Who is encircling whom?

 When an authoritarian regime with a poor rep. abroad accuses others of crimes and misdemeanours, one can be pretty certain that the former perpetrated them first. Thus Goebbels accused Jews of "the big lie" when he had presided over the most productive generation of "fake news" up until his time. Putin accuses NATO and the EU of unprovoked aggression against Mother Russia after years of undermining Georgia, Moldova and Serbia, culminating in an all-out war against democratic Ukraine. 

So when President Xi declares that "Western countries led by the United States have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression of China" it is confirmation that encirclement has been China's policy for a long time. China has built up the world's largest navy. The aim clearly is to turn the western Pacific into China's private lake, as the latest incident in which the US is belatedly asserting freedom of navigation in international waters has shown. China uses infrastructure projects, such as the Belt and Road Initiative in Eurasia, railway building in Africa and  a container terminal (among other schemes) in Sri Lanka, to increase its presence and economic power abroad. The projects are financed by loans at interest rates which are detrimental to the recipient, as Sri Lanka has recently discovered. Cambodia and Myanmar are practically Chinese client states, while Iran is viewed by some commentators as being on the way there.

This accounts in part for India's support for Russia at the UN. India fears China, with whom she shares a long land border and sees Russia as a bulwark against China. (One wonders whether the recent mutual grooming in Moscow has altered this view.) 

It would not be surprising if China turned out to behind the bail-out of the UK arm of Silicon Valley Bank by HSBC, which has good relations with the Chinese administration. Xi is now posing as the broker of world peace with his nebulous promise of a settlement to the Ukraine war and his restoration of diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Israel is rightly worried about this last, but it may signal the beginning of the end of the proxy civil war in Yemen. 

America and Tory Britain see the answer to the threat in purely military terms, but we need to catch up in soft power, too. Third party states need to be wooed for liberal democracy, not merely threatened. One hopes that we have not lost India and Iran permanently, but there is a risk that Afghanistan, with her strategic untapped mineral wealth and key geographic position, could yet fall. So far, China's suppression of organised religion, particularly that of the Muslim Uyghurs, seems to have made the Taliban government wary, but that may change.

But the big contest between Western values and the dictatorships is building up in Africa, as the Biden administration has recognised. With our unique position on the continent, Britain and the Commonwealth should be prominent in the argument but, apart from the recently-signed agreement with Rwanda, there is little obvious sign of the necessary engagement.