No paywall: https://archive.ph/KhMHW https://archive.ph/KhMHW "Vietnam, that 100mn-strong beneficiary of friend-shoring, is “not free”, in US watchdog Freedom

No paywall: https://archive.ph/KhMHW https://archive.ph/KhMHW "Vietnam, that 100mn-strong beneficiary of friend-shoring, is “not free”, in US watchdog Freedom House’s reckoning. Indonesia, the fourth most populous nation on Earth, is just “partly free”. So too is much of the subcontinent, from where lots of the mistreated workers in Qatar have come. There is no western counterbalancing of China, no Asia strategy at all, without the help of some or all of these nations. ...the outrage over Qatar — whose host status we have had 12 years to get used to — has been stunning. I am glad it exists. Give me Enlightenment chauvinism over the pretence that all models of government are equal... The outrage reveals something about those who feel it, though. It is plain now that lots of people have paid lip service to the idea of a changing world, a less western-skewed balance of power, without reckoning with its practical effects... ...Four months have passed since Joe Biden bumped fists with Saudi Arabia’s crown prince... ...He knows that victory depends on enlisting allies that fall short of the Jeffersonian ideal of governance. Others are slower to the same realisation. Liberals have traded relativism for a universal conscience just as the world makes such a thing unaffordable."