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Martial law has also been declared in some regions of Azerbaijan.

The conflict in the Caucasus Mountains has remained unresolved for more than three decades, with periodic bouts of fighting.

Iran, which borders both Azerbaijan and Armenia, offered to broker peace talks.

an attack on civilian settlements in Nagorno-Karabakh, including the regional capital Stepanakert, began at 08:10 local time (04:10 GMT) on Sunday.

Armenia's government declared martial law and total military mobilisation,

Warning that the region was on the brink of a "large-scale war", and accusing Turkey of "aggressive behaviour", he urged the international community to unite to prevent any further destabilisation.

Azerbaijanis are a predominantly Turkic people with whom Turkey has close ties, although unlike Turks, most Azerbaijanis are Shia, not Sunni, Muslims. Turkey does not have relations with Armenia, a mainly Orthodox Christian country which has historically looked to Russia for support.

Iran, a mainly Shia state, has a large ethnic Azerbaijani community but maintains good relations with Russia. They and Turkey, a Nato member, back opposing sides in Syria's ongoing civil war.

the ethnic divisions in Armenia and Azerbaijan have become even starker

“Azeri armed forces are not violating the humanitarian ceasefire,” defence ministry spokesman Vagif Dargiahly said.

The flare-up of fighting is the worst since a 1991-94 war over Nagorno-Karabakh that killed about 30,000.

it is close to Azeri gas and oil pipelines to Europe, and Turkey and Russia risk being dragged in. Russia has a defence pact with Armenia, while Turkey is allied with Azerbaijan.

Turkey is not involved in the mediation, which has been led by France, Russia and the United States.

The conflict is also worsening the spread of COVID-19 across both countries,

Armenia’s new cases had doubled over the past 14 days as of Monday, while new infections were up approximately 80% over the past week in Azerbaijan,

NATO member Turkey, Azerbaijan’s main supporter and arms supplier, said the deal had secured important gains for its ally

Some Azeris regretted fighting had ended before Azerbaijan controlled all of Nagorno-Karabakh and were wary of the arrival of peacekeepers from Russia, which dominated the region in Soviet times.

We were about to gain the whole of Nagorno-Karabakh back,” said 52-year-old Kiamala Aliyeva. “The agreement is very vague I don’t trust Armenia and I don’t trust Russia even more.”

rance, which has long mediated in the conflict with Russia and the United States, said any lasting agreement must take into account Armenia’s interests.

Appealing to Armenians to see the deal as starting an era of national unity, he said: “This is not a victory, but there is no defeat until you consider yourself defeated.”

Russia, which has a defence pact with Armenia and a military base there, is likely to hail the deal as a sign it is still the main arbiter in the energy-producing South Caucasus,

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said there had been no agreement on deploying any Turkish peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh, but the Turkish military will help staff a joint monitoring centre with Russian forces.

Putin said displaced people would be able to return to Nagorno-Karabakh and prisoners of war and bodies of those killed would be exchanged. All economic and transport links in the area would be reopened.

Surprisingly, Iran is not happy with Azerbaijan’s victory. As openly as the Iranians ever do, they’ve threatened to use force against any changes to the borders of Armenia. Iran, a millenniums-old civilization central to a whole continent, cannot tolerate being walled off behind a chain of Turkish dependencies. India, similarly, is on Armenia’s side and has been sending a regular supply of weapons. One spur for such support, no doubt, is Pakistan’s joining the Azeri-Turkish alliance. In the jargon of American lawyers, this opens a whole new can of worms.

Then there’s Russia, whose absence from the denouement in Nagorno-Karabakh was striking. Even after the 1990s, Moscow still remained by far the biggest supplier of weapons to both Armenia and Azerbaijan. Their economies and societies, above all the elites and their corruption networks, were until very recently molded together. What we are seeing now, as both nations slip out of Russia’s orbit, might be the second round of Soviet collapse.

Once again, Armenia started the shift. In spring 2018 a tremendously hopeful uprising, reminiscent of 1989 in Central Europe, forced the post-communist elites to surrender power. Vladimir Putin was visibly displeased to meet Nikol Pashinyan, the anticorruption journalist and street rebel elected Armenia’s premier by an overwhelming majority. Mr. Pashinyan admittedly had neither political team nor experience; he is learning statesmanship on the job, often at great expense to his nation. Yet he managed to significantly reduce corruption, helping to unlock the legendary entrepreneurship of Armenians. Amid all the grim news, the Armenian economy, led by the I.T. sector, is registering impressive growth.

