Navalny's death deepens the pulse between democracies and authoritarian regimes

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Friday in Munich. WOLFGANG RATTAY (REUTERS)

The news of Alexei Navalny's death broke on Friday like a sinister, dramatic lightning bolt in the rooms of the Bayerischer Hof hotel, traditional headquarters of the Munich Security Conference, just when the forum that brings together hundreds of people in the Bavarian capital every year political and military leaders from much of the world were preparing to begin.

Many since then have thought what the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, said the next day on the main stage: “Putin wanted to send us all a message.”

A message of total confrontation with the West, whose leaders had called in the past for Navalni's physical integrity to be respected, and of total contempt for democracy.

In that confrontation, Putin is not alone.

Iran supplies it with drones.

North Korea, ammunition.

China does not provide weapons, as far as we know, but it does provide economic oxygen through trade, including technological products essential for the Russian war economy;

and political oxygen, through multiple top-level meetings and joint declarations that call for a new world order while affirming that democracy and human rights are relative concepts.

Ukraine denounces that Beijing helps Moscow with its cyber attacks.

And the confrontation in question, of course, is not just about Ukraine.

The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, portrayed it this way in her speech this Saturday at the Munich conference: “It is not only about Ukraine, but about sending a signal to others.

The question is whether democracy will survive in the world and whether we can defend our values.

The answer has to be yes,” she said.

“Putin's war is a war against a rules-based world,” said Zelensky.

“I hope it doesn't become the world of yesterday,” he added, with a sad reference to Zweig's memoirs.

What is clear is that the entire world today is watching what fate Putin's invasion will have, what resistance will be put up by the fifty democracies that support Ukraine—the response that Von der Leyen speaks of.

Everyone will draw conclusions and they will, of course, be greatly influenced by whether or not Donald Trump wins the November presidential elections in the United States.

A pulse beyond Ukraine

Putin himself has clearly said that the fight is not just about Ukraine.

“This is not a territorial conflict and it is not an attempt to establish a regional geopolitical balance.

“This issue is broader and more fundamental and concerns the underlying principles of the new international order,” the Russian president said at the latest Valdai forum.

Putin traveled to Munich in 2007 to warn of the same thing, that the current world order did not work for him, that he rejected the primacy of the United States. And he made it clear that he was willing to challenge that state of affairs.

Bush's US, which had illegally invaded Iraq, decided to go ahead with opening NATO's door to Ukraine and Georgia.

Disrespectful of the freedom of the countries that he considers to be his zone of influence to decide their future, Putin turned to

de facto

means against both in the face of the substantial passivity of the West.

And it went further, until today's unbridled conflict.

In the midst of the challenge launched by Putin, the closing of ranks between autocratic regimes is evident, but this does not mean that they are a seamless unitary pole.

Nor is the much more cohesive European pole.

Wang Yi, China's main foreign policy representative, tried in Munich to profile his country as a stabilizing force in a turbulent context.

“The key message I bring is that China is a responsible actor and will serve as a strong stabilizing force.

It will do so by promoting cooperation among major powers,” Wang said. Beijing has a huge interest in the stability of a system that allows it to prosper.

At the same time, riding on the back of its new prosperity, it has become more assertive under Xi Jinping's long rule.

Do not marginalize China

Beyond the reassuring message, Wang's intervention revealed worrying cracks.

“Whoever tries to marginalize China in the name of risk reduction policies will make a historic mistake,” he said emphatically.

Meanwhile, both the US and the EU are actively working to reduce their dependence on China.

On the other hand, asked by the president of the conference, Christoph Heusgen, if it would not be appropriate for Beijing to increase pressure on Moscow to contain its invasion, Wang replied dryly that he rejected “any attempt to blame” China in that sense.

Meanwhile, bilateral trade between the two countries breaks records, exceeding $200 billion in 2023.

The harmony is evident.

“We are experiencing a phase of change unparalleled in 100 years.

When we are together, we lead that change,” Xi told Putin as he said goodbye to him after a meeting last March, probably without realizing that the brief conversation was recorded before getting into the official car.

In the midst of this struggle between democracies and authoritarian regimes, the West has great difficulties in recruiting new partners.

The Munich Security Conference made it clear how its position in the conflict in the Middle East exposes it to projecting on a global scale a disastrous image of double standards that harms it.

Antony Blinken, US Secretary of State, spoke of “an imperative, more urgent than ever, to establish a Palestinian state that guarantees the security of Israel.”

The head of American diplomacy has repeated in recent weeks that Israel's response to the Hamas attack causes excessive suffering for Palestinian civilians.

But the world sees perfectly well that the United States did nothing in the past to guarantee the creation of that State.

And today, while he mourns the civilian deaths, he continues to arm Israel.

In a statement, the EU asked Israel not to proceed with the Rafah offensive in southern Gaza.

But it does not review the terms of its relations with the country led by Benjamin Netanyahu.

Of course, Putin's offensive war, devoid of any justification, is different than Israel's reactive war after the Hamas attack.

But Western inaction in the face of decades of oppression, illegal occupation and colonization of lands, and the brutality of the Israeli response, leaves it totally exposed to criticism of hypocrisy.

The illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 doesn't help either.

A large group of countries, called the global South, largely refuse to align.

Among them there are full democracies, fragile ones, or authoritarian regimes.

Many of them regret the ongoing confrontation in the northern hemisphere, which has negative effects for them, while at the same time they try to take advantage of the competition between powers to obtain better returns.

That competition, that confrontation is underway.

It does not have the ideological component of the Cold War, but it is clearly, as then, a pulse of power that today is articulated between a group of authoritarian regimes that demand an order that is more favorable to them and the democracies that have had a position of preeminence. since World War II.

Navalni's death is an emblem of this pulse, widening a little more the gap between those who regret it, in the democratic world, and those who prefer to look the other way.

China, by the way, declined to comment, noting that this is an “internal matter” for Russia.

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