Britain has already surrendered to China’s war against Western civilization.

Twenty-two years ago today, the West woke up to a new diabolical existential enemy. When 19 terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners and crashed two into the Twin Towers, killing nearly 3,000 people, the American government and its European counterparts learned with horror that the fall of the Soviet Union had not, in fact, brought about the end of history. . – that is, the final exhaustion of the great dialectical battle between the forces of freedom and fundamentalism.

Instead, it turned out that there were people who were willing to blow themselves up to destroy the West. His fundamentalism boiled down to a complete rejection of Western civilization and, in particular, its idea of ​​freedom anchored in individual freedom and personal autonomy rather than unconditional submission to God.

As terrifying as this attack was, at least it was tangible. The new struggle seemed frankly Manichean, between individual freedom and collective fundamentalism; the vital force and the death instinct.

The terrorists, extolling their murderous acts, attacked the infidels in the open. The movement had prominent villains, notably Osama Bin Laden, a Saudi millionaire who seemed pathologically obsessed with Whitney Houston and yet so despised American consumerism that he refused to use a refrigerator. The gauntlet thrown by these terrorists brought out the essence of the West. Cowboy President George W. Bush promised, in a Texas-smoking tone, to hunt down the ringleaders “dead or alive.”

Today, the enemy we face – the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – is, in some ways, more terrifying than Al Qaeda. This new enemy does not seek to destroy Western values ​​by waging open war. Rather, it is steadily making freedom and democracy obsolete by infiltrating the shadows of our economic and political system. The CCP has been extraordinarily successful in capturing the British capital.

In recent decades it has acquired strategic infrastructure in industry and energy, from Heathrow Airport to Hinkley Point. Beijing has also effectively co-opted much of British academia, much of which is now financially dependent on Chinese donations and students. And there are suspicions that it has extended its tentacles to the heart of our democracy, with alleged spies in Parliament.

This penetration into all aspects of British life has given China leverage to silence elite criticism of its disastrous human rights record and aggression towards Taiwan. It amounts to a new way of attacking the West, and this time it is not the work of a heterogeneous group of guerrillas but of a ruthless two-faced State.

It is chilling that Project Britain is only a sideshow in China’s quest for power at all costs. Having influence over UK assets allows Beijing to get away with nationalist aggression in the South China Sea. However, this capture has been ensured by the relentless willingness of our ruling class to endanger their own country for the sake of global investment.

What began as naïveté about the price of Chinese money has ossified into manic defiance; The attitude at the top of the Government seems to be that Britain is in too deep to back down. He Foreign Secretary James Cleverly recently visited Beijingand has boasted of securing £600m in licenses to launch fund management companies there. At the same time, he lectures the British media that disengaging from China is not “credible.”

The fact that we have only now learned of the alleged spy scandal in China, despite this person being arrested in March, suggests that the British state is more interested in containing public outrage than cleaning up its own house. Instead of leading the fight against China, Britain has already given up.

For the country that strove to be America’s most loyal partner in the War on Terror, such defeatism is extraordinary. Our postwar global strategy, which has been to prosper as a mid-sized power in a world of superpowers punching above our weight, may never recover.

It is difficult to understand such epic stupidity on the part of our political leaders. But it surely comes down to a basic inability to recognize that the CCP poses a greater threat to human progress than primitive Wahhabism. By promoting a rival system of civilization anchored in security rather than freedom, your challenge is fundamental.

As China demonstrated at the beginning of the Covid pandemic, authoritarian states can formidably crush certain threats. But ultimately, humanity has not survived and progressed for hundreds of thousands of years because of its ability to anticipate all the risks that lie ahead. We are not prey animals with eyes on the sides of our heads; We are big-brained, autonomous linguistic beings who thrive in collaborative and creative communities that can tolerate a level of novelty and heretical thinking.

The West is in danger of forgetting this lesson. Chinese political culture, on the other hand, held back by authoritarian rulers, never learned this.

What our elites, lacking both imaginative reach and intellectual depth, have failed to understand is that a world dominated by Beijing, defined by a yearning for certainty rather than a striving for freedom, will be a dead end for the human progress. It would be a world that is both claustrophobic and stagnant.

Any future technological leaps are unlikely to improve our quality of life and will instead center around human targeting, prediction and control. This danger is compounded by the fact that the AI ​​weapons industry, as well as surveillance capitalism, are already beginning to form a closed loop of mutually imposed innovation. They are powered by a similar core technology architecture, comprising transistors, specialized microchips, and big data analytics.

It is up for debate whether our confidence and self-knowledge needed to avoid that future are buried somewhere or whether they have been sacrificed in too many dirty deals. What is clear is that we are running out of time to remember what we stand for.