History has a habit of serving the same lessons with changed variables. In 1988, it was the dreamer Gorbachev stumbling over Nagorno-Karabakh that unwittingly shattered the world order. Today, Mr. Putin could become the second, much darker incarnation of the Kremlin aggrandizer going awry on all fronts. The consequences — from emboldening international aggression to reanimating the West under the banner of NATO — will be profound. As events in Nagorno-Karabakh show, the fragile post-Cold War order is giving way to something else entirely.

The Caucasus might seem strange and distant. Yet it might prove the wedge that turns the fortunes of world order. Trieste, Smyrna, Sarajevo, Danzig and Crimea were all such places. Let us not have to relearn history at the cost of yet another ethnic cleansing

Iran had proposed a leading role in peace negotiations for countries in the region. Russia, it said, would be one of these countries.

Negotiations have for decades been led by Russia, France and the United States in their roles as co-chairs of a panel known as the Minsk Group of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), a security and rights watchdog.

in which Turkey wants a bigger role.

The ethnic Armenian-controlled Nagorno-Karabakh defence ministry says 1,177 of its troops have been killed since Sept. 27.

Russia has estimated 5,000 deaths on both sides.

The U.N. report goes on: "The lethal autonomous weapons systems were programmed to attack targets without requiring data connectivity between the operator and the munition: in effect, a true 'fire, forget and find' capability."

Azerbaijan used armed drones to gain a major advantage over Armenia in recent fighting for control of the Nagorno-Karabakh region. Just last month, the Israel Defense Forces reportedly used drones to drop tear gas on protesters in the occupied West Bank, while Hamas launched loitering munitions — so-called kamikaze drones — into Israel.

While this incident may or may not represent the first battlefield killing by an autonomous drone, the idea of such a weapon is disquieting to many.

According to the documents, Facebook is aware that its products are being used to facilitate hate speech in the Middle East, violent cartels in Mexico, ethnic cleansing in Ethiopia, extremist anti-Muslim rhetoric in India, and sex trafficking in Dubai. It is also aware that its efforts to combat these things are insufficient. A March 2021 report notes, “We frequently observe highly coordinated, intentional activity … by problematic actors” that is “particularly prevalent—and problematic—in At-Risk Countries and Contexts”; the report later acknowledges, “Current mitigation strategies are not enough.”

As recently as late 2020, an internal Facebook report found that only 6 percent of Arabic-language hate content on Instagram was detected by Facebook’s systems. Another report that circulated last winter found that, of material posted in Afghanistan that was classified as hate speech within a 30-day range, only 0.23 percent was taken down automatically by Facebook’s tools. In both instances, employees blamed company leadership for insufficient investment.

last year, according to the documents, only 13 percent of Facebook’s misinformation-moderation staff hours were devoted to the non-U.S. countries in which it operates, whose populations comprise more than 90 percent of Facebook’s users.

Among the consequences of that pattern, according to the memo: The Hindu-nationalist politician T. Raja Singh, who posted to hundreds of thousands of followers on Facebook calling for India’s Rohingya Muslims to be shot—in direct violation of Facebook’s hate-speech guidelines—was allowed to remain on the platform despite repeated requests to ban him, including from the very Facebook employees tasked with monitoring hate speech.

The granular, procedural, sometimes banal back-and-forth exchanges recorded in the documents reveal, in unprecedented detail, how the most powerful company on Earth makes its decisions. And they suggest that, all over the world, Facebook’s choices are consistently driven by public perception, business risk, the threat of regulation, and the specter of “PR fires,” a phrase that appears over and over in the documents.

“It’s an open secret … that Facebook’s short-term decisions are largely motivated by PR and the potential for negative attention,” an employee named Sophie Zhang wrote in a September 2020 internal memo about Facebook’s failure to act on global misinformation threats.

In a memo dated December 2020 and posted to Workplace, Facebook’s very Facebooklike internal message board, an employee argued that “Facebook’s decision-making on content policy is routinely influenced by political considerations.”

To hear this employee tell it, the problem was structural: Employees who are primarily tasked with negotiating with governments over regulation and national security, and with the press over stories, were empowered to weigh in on conversations about building and enforcing Facebook’s rules regarding questionable content around the world. “Time and again,” the memo quotes a Facebook researcher saying, “I’ve seen promising interventions … be prematurely stifled or severely constrained by key decisionmakers—often based on fears of public and policy stakeholder responses.”

And although Facebook users post in at least 160 languages, the company has built robust AI detection in only a fraction of those languages, the ones spoken in large, high-profile markets such as the U.S. and Europe—a choice, the documents show, that means problematic content is seldom detected.

A 2020 Wall Street Journal article reported that Facebook’s top public-policy executive in India had raised concerns about backlash if the company were to do so, saying that cracking down on leaders from the ruling party might make running the business more difficult.

Employees weren’t placated. In dozens and dozens of comments, they questioned the decisions Facebook had made regarding which parts of the company to involve in content moderation, and raised doubts about its ability to moderate hate speech in India. They called the situation “sad” and Facebook’s response “inadequate,” and wondered about the “propriety of considering regulatory risk” when it comes to violent speech.

“I have a very basic question,” wrote one worker. “Despite having such strong processes around hate speech, how come there are so many instances that we have failed? It does speak on the efficacy of the process.”

Two other employees said that they had personally reported certain Indian accounts for posting hate speech. Even so, one of the employees wrote, “they still continue to thrive on our platform spewing hateful content.”

Taken together, Frances Haugen’s leaked documents show Facebook for what it is: a platform racked by misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy thinking, extremism, hate speech, bullying, abuse, human trafficking, revenge porn, and incitements to violence

It is a company that has pursued worldwide growth since its inception—and then, when called upon by regulators, the press, and the public to quell the problems its sheer size has created, it has claimed that its scale makes completely addressing those problems impossible.

Instead, Facebook’s 60,000-person global workforce is engaged in a borderless, endless, ever-bigger game of whack-a-mole, one with no winners and a lot of sore arms.

Zhang details what she found in her nearly three years at Facebook: coordinated disinformation campaigns in dozens of countries, including India, Brazil, Mexico, Afghanistan, South Korea, Bolivia, Spain, and Ukraine. In some cases, such as in Honduras and Azerbaijan, Zhang was able to tie accounts involved in these campaigns directly to ruling political parties. In the memo, posted to Workplace the day Zhang was fired from Facebook for what the company alleged was poor performance, she says that she made decisions about these accounts with minimal oversight or support, despite repeated entreaties to senior leadership. On multiple occasions, she said, she was told to prioritize other work.

A Facebook spokesperson said that the company tries “to keep people safe even if it impacts our bottom line,” adding that the company has spent $13 billion on safety since 2016. “​​Our track record shows that we crack down on abuse abroad with the same intensity that we apply in the U.S.”

Zhang's memo, though, paints a different picture. “We focus upon harm and priority regions like the United States and Western Europe,” she wrote. But eventually, “it became impossible to read the news and monitor world events without feeling the weight of my own responsibility.”

Indeed, Facebook explicitly prioritizes certain countries for intervention by sorting them into tiers, the documents show. Zhang “chose not to prioritize” Bolivia, despite credible evidence of inauthentic activity in the run-up to the country’s 2019 election. That election was marred by claims of fraud, which fueled widespread protests; more than 30 people were killed and more than 800 were injured.

“I have blood on my hands,” Zhang wrote in the memo. By the time she left Facebook, she was having trouble sleeping at night. “I consider myself to have been put in an impossible spot—caught between my loyalties to the company and my loyalties to the world as a whole.”

What happened in the Philippines—and in Honduras, and Azerbaijan, and India, and Bolivia—wasn’t just that a very large company lacked a handle on the content posted to its platform. It was that, in many cases, a very large company knew what was happening and failed to meaningfully intervene.

solving problems for users should not be surprising. The company is under the constant threat of regulation and bad press. Facebook is doing what companies do, triaging and acting in its own self-interest.

How many Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire at the start of the mass killings?Many historians agree that the number was about 2 million. However, victims of the mass killings also included some of the 1.8 million Armenians living in the Caucasus under Russian rule, some of whom were massacred by Ottoman forces in 1918 as they marched through East Armenia and Azerbaijan.

on the night of April 23-24, 1915, the authorities in Constantinople, the empire's capital, rounded up about 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders. Many of them ended up deported or assassinated.

