Meanwhile re-Ottomanising Turkey – its leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, present at the talks in Tehran – is playing its own game. Moreover, few noticed that earlier this month a Chechen leader, Magomed Dauden, described the war in Ukraine as ‘a jihad to defend Islam’ and added that ‘we’ll get to Berlin’. But the earlier and equally significant refusal of Qatar to ‘choose sides’, the participation of Libyan, Syrian and Chechen irregulars in the fighting, and the swift rejection by the Saudis of the UK’s request for extra energy supplies have been under-reported. Hence, analysis mostly dodges the issues raised by the anti-Western positions that Pakistan, Syria and Iran have taken on Ukraine, while Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, in welcoming Vladimir Putin to Tehran this week, declared that Nato had to be ‘stopped’. The latter is being carried forward with boldness and skill in many countries, but silence about it largely reigns for fear of accusations of ‘Islamophobia’. Worse, ours is also a period of preoccupation in self-destroying ‘free societies’ with relatively trivial matters, ‘identity’ and ‘diversity’ among them, combined with wide-scale evasions of much larger issues, including China’s advancing economic and strategic strengths and Islam’s worldwide upsurge.
It is a time that has seen mere licence mistaken for liberty, increasing social and moral disorder, the declining quality of its political leaders and the diminishing status of its ruling institutions, and with a Trump perhaps set to return to the White House. Russia’s assault on Ukraine has come at an awkward time for Western liberal democracy.
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