Ben Judah
(Picture: Handout)At the start of last year, when Xi Jinping met Vladimir Putin for their most sensitive talks in Beijing, they had high hopes for 2022. The Russian president, Western intelligence believes, informed his host of his intentions to imminently attack Ukraine. Xi then asked Putin to wait until after the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics, he was hosting in his capital. Both men promptly announced a “no-limits friendship” afterwards.
Historians will come back to this meeting behind the ceremonial gates of the Diaoyutai Guest House, a complex where Mao himself used to live, as the pinnacle of a delusion. A shared geopolitical misread between the two autocrats: that the West, routed in Afghanistan, was not only in accelerating decline but could now easily be pushed around.