Estimates range from 300,000 to 2 million deaths between 1914 and 1923, with not all of the victims in the Ottoman Empire

Some show Ottoman soldiers posing with severed heads, others with them standing amid skulls in the dirt.The victims are reported to have died in mass burnings and by drowning, torture, gas, poison, disease and starvation. Children were reported to have been loaded into boats, taken out to sea and thrown overboard. Rape, too, was frequently reported.

It ruled over the western reaches of the late Silk Road, although the overland trade routes were quickly being supplanted by ocean-going trading vessels

The greatest Safavid ruler was Shah Abbas I (r. 1587 - 1629), who modernized the Persian militar

he spoke about the importance of Russia’s national identity and its territorial sovereignty.

Russia’s nationalism, he went on, is inward-looking. Students “all come here with the idea that Russia is a great power.

The American media made the Kremlin the third player in the U.S. election, which is great,” joked Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist who specializes in cybersecurity. “Like, you think to yourself: ‘We are such a great country, we can interfere with world elections!’ ”

: that Americans looking for a master plan fundamentally misunderstood the Russian leadership’s mentality. “When you are trained by the K.G.B., it means you see the world in terms of threats,” he explained. “That’s the only way you see it.

Garbuzov suggested that little had changed — the Kremlin did not understand America and did not listen to those who did. The United States was no different. “We have an image of America as the country that foments revolutions around the world.

The Americans have the image of Russia as a country that wants to revive the Soviet Union by any means,” he went on. “Both parties deeply misunderstand the motives of each other’s behavior.” He concluded by saying: “This is a very sad thing, the mutual misunderstanding we couldn’t overcome during the decades of the Cold War and can’t overcome now.”

Russia has long been a canvas on which Americans project their thoughts or fears — of the Red menace, and of Putin’s quest for world domination. This tradition only accelerated after the 2016 election, when it seemed as if everyone were an expert on Putin’s agenda.

The very word “Putin” has come to symbolize a coherent, systematic destruction of the post-Cold War international orde

But no one I spoke with who had an intimate knowledge of Russia saw that as anything but fiction. Instead, they talked about Russia’s strides back onto the world stage as improvised reactions, tactics, gambles that were at times more worrisome than masterful.

If Americans tried to see the world as the Russians did, and as our allies did, could we better understand what any of these countries were doing? And if we understood what they really wanted, could we better understand the world ourselves?

even identifying the beginning of the post-Cold War international order is a fraught exercise.

Russian policymakers often set the start date in 1989, when General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev willingly dismantled Russia’s political and military dominance over Eastern Europe. After such a magnanimous gesture, Moscow believed it would be treated as an equal partner of the United States, rather than as a rival, with the right to retain influence over countries in what it considered its neighborhood.

Western observers, on the other hand, date the dawn of the American hegemonic age as 1991

each side would come to blame the other for reneging on a post-Cold War compact that the other side never agreed on or perhaps even really understood.

“The basic disagreement becomes clear: Was the status quo set in 1989, making the U.S. a revisionist hegemon, or was it set in 1991, making Russia a revisionist challenger?”

When Putin assumed the presidency in 2000, he remained “convinced that he could build good relations with the West, in particular with the United States,”

He took pains to court Tony Blair and George W. Bush, and he was the first leader to call Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks.

He mistakenly believed the attacks on Sept. 11 would align the two countries’ world views around the war on terror.

Russians now understood clearly that the West saw them as a “de facto defeated country,” Fyodor Lukyanov, chairman of the Presidium on the Council of Foreign and Defense Policy, told me, “which had no right to claim to be on the same footing as Americans or Europeans.”

The difference in perspectives slowly became intractable. By 2007, Putin voiced his displeasure at the Munich Security Conference, an annual assembly of global elites, but it’s unclear if anyone understood the depth of his discontent. “The United States has overstepped its national borders in every way,” he said.

This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who is happy about this?” He went on: “No one feels safe! Because no one can feel that international law is like a stone wall that will protect them.”

It was in Syria where Putin challenged his country’s post-Cold War identity, as well as how the West had perceived it for so long. His decision to commit Russian forces has been portrayed as the first step in an effort to realign the region, but the strategy was largely a result of luck and timing, its tactics born partly of a lack of resources.

Russia’s success in Syria has inspired the Kremlin to sell itself as a neutral moderator in other Middle Eastern conflicts — the fight among factions in Libya, the war in Yemen and the Israeli-Palestinian quagmire.

