The crumbling of the Crinks – China, Russia, Iran, North Korea – is one of the most heartening developments of 2024. To what do we owe this felicitous development?

President Joe Biden claims that it is thanks to him that Iran, Hezbollah and Russia are far weaker than when he took office. That is an unusual take on history but it does have some substance. After all, it was Biden’s catastrophic departure from Afghanistan that emboldened Putin to invade Ukraine. It was also Biden’s relaxation of sanctions on Iran that pumped billions of dollars into the hands of Iran’s mullahs, which they channelled into arming their proxy militias – Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, et al. The rivers of gold funded the mountainous stockpiles of weapons and the miles of underground tunnels in Gaza that emboldened Hamas to launch its barbarously bloodthirsty attack on Israel. And yes, it was the conduct of these disastrous conflicts that has weakened Russia and Iran so, yes, you can say that Biden played an ignominious role in weakening his enemies.

In reality, credit must go to Ukraine and Israel who, in spite of the pleas from Biden that they fight with one arm tied behind their backs fought as if their existence depended on winning. Which it did.

But you would be wrong to ignore the role of the Crink dictators in weakening themselves, particularly, Russia and Iran, with their long imperial histories and grandiose imperial pretensions.

China also has a long imperial history and grand imperial intentions to dominate the globe but has played its cards more cautiously, engaging in a massive arms buildup, menacing any country that dares to question its absurds claims to the South China Sea, and repeatedly threatening Taiwan while stopping short of invasion. It is China’s domestic policies, particularly its property bubble which it refuses to allow to burst, which is hobbling it.

Whatever imperial ambitions impoverished North Korea has to dominate its peninsula, it has enough trouble stopping defectors deserting the workers’ paradise. It arms itself to the teeth fundamentally to try to maintain its diabolical dynasty.

Dictators with imperial pretensions are always prone to overreach because they lack the sobering discipline of popular elections, and the slings and arrows of a free press to keep them acquainted with reality.

Anyone brave enough to speak truth to power in a dictatorship finds themselves, in the immortal words of W. S. Gilbert, sitting: ‘in solemn silence in a dull, dark dock, In a pestilential prison, with a lifelong lock, Awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock, From a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block.’

Decapitation, of course, is démodé these days. Putin prefers poisoning or defenestration. Public hangings are preferred in Iran, which exceeded its own record, set in 2023, of executing 853 people, executing 901 people in 2024, including 40 in one week in December. It was almost as if it was intent on bettering its entry in some grisly Iranian Guinness Book of Record.

Nobody knows how many people are executed in China – the statistics are a state secret – although it is a safe bet that the organs of the executed are farmed out and sold to the highest bidder.

The number of executions in North Korea is also unknown although public executions have apparently increased with defectors reporting that recently a 22-year-old was executed in public for the heinous crime of listening to 70 South Korean songs and sharing three South Korean films.

The pattern repeats itself in dictatorships because they perpetuate their power through the creation of a climate of terror. This can be remarkably successful for a very long time. The death of Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States at 100, in the dying days of 2024, is reminder of just how long Iran has been under the jackboot of the Islamofascists. Ayatollah Khomeini seized power at the end of 1979, at the start of the penultimate year of Carter’s term. He and his president and successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, have been in power ever since.

Putin has been in power since 1999 switching between president and prime minister to pay lip service to term limits.

In China, the communist party has been in power since 1949 and in North Korea, the state that created socialism in one family, the Kim family – Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, and Kim Jong-un – has ruled North Korea since 1948.

Yet, for all the spoils of longevity in office that dictators enjoy, surrounding themselves with sycophants can sow the seeds of their downfall since one thing that is often in short supply is opposition to their bad ideas. Putin has been open about his ambition to rebuild the Russian empire. Who was going to oppose him? Especially, when Putin had made a practice of invading countries and had gotten away with it. What did the West do about the annexations of South Ossetia or Crimea? Not enough to deter Putin from invading Ukraine.

Often dictators attribute the benefits they derive from the weakness other countries exhibit to their own genius. The obvious example is that of Hitler who believed himself a military genius because of the appeasement of the Allies.

Iran’s murderous mullahs have been lucky to benefit from from the weakness and errors committed by a succession of US presidents starting with Carter’s botched rescue of the hostages held in the US embassy in Tehran.  This was the polar opposite of the Israeli raid on Entebbe only four years earlier. The Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 played into Iran’s hands by weakening Iraq, its neighbour and enemy. The Obama administration made a bad situation much worse by promising Iran massive relief of sanctions if it would delay its acquisition of nuclear weapons for a decade. Although Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018 and applied ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions on Iran and any country doing business with it, Biden resumed the disastrous policy leading directly to Hamas’ invasion of Israel.

Russia benefited for decades from the determination of European countries not to invest in military deterrence and to free ride instead on America’s nuclear deterrent and its military. This left Europe free to sabotage its economy by pursuing mad environmental policies such as banning fracking and instead rely on Russian supplies of gas and to pursue delusional climate policies resulting in the deindustrialisation of the continent starting with Germany and latterly destroying its agricultