By Conrad Black
With all the controversy over the fast-moving war in Iran, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that the world balance of power and international correlation of forces are shifting in favour of the western democracies. Since the reinstallation of the present U.S. administration less than 14 months ago, fentanyl and other drug traffic, much of it originating in China, into the United States has been drastically reduced. Venezuela has been eliminated as a link in that chain and the U.S. armed forces are co-operating with a revived Mexican government effort to subdue the violent gangs in northern Mexico, blunting their traffic in slaves and narcotics freely into the United States. The entry of undocumented immigrants and particularly violent criminals (of whom hundreds of thousands were admitted in the previous four years), has nearly stopped.
The Russo-Chinese allies: Syria, Venezuela, Iran and imminently Cuba, have all abruptly ceased to be practising allies of Moscow and Beijing. The hypocritical absurdity of the Western Europeans languishing like Canada with risible defence budgets and pleading with the United States to help Ukraine against the Russian invasion while largely financing the Russians their buying its oil and gas is ending. Those countries have been badgered into raising their defence budgets to serious levels and the U.S. administration has quieted its isolationist supporters by selling highly sophisticated weapons to NATO allies in Europe who pass them on to Ukraine.
At the same time as western Europe, and because of an agreement with the U.S., India ceased to be oil customers of Russia, Venezuela has ceased to supply China with oil and the U.S. is determined to end Iranian oil shipments to China. To some extent the Russians will fill that gap but China has the ability to extract a much lower price than Russia has been charging Europe and India for its oil. The great Chinese courtship of Latin America has been rebuffed by voters in Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Bolivia and imminently Colombia and Peru, and free enterprise moderate conservative government, led by Argentina’s flamboyant President Javier Milei, is disembarking the left in one Latin American country after another.
U.S. President Donald Trump has been one of the only statesmen in the West to recognize that in addition to the necessity of preventing Russian reabsorption of Ukraine into Russia, which governed it for over 350 years, it was also desirable to avoid such humiliation of Russia that it was pushed durably into the embrace of China. The greatest nightmare of the Ukraine war, apart from an outright Russian victory that would reveal NATO to be a paper tiger and the western alliance to be a farce, has been pushing Russia into such a state of vassalage to China, the Chinese would ship tens of millions of their surplus population to Siberia and extract the resources of that area paying a royalty to the Kremlin and vastly enhancing China’s strategic strength.
For adopting a position that recognized that after its centuries of incumbency in Ukraine, Russia had some residual rights there, President Trump has been widely denigrated as a virtual catspaw of the Kremlin. Of course, this is nonsense, and Russian President Vladimir Putin, despite his swagger as he regularly trots off to Beijing to pay his obeisances, cannot escape the facts that Russia has a GDP smaller than Canada’s, that this war has gone on longer than the titanic Russo-German struggle of 1941-1945, that Russia has suffered approximately a million casualties and over half a million deserters and draft evaders, and has not made any appreciable gains in the last two years. This war has not only been a disaster for Russia; it signifies that the stronger of the former Soviet republics have legitimately seceded from Russian control, and Russia will not again revive the empire of Peter the Great and Stalin nor exercise the influence that they and other Russian leaders have intermittently enjoyed in central Europe. Russia is an important nationality that ultimately belongs in the West, but it has no chance to rival the United States again.
The whole world noted the almost effortless elimination by the Americans and the Israelis of the supposedly sophisticated air defences that China had sold Iran. The routine Chinese incursions in the airspace and coastal waters of Taiwan have been suspended. Most readers will remember that 10 years ago it was impossible to set foot out of doors without being button-holed by someone announcing that China would imminently surpass the United States as the world’s greatest economy. That prediction was no more accurate than the former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s assertion in 1956, of the West: ”We will bury you.” Chinese GDP last year was $20 trillion; the United States was at $31 trillion, and American numbers are authentic and the U.S. economic growth rate is greater than China’s. Just as those who did not wish America or the West well stared in pleased astonishment as between 10- and 15-million destitute people including approximately 500,000 violent criminals entered the United States illegally between 2021 and 2025, they were also unaccustomed to seeing the United States military perform with the flawless professional execution that it has shown in the last year.
In his war message after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt said: “We will make very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endangers us.” The United States has, by its military and economic power, deterred direct attacks on it. But after the end of the Cold War, enemies of the West devised techniques of terrorism and guerrilla war by proxy to avoid direct retribution. The present U.S. administration has developed such refined weaponry and comprehensively trained elite military units that it is able to sever the jugular of its opponents at no or minimal loss to itself, as has been demonstrated in Iran and Venezuela. Militant Islam has now been almost as thoroughly demystified and defeated as were international communism and Nazism. The terrorist puppet organizations of Hamas and Hezbollah are finished and there is about to be a possibility of peace in the Middle East and the general recognition of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. And nuclear nonproliferation, which had become just a club of hypocrites stockpiling their own weapons and admonishing all other countries to abstain from so arming themselves, has at least been resurrected to the point of demonstrating that lunatic terrorism-sponsoring governments will not be allowed to cross that threshold.
These are all seismic changes in the world and a clear victory for responsible government.
First published in the National Post
