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you to become more like America. China will collaborate with you to keep your system going, whether you’re North Korea, Zimbabwe, Burma, or an American company. There is only one catch: China needs more room to grow, and its claims on world resources will only increase.
    Events around the world in recent years have seemed to confirm this Chinese thesis that people can have either wealth creation or chaos, but not both. The regime is confident that its people will continue to opt for the model that says: stability now, freedom later (or never). And Beijing is in a position to demand that the rest of the world respect the smooth functioning of Chinese procedures as well, because, more and more, the world’s wealth depends on it. China is now the world’s top consumer of luxury goods, and alliances with other countries underpinChinese wealth. In short, China is too big to fail. If we don’t want the global economy to collapse, we must acquiesce in Chinese power.
    Thus, Beijing is inexorably corrupting the political principles in countries across the globe in exchange for the affluence China disseminates—and this applies also, sadly, to American investors in China, including top computer companies and our largest banks and car manufacturers. We are all complicit in human-rights abuses in China, because China purchases our debt.
    It’s important to note that this message—conveyed by political speeches, controlled media, censored Internet content, foreign-language broadcasts, and the like—is not aimed only at domestic audiences. The audience is global. A threat to China Inc.’s smooth functioning constitutes a threat to the world. Everybody must invest in the Communist Party’s continuity. And every regime can take a version of that message and apply it internally—if only the version that equates the U.S. with revolutions and chaos.
    And disturbingly, the message seems to be persuasive.
    Russia’s New Conservatism and the Appeal to Stability
    Ironically, it’s precisely the cultural depredations issuing from the global economy that Russia exploits as it seeks to regain control over former satellites that had strayed toward the West. A quiet new ideology now emanates from Russia that can be disseminated in virtually every country, much as Moscow once deployed Marxism, to subvert pro-Western systems and ideas. It is a new, reactionary brand of conservatism that stands squarely against the Western model of personal freedom, multiculturalism, and social and economic dynamism.
    Here’s what it’s about: In espousing the rather foggy notion of “stability,” Russia along with China presents an us-versus-them, polarized worldview in which America represents political disintegrationand social fragmentation. This is convincing in part because the U.S., as lone world leader and champion of democracy, can be associated, one way or another, with the problems of every failed country in the world. And no doubt the us-versus-them belief draws strength from the Western media’s tendency to blame the U.S. for everything from genocides in Africa to the debacle in Assad’s Syria. If we didn’t cause the problem—any problem—we should at least have done more to stop or alleviate it.
    Our adversaries can point to a string of instances where the U.S. helped topple a presiding order and then bugged out, leaving the outcome to chance; where, on the other hand, we stayed with the task, we’re blamed for all the ensuing problems. So, for example, we are held responsible for the wholesale collapse of socialist regimes in South America during the post-Soviet 1990s and the economic strife that followed. That blame game helped fuel the anti-American dogma of Hugo Chávez and other neo-socialist leaders in Latin America. Russians also remember the Wild West, post-Soviet conditions of the Warsaw Pact zone, in which untrammeled free markets displaced regional economies and gave Mafia oligarchs control of national assets. Then came the