The Telegraph, June 10, Sir Iain Duncan Smith MP
As the G7 leaders meet this week, they would do well to spend some time dwelling on China’s threat to democracy and contemplate the words of Ronald Reagan. “Freedom”, he wrote, “is never more than one generation away from extinction.”
At the end of the Cold war, instead of listening to Reagan, the West took for granted the idea that liberal democracy had “won”. Sadly, this was a false assumption. And in the intervening period, the economic rise of communist China has made fools of successive leaders of the free world. Their lazy assumption that the free market would usher in democracy to China was wrong, but it excused their greedy pursuit of cheaper goods, services and technology from China.
China’s Communist leaders learned an important lesson: that to avoid the Soviet fate they needed a powerful economy. We have given them that. Now, this growing economic dominance has boxed Western nations in. Today, the free world, like some drug addict, has allowed itself to become dependent on a nation that attacks our core values of democracy, human rights and the rule of law.
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