, twice snapped at him to “speak directly” — as if that were possible anymore in Putin’s Russia. Only after Naryshkin gave Putin the lie he obviously wanted to be told did Putin snarl, “You can sit down now.”

How many Russian military officers watching that humiliation were ready to tell Putin the truth about Ukraine once the war started going badly? When the Russian military was up against foes in Georgia, Syria, Crimea and Chechnya, Russia could just indiscriminately bomb its way out of any problem. But now that Putin’s military has found itself in a war with Ukraine’s highly motivated army and its homegrown weapons industry, backed with some of NATO’s best precision weapons and training, the rot has really started to show. Russia’s tank and logistic forces were mauled into multiple junkyards of burning hulks in western Ukraine.

And it is impossible to exaggerate how incompetent the Russian navy had to be to allow the command warship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, the Moskva missile cruiser, to be so badly damaged, reportedly by two Ukrainian-made anti-ship cruise missiles, called Neptunes, that the Moskva sank into the sea off Ukraine last week — the biggest loss of a naval ship in battle in 40 years.

For the Russian flagship in charge of coordinating all of the air defences for the flotilla, and itself carrying 64 S-300F Rif air defence missiles, to be taken out by enemy anti-ship missiles had to have been the result of a cascade of systems failures in detection and response to an attack.

Moreover, Neptune missiles are not necessarily “ship killers.” They were more likely designed to be “mission killers” — to disable the radar and electronics of sophisticated ships like the Moskva — not specifically sink them.

So I pity the commander who had to tell Putin that Russia’s meanest, monstrous warship in the Black Sea, rumored to have been his favourite, had been sunk by a Ukrainian missile fired in war for the first time.

China is a much more serious country than Russia: It is not built on oil, lies and corruption (though it has plenty of the latter), but on the hard work and manufacturing talents of its people, directed by a top-down, iron-fisted but eager-to-learn-from-abroad Chinese Communist Party. At least, eager in the past to learn, but less so lately.

China’s economic success, and the sense of pride it has generated, seems to have lulled its leadership into thinking it could basically go it alone against a pandemic. By producing its own vaccines, rather than importing better ones from the West, and by repurposing its highly efficient system of authoritarian surveillance and control to curb travel, do mass testing and quarantine any individuals or neighborhoods where COVID-19 appeared, China bet on a “zero COVID” policy. If it could get through the pandemic with fewer deaths and a more open economy, it would be another signal to the world — a big signal — that Chinese communism was superior to American democracy.

But Beijing, while scoffing at the West, became shockingly negligent about vaccinating its own elderly. That did not matter as much when China was able to stem the spread of earlier variants of the coronavirus with tight population controls. But now it matters, because China’s Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines appear not nearly as effective against omicron as the mRNA vaccines made in the West, although they still are effective at reducing hospitalization and death. In China today, more than 130 million people “aged 60 and above are either unvaccinated or have received fewer than three doses,” putting them “in greater danger of developing severe COVID symptoms or dying if they contract the virus,” The Financial Times recently reported, citing a University of Hong Kong study.

This has led Beijing to opt for that total lockdown of Shanghai, which has been so poorly managed that residents have reportedly had to scramble for food.

Dr. David L. Katz, a U.S. public health and preventive medicine expert who wrote one of the most prescient early guest essays in this newspaper about managing COVID at the onset, explained to me that the problem with having the kind of draconian lockdown policy that China maintained is that you are guaranteeing that your population develops little native immunity from having acquired and survived the virus. So, Katz said, if the virus mutates globally, as it did with omicron, and you have “a less than effective vaccine, virtually no natural immunity in the population, and millions of elderly unvaccinated, you’re in a bad place and there is no easy way out.”

You can’t fool around with or propagandize away Mother Nature; she’s merciless.

The moral of this story? High-coercion authoritarian systems are low-information systems — so they often drive blind more than they realize. And even when the truth filters up, or reality in the form of a more powerful foe or Mother Nature slams them in the face so hard it can’t be ignored, their leaders find it hard to change course because their claims to the right to be presidents-for-life rest on their claims to infallibility. And that is why Russia and China are both now struggling.

I am worried sick about our own democratic system. But as long as we can still vote out incompetent leaders and maintain information ecosystems that will expose systemic lying and defy censorship, we can adapt in an age of rapid change — and that is the single most important competitive advantage a country can have today.

The last decade looked like a good one for authoritarian regimes and a challenging one for democratic ones. Cybertools, drones, facial recognition technology and social networks seemed to make efficient authoritarians even more efficient and democracies increasingly ungovernable.

