An important lesson of the post-Cold War era, learned far too late: allowing totalitarian regimes to interface with the political, economic, and media systems of free nations is like installing a dangerous virus on a computer.

The suicidal folly of globalism was believing the reverse: that freedom and democracy would leak into totalitarian systems and produce quiet revolutions. As we know after 30 years of disastrous experimentation, tyranny is FAR more viral than liberty in the modern world.

Tyranny, like a computer virus, breaks all the rules that allow free markets and democracies to function. Tyranny ruthlessly exploits "weaknesses" in the code of free systems, working from beyond the reach of the legal or social enforcement systems in targeted nations.

Tyrannical nations use brutal methods to extract value from their people, then invest that value to target and destroy industries in free countries, taking control of important supply chains with production unencumbered by the costs free societies impose on their companies.

Tyrannical nations easily overwhelm the media of free societies with propaganda, ideological content and official lies. A tyranny can run op-eds in free-world newspapers while silencing all dissent, both foreign and domestic, in its own state media.

In every realm - economic, political, and information/media - tyrannies easily subvert the ideal of free and fair competition that drives both capitalism and democracy. What is "democracy" in any of its forms, if not a free and fair competition of ideas?

Allowed to interface with the systems of the free world, tyranny cheats and lies, as a computer virus breaks the rules of the systems it infects. Free-market business and political entities cannot fairly "compete" against murderous tyrannical nation-states and their enterprises.

How does a company in a free nation compete against a state-run enterprise supplied with money, materials, and slave labor by a fascist regime? How do you undercut the prices of a "competitor" that doesn't have to worry about expensive labor laws, regulations, or market forces?

The pandemic SHOULD be eye-opening because mankind's great fascist enemy, China, is now openly boasting of how its system is "superior" because of all the ways it cheats and lies, crowing about its victory over the foolish free nations that opened their doors to its influence.

Read Chinese media, listen to their officials: they're acting like a computer virus that throws a big flashing "YOU'VE BEEN HACKED, CHUMP!" message on your screen after it finishes corrupting your operating system and locking up your data for a ransomware payment.

Examples: https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2021/01/04/state-media-china-beat-coronavirus-due-to-its-powerful-and-efficient-political-system/

The new fascists understood that when we compromised our principles and lowered our defenses to do business with them, we exposed the core code of capitalism and democracy to malware attack. We basically gave them our passwords.

Why did the last generation of Western leaders foolishly assume that "engagement" would liberalize tyrannical regimes? The elites told themselves some fairy tales about why the Soviet Union fell, to excuse their previous inability to see its real weaknesses.

But more dangerously, and perhaps more understandably, they overestimated emerging communications technologies as a force for liberalization. They thought telecom and the dawning Internet would be irresistible forces for intellectual freedom and political freedom would follow.

The truth is that authoritarian regimes quickly adapted those technologies into instruments of repression, after using murderous force to suppress promising early revolutions. The fax machine uprising was murdered in Tiananmen Square.

The notion of oppressed people rising up and demanding freedom to improve their miserable standard of living was easily countered by totalitarian regimes co-opting capitalist industrial strategy (and outright stealing capitalist intellectual property) without importing liberty.

And worst of all, we entered this misbegotten and doomed project to liberalize tyrannical regimes through engagement at the same moment Western societies were losing faith in classical liberalism themselves. We brought knives to an ideological gunfight.

We didn't "liberalize" THEM at all. They correctly diagnosed the growing hostility of Western elites to every precept of classical liberalism and free-market capitalism, played off their insecurity and lust for power, and seeded the free world with THEIR fascist ideology.

You can draw a straight line from lefty editorials of the Obama era wishing he could have the dictatorial powers of China's leader, so he could "fix" everything wrong with America, to today's triumphalist Chinese editorials about winning the political war over the coronavirus.

Why did liberalizing through "engagement" fail miserably, bringing tyranny to the West through engagement instead? Bottom line: because the tyrants knew the political, corporate, and cultural leaders of the West didn't want to win that struggle as much as they did. /end