Sports Calendar

China’s Olympics may have cost $40 billion, but that is less than 1 per cent of the sum Beijing is currently investing in infrastructure nation-wide. The Olympic budget is also dwarfed by the nearly $500 billion that China holds in US government bonds. Nineteen years on from Tiananmen Square many in Washington hoped they would be fostering a new Chinese democratic wave that this time would sweep all before it. Instead, their financial system is being propped up by China’s one-party capitalist miracle.

If only the autocrats were always so benign. David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, has been struggling since taking up his post to persuade Beijing, and now Moscow, to see the benefits of joining the West’s “rules-based system”. He has failed. China’s refusal to withdraw its support for presidents al-Bashir of Sudan or Mugabe of Zimbabwe were two early examples. Russia’s refusal to respect Georgia’s international boundary or observe the letter of its recent ceasefires is merely the latest.

T he response in each case to Mr Miliband’s entreaties has been to ignore his rules – essentially those enshrined by US-dominated global institutions set up in the 1940s – in favour of national interests, narrowly defined. Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, has spoken more loftily of a “real competitive environment in ideas” on foreign policy, but the result is the same: paralysis in the UN Security Council, where Russian and Chinese vetoes have derailed multilateral initiatives on Georgia and Zimbabwe in the past month alone.

As the autocracies gain confidence, the omens are bad for young democracies in their spheres of influence, from Georgia and Ukraine to Indonesia. Nor are they good for longstanding peace initiatives in Kashmir and the Middle East, or for the next international crisis in need of a consensual solution, be it keeping the Arctic peaceful, Antarctica neutral or space nuclear-free.

But neither US presidential candidate should despair, and nor should Europe’s leaders. The combination of liberal democracy and a commitment to free markets remains the most humane but also the strongest system of governance yet devised by man or statesman. China, Russia and the Gulf all owe their new muscle to it, even as their ruling elites share a fundamental lack of legitimacy that makes them more vulnerable than they look.

It is not too late to bind the new autocracies into rules-based systems, but those systems need updating, and not by Western governments alone.

China, Russia and the Gulf have been enriched by low-cost production and the high price of oil. They have been emboldened by what they see as social dysfunction, economic instability and foreign policy hubris in the West. The march of history towards global democracy – and with it the idea of a “world community” working on the common threats – is in danger of stalling. Regardless of whether Barack Obama or John McCain win the US presidential election, the next generation of Western leaders faces a new new world order.