The last decade looked like a good one for authoritarian regimes and a challenging one for democratic ones. Cybertools, drones, facial recognition technology and social networks seemed to make efficient authoritarians even more efficient and democracies increasingly ungovernable. The West lost self-confidence — and both Russian and Chinese leaders rubbed it in, putting out the word that these chaotic democratic systems were a spent force. And then a totally unexpected thing happened: Russia and China each overreached. Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and, to his surprise, invited an indirect war with NATO and the West. China insisted that it was smart enough to have its own local solution to a pandemic, leaving millions of Chinese under-protected or unprotected and, in effect, inviting war with one of Mother Nature’s most contagious viruses — the omicron mutation of SARS-CoV-2. It has now led China to lock down all of Shanghai and parts of 44 other cities — some 370 million people. In short, both Moscow and Beijing find themselves suddenly contending with much more powerful and relentless forces and systems than they ever anticipated. And the battles are exposing — to the whole world and to their own people — the weaknesses of their own systems. So much so that the world now has to worry about instability in both countries. Be afraid. Russia is a key supplier of wheat, fertilizer, oil and natural gas for the world. And China is the origin of, or a crucial link in, thousands of global manufacturing supply chains. If Russia is locked out and China is locked down for a prolonged period, every corner of the planet will be affected. And that is no longer a remote possibility. Let’s start with Putin. He lulled himself into thinking that because his army had smashed a bunch of ragtag military opponents in Syria, Georgia, Crimea and Chechnya, it could quickly devour a country of 44 million people — Ukraine — that over the last decade had been moving to join the West and was tacitly being armed and trained by NATO. It’s been a military and economic debacle for Russia so far. But just as important, it has exposed precisely how much Putin’s “system” is built on both lying upward — everyone telling superiors what they want to hear, all the way up to Putin — and drilling downward, tapping Russia’s natural resources, enriching a few Russians, rather than unleashing the country’s human resources and empowering the many. Putin’s Russia is basically built on oil, lies and corruption, and that is not a resilient system. You could see it right from the eve of the war when Putin conducted a nationally televised meeting of his top national security advisers, and none other than Sergei Naryshkin, chief of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, appeared confused over which lie Putin wanted to be told. Putin said the eastern Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk should be allowed to become independent states, and then he polled these advisers for confirmation. But Naryshkin seemed to think Putin wanted to be told that the two provinces should be annexed to Russia. As Naryshkin stammered over the wrong answer, Putin, without a hint of irony, twice snapped at him to “speak directly” — as if that were possible anymore in Putin’s Russia. Only after Naryshkin gave Putin the lie he obviously wanted to be told did Putin snarl, “You can sit down now.” How many Russian military officers watching that humiliation were ready to tell Putin the truth about Ukraine once the war started going badly? When the Russian military was up against foes in Georgia, Syria, Crimea and Chechnya, Russia could just indiscriminately bomb its way out of any problem. But now that Putin’s military has found itself in a war with Ukraine’s highly motivated army and its homegrown weapons industry, backed with some of NATO’s best precision weapons and training, the rot has really started to show. Russia’s tank and logistic forces were mauled into multiple junkyards of burning hulks in western Ukraine. And it is impossible to exaggerate how incompetent the Russian navy had to be to allow the command warship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, the Moskva missile cruiser, to be so badly damaged, reportedly by two Ukrainian-made anti-ship cruise missiles, called Neptunes, that the Moskva sank into the sea off Ukraine last week — the biggest loss of a naval ship in battle in 40 years. For the Russian flagship in charge of coordinating all of the air defences for the flotilla, and itself carrying 64 S-300F Rif air defence missiles, to be taken out by enemy anti-ship missiles had to have been the result of a cascade of systems failures in detection and response to an attack. Moreover, Neptune missiles are not necessarily “ship killers.” They were more likely designed to be “mission killers” — to disable the radar and electronics of sophisticated ships like the Moskva — not specifically sink them. So I pity the commander who had to tell Putin that Russia’s meanest, monstrous warship in the Black Sea, rumored to have been his favourite, had been sunk by a Ukrainian missile fired in war for the first time. China is a much more serious country than Russia: It is not built on oil, lies and corruption (though it has plenty of the latter), but on the hard work and manufacturing talents of its people, directed by a top-down, iron-fisted but eager-to-learn-from-abroad Chinese Communist Party. At least, eager in the past to learn, but less so lately. China’s economic success, and the sense of pride it has generated, seems to have lulled its leadership into thinking it could basically go it alone against a pandemic. By producing its own vaccines, rather than importing better ones from the West, and by repurposing its highly efficient system of authoritarian surveillance and control to curb travel, do mass testing and quarantine any individuals or neighborhoods where COVID-19 appeared, China bet on a “zero COVID” policy. If it could get through the pandemic with fewer deaths and a more open economy, it would be another signal to the world — a big signal — that Chinese communism was superior to American democracy. But Beijing, while scoffing at the West, became shockingly negligent about vaccinating its own elderly. That did not matter as much when China was able to stem the spread of earlier variants of the coronavirus with tight population controls. But now it matters, because China’s Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines appear not nearly as effective against omicron as the mRNA vaccines made in the West, although they still are effective at reducing hospitalization and death. In China today, more than 130 million people “aged 60 and above are either unvaccinated or have received fewer than three doses,” putting them “in greater danger of developing severe COVID symptoms or dying if they contract the virus,” The Financial Times recently reported, citing a University of Hong Kong study. This has led Beijing to opt for that total lockdown of Shanghai, which has been so poorly managed that residents have reportedly had to scramble for food. Dr. David L. Katz, a U.S. public health and preventive medicine expert who wrote one of the most prescient early guest essays in this newspaper about managing COVID at the onset, explained to me that the problem with having the kind of draconian lockdown policy that China maintained is that you are guaranteeing that your population develops little native immunity from having acquired and survived the virus. So, Katz said, if the virus mutates globally, as it did with omicron, and you have “a less than effective vaccine, virtually no natural immunity in the population, and millions of elderly unvaccinated, you’re in a bad place and there is no easy way out.” You can’t fool around with or propagandize away Mother Nature; she’s merciless. The moral of this story? High-coercion authoritarian systems are low-information systems — so they often drive blind more than they realize. And even when the truth filters up, or reality in the form of a more powerful foe or Mother Nature slams them in the face so hard it can’t be ignored, their leaders find it hard to change course because their claims to the right to be presidents-for-life rest on their claims to infallibility. And that is why Russia and China are both now struggling. I am worried sick about our own democratic system. But as long as we can still vote out incompetent leaders and maintain information ecosystems that will expose systemic lying and defy censorship, we can adapt in an age of rapid change — and that is the single most important competitive advantage a country can have today.

