The blessings of democracy will prevail, it was once thought. Today the opposite is the case: an “axis of autocrats” is setting out to destroy the free West. If you want to understand the drama of the situation, you have to read Anne Applebaum.
In the fall of 2023, the European Union and the US Congress argued over support for Ukraine. Here and there, a minority with good relations with Russia blocked further financial and military aid – supporters of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Republican MPs loyal to Trump. Hamas, armed by Iran, carried out its brutal terrorist attack on Israel. The Houthi rebels in Yemen, who are also loyal to Iran, fired on cargo ships in the Red Sea. The Azerbaijani dictator Ilham Aliyev, with blessings and combat drones from Turkey, conquered the Nagorno-Karabakh region and expelled the 100,000 Armenians living there. In the spring of 2024, Chinese hackers were exposed who had penetrated the computers of the British Parliament. A Russian campaign aimed at influencing the European elections was uncovered in Brussels, Warsaw and Prague. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro announced the occupation of a province in the neighboring country of Guyana. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, impoverished because of his incompetent tyranny, flocked to the USA, which raised fears of foreign infiltration there and brought in Donald Trump, who sympathized with Putin in the Ukraine war.