Russia did not break the back of the international world order, as much as it recognized the opportunities created by American withdrawal and the new era of global bardak.

There are more young people than ever before. About 41% of the global population of 7.7 billion is aged 24 or under. In Africa, 41% is under 15. In Asia and Latin America (where 65% of the world’s people live), it’s 25%.

In developed countries, imbalances tilt the other way. While 16% of Europeans are under 15, about 18%, double the world average, are over 65.

Recession, stagnant or falling living standards, and austerity programmes delivered from on high have shaped their experience

a common factor is the increased willingness of undemocratic regimes, ruling elites and wealthy oligarchies to use force to crush threats to their power – while hypocritically condemning protester violenc

they’re connected. More people than ever before have access to education. They are healthier. They appear less bound by social conventions and religion. They are mutually aware. And their expectations are higher.

thanks to social media, the ubiquity of English as a common tongue, and the internet’s globalisation and democratisation of information

younger people from all backgrounds and locations are more open to alternative life choices, more attuned to “universal” rights and norms such as free speech or a living wage – and less prepared to accept their denial

It is difficult, if not perverse, to watch protesters risking torture and death by challenging Egypt’s dictator, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and not relate their daring both to Hong Kong and, say, to Kashmiris’ efforts to throw off the yoke imposed by another “strongman”, India’s Narendra Modi. When Palestinian youths taunt the Israel Defence Forces with flags and stones, are they not part of the same global fight for democratic self-determination, basic freedoms and human rights espoused by young Muscovites opposing Vladimir Putin’s cruel kleptocracy?

Any government, elected or not, that fails to provide jobs, decent wages and housing faces big trouble.

Another negative is the perceived, growing readiness of democratically elected governments, notably in the US and Europe, to lie, manipulate and disinform

disbelief is the new spirit of the age

The stifling silence that hangs over North Korea’s gulag, China’s Xinjiang and Tibet regions, and dark, hidden places inside Syria, Eritrea, Iran and Azerbaijan could yet descend on us all. What helps protect us is the noisy, life-affirming dissent of the young.

“There are five major ways that authoritarian regimes exploit Facebook and other social media services,” Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media scholar at the University of Virginia, writes in “Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy.” They can “organize countermovements to emerging civil society or protest movements,” “frame the public debate along their terms,” let citizens “voice complaints without direct appeal or protest” and “coordinate among elites to rally support.” They can also use social media to aid in the “surveillance and harassment of opposition activists and journalists.”

Facebook, according to the company’s own investigation, is home to thousands of QAnon groups and pages with millions of members and followers. Its recommendation algorithms push users to engage with QAnon content, spreading the conspiracy to people who may never have encountered it otherwise

Similarly, a report from the German Marshall Fund pegs the recent spate of fire conspiracies — false claims of arson in Oregon by antifa or Black Lives Matter — to the uncontrolled spread of rumors and disinformation on Facebook.

Several thousand opposition supporters staged a rival protest on a different square in the capital. Crowds there could be seen cheering and clapping as a fighter jet flew overhead in footage circulated by Russia’s RIA news agency.

Between 1928 and 1940, Stalin enforced the collectivization of the agricultural sector. Rural peasants were forced to join collective farms. Those that owned land or livestock were stripped of their holdings. Hundreds of thousands of higher-income farmers, called kulaks, were rounded up and executed, their property confiscated.

Stalin eliminated all likely opposition to his leadership by terrorizing Communist Party officials and the public through his secret police.

The Soviet Union by 1948 had installed communist-leaning governments in Eastern European countries that the USSR had liberated from Nazi control during the war. The Americans and British feared the spread of communism into Western Europe and worldwide.

The Cold War power struggle—waged on political, economic and propaganda fronts between the Eastern and Western blocs—would persist in various forms until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

At home, however, Khrushchev initiated a series of political reforms that made Soviet society less repressive. During this period, later known as de-Stalinization, Khrushchev criticized Stalin for arresting and deporting opponents, took steps to raise living conditions, freed many political prisoners, loosened artistic censorship, and closed the Gulag labor camps.

On October 4, 1957, the USSR publicly launched Sputnik 1—the first-ever artificial satellite—into low Earth orbit. The success of Sputnik made Americans fear that the U.S. was falling behind its Cold War rival in technology.

Gorbachev’s glasnost plan called for political openness. It addressed personal restrictions of the Soviet people. Glasnost eliminated remaining traces of Stalinist repression, such as the banning of books (like Boris Pasternak’s Nobel Prize-winning “Dr. Zhivago”) and the much-loathed secret police (though the KGB wouldn’t fully dissolve until the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991). Newspapers could criticize the government, and parties other than the Communist Party could participate in elections.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the Communist Party elite rapidly gained wealth and power while millions of average Soviet citizens faced starvation. The Soviet Union’s push to industrialize at any cost resulted in frequent shortages of food and consumer goods. Bread lines were common throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Soviet citizens often did not have access to basic needs, such as clothing or shoes.

An unsuccessful coup by Communist Party hard-liners in August 1991 sealed the Soviet Union’s fate by diminishing Gorbachev’s power and propelling democratic forces, led by Boris Yeltsin, to the forefront of Russian politics.

Yet in the immediate aftermath of war, precisely because a peace effort is underway, foreign governments and international peacekeepers are unusually well-placed to intervene. Unlike during armed conflict, there is also a chance for international mediators and local communities to work together to prevent attacks before the damage is done.

In Nagorno-Karabakh, too, cultural reconciliation is still possible. Despite the dismal record of the past three decades, both sides have demonstrated awareness of — and admiration for — heritage that is not their own. In 2019, Armenians restored a prominent 19th-century mosque in Shusha (though they pointedly failed to note its previous use by Azerbaijani Muslims). And in his recent address, Mr. Aliyev acknowledged the importance of the region’s churches — even as he denied their Armenian origin.

The USSR crumbled — or so goes the lesson — because it became open, loosened its grip over politics and polity.

This idea has now received official stamp from the very top of Beijing’s leadership, and one can see it reverberating through the new wave of paranoia about foreign influence, reassertion of party power, and hostility to civil society

The Soviet fall, once seen at least in part as a result of the Communist Party’s own failings, has become reinterpreted as a deliberate US plot and a moral failure to hold the line against Western influence,” writes Palmer.

This paranoia guides and informs every step that Xi takes, be it the brutal repression of Uighur minority, the annihilation of their Muslim identity or the purge of his political opponents under the pretext of corruption.

Xi wrote in 2017: “As the world’s largest party, no external force can defeat us, and only we can defeat ourselves… We should stay alert to the ubiquitous factors that could weaken our Party’s pioneering nature and contaminate our Party’s purity… If we don’t take strict precautions and correct them in time… small problems will grow into big ones, minor slips will escalate into an irreversible landslide, probably even leading to a broader and subversive catastrophe.”

Xi and the CPC remain convinced that the US wants to balance and contain its rise, constrict it by fanning pro-democracy sentiments and challenge the ‘One China’ policy

Beijing’s actions are swayed by insecurity based on that fear. China blames the US for “influencing” the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, accuses Washington of instigating and sponsoring Taiwan’s defiance, and it has noted with concern American (mostly botched) efforts at regime change in post-second World War history

This has heightened Xi’s (and the party’s fears) to the extent that China believes a proactive, interventionist, in-your-face foreign policy — driven by a revanchist obsession with reassembling the Middle Kingdom’s imperial empire over the land and sea through military and non-military means — along with the relentless accumulation of economic and hard power are prerequisite to achieving the China Dream.

In keeping the party and the society focused on achieving that goal, fear (whether real or imagined) is a useful tool.

The CPC needs the west and its political system as the ‘other’ to operate in opposition to it, and paranoia remains the overwhelming driving force that binds the party, the state and society

in the last six months alone of the new decade — and amid a raging, global pandemic that originated in Wuhan — Xi’s China has undertaken a series of coercive steps and has gone into geopolitical jousting with almost all its neighbours and regional actors. The goal of a regional hegemon and a presumptive superpower should be creating conditions that aid its rise, not cause impediments in the path through abrasive overreach.

This naked bullying behaviour has consequences, even though China may like to believe that the ability of these regional actors in balancing against China is constrained by their economic dependence on Beijing. China has alienated regional players and given rise to a renewed push for Asian multilateralism underwritten by the US.

As former Indian ambassador to China Gautam Bambawale has said, for a minor tactical gain on the ground, China has “lost India” and forced New Delhi into fundamentally reassessing its China policy.