China and Russia are giving authoritarianism a bad name

Adding the United States to its annual list of "backsliding" democracies, the International think tank International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) on Monday, cited a "visible deterioration" it said began in 2019.

"This year we coded the United States as backsliding for the first time, but our data suggest that the backsliding episode began at least in 2019," it said in its report titled "Global State of Democracy 2021".

"A historic turning point came in 2020–21 when former president Donald Trump questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election results in the United States," the report noted.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/biden-defines-his-underlying-challenge-with-china-prove-democracy-works-373763">Biden defines his underlying challenge with China: ‘Prove democracy works’</a>

Globally, over one in four people live in backsliding democracies, a figure that grows to two out of three with the addition of authoritarian or "hybrid" regimes.

"The United States is a high-performing democracy, and even improved its performance in indicators of impartial administration (corruption and predictable enforcement) in 2020. However, the declines in civil liberties and checks on government indicate that there are serious problems with the fundamentals of democracy," Alexander Hudson, a co-author of the report.

Hudson also noted a deterioration in the quality of freedom of association and assembly after the police killing of George Floyd.

In its assessments, International IDEA draws on 50 years of democratic indicators from around 160 countries, categorising them as democracies (including those that are "backsliding"), hybrid governments, and authoritarian regimes.

'Runaway polarisation'&nbsp;

"The visible deterioration of democracy in the United States, as seen in the increasing tendency to contest credible election results, the efforts to suppress participation (in elections), and the runaway polarisation... is one of the most concerning developments," said International IDEA secretary-general Kevin Casas-Zamora.

He warned of a knock-on effect, noting: "The violent contestation of the 2020 election without any evidence of fraud has been replicated, in different ways, in places as diverse as Myanmar, Peru and Israel."

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/aukus-us-australia-uk-sign-key-deal-in-nuclear-submarine-alliance-431078" hreflang="en">AUKUS: US, Australia, UK sign key deal in nuclear submarine alliance</a>

In the past decade, the number of backsliding democracies has doubled, making up a quarter of the world's population. Aside from "established democracies" like the US, the list also includes EU member states of Hungary, Poland and Slovenia.&nbsp;

As Myanmar transitioned from democracy to authoritarianism, Afghanistan and Mali also moved from hybrid governments to this category.

Turning authoritarian&nbsp;

In 2020, countries edging towards authoritarian outnumbered those enjoying democratisation for the fifth consecutive year.

This trend is expected to continue in 2021, according to International IDEA.

As of 2021, the world will have 98 democracies, the lowest number in many years, as well as 20 "hybrid" governments including Russia, Morocco and Turkey, and 47 authoritarian regimes including China, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Iran.

When backslidden democracies are added to hybrid and authoritarian states, we are talking about 70 percent of the world's population, says Casas-Zamora.

Also read |&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/us-interior-secretary-deb-haaland-declares-word-squaw-as-derogatory-term-430999" hreflang="en">US Interior Secretary Deb Haaland declares word 'squaw' as derogatory term</a>

"That tells you that there is something fundamentally serious happening with the quality of democracy," he added.

Reports said there has been an escalation in democratic erosion since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Some countries, particularly Hungary, India, the Philippines and the USA, have (imposed) measures that amount to democratic violations -- that is, measures that were disproportionate, illegal, indefinite or unconnected to the nature of the emergency," the report said.

"The pandemic has certainly accelerated and magnified some of the negative trends, particularly in places where democracy and the rule of law were ailing before the pandemic," Casas-Zamora said.

(With inputs from agencies)

Adding the United States to its annual list of "backsliding" democracies, the International think tank International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) on Monday, cited a "visible deterioration" it said began in 2019.

Adding the United States to its annual list of "backsliding" democracies, the International think tank International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) on Monday, cited a "visible deterioration" it said began in 2019. "This year we coded the United States as backsliding for the first time, but our data suggest that the backsliding episode began at least in 2019," it said in its report titled "Global State of Democracy 2021". "A historic turning point came in 2020–21 when former president Donald Trump questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election results in the United States," the report noted. Also read | Biden defines his underlying challenge with China: ‘Prove democracy works’ Globally, over one in four people live in backsliding democracies, a figure that grows to two out of three with the addition of authoritarian or "hybrid" regimes. "The United States is a high-performing democracy, and even improved its performance in indicators of impartial administration (corruption and predictable enforcement) in 2020. However, the declines in civil liberties and checks on government indicate that there are serious problems with the fundamentals of democracy," Alexander Hudson, a co-author of the report. Hudson also noted a deterioration in the quality of freedom of association and assembly after the police killing of George Floyd. In its assessments, International IDEA draws on 50 years of democratic indicators from around 160 countries, categorising them as democracies (including those that are "backsliding"), hybrid governments, and authoritarian regimes. 'Runaway polarisation' "The visible deterioration of democracy in the United States, as seen in the increasing tendency to contest credible election results, the efforts to suppress participation (in elections), and the runaway polarisation... is one of the most concerning developments," said International IDEA secretary-general Kevin Casas-Zamora. He warned of a knock-on effect, noting: "The violent contestation of the 2020 election without any evidence of fraud has been replicated, in different ways, in places as diverse as Myanmar, Peru and Israel." Also read | AUKUS: US, Australia, UK sign key deal in nuclear submarine alliance In the past decade, the number of backsliding democracies has doubled, making up a quarter of the world's population. Aside from "established democracies" like the US, the list also includes EU member states of Hungary, Poland and Slovenia. As Myanmar transitioned from democracy to authoritarianism, Afghanistan and Mali also moved from hybrid governments to this category. Turning authoritarian In 2020, countries edging towards authoritarian outnumbered those enjoying democratisation for the fifth consecutive year. This trend is expected to continue in 2021, according to International IDEA. As of 2021, the world will have 98 democracies, the lowest number in many years, as well as 20 "hybrid" governments including Russia, Morocco and Turkey, and 47 authoritarian regimes including China, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Iran. When backslidden democracies are added to hybrid and authoritarian states, we are talking about 70 percent of the world's population, says Casas-Zamora. Also read | US Interior Secretary Deb Haaland declares word 'squaw' as derogatory term "That tells you that there is something fundamentally serious happening with the quality of democracy," he added. Reports said there has been an escalation in democratic erosion since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. "Some countries, particularly Hungary, India, the Philippines and the USA, have (imposed) measures that amount to democratic violations -- that is, measures that were disproportionate, illegal, indefinite or unconnected to the nature of the emergency," the report said. "The pandemic has certainly accelerated and magnified some of the negative trends, particularly in places where democracy and the rule of law were ailing before the pandemic," Casas-Zamora said. (With inputs from agencies)

'Visible deterioration of democracy': US joins annual list of 'backsliding' democracies

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China and Russia are giving authoritarianism a bad name

'Visible deterioration of democracy': US joins annual list of 'backsliding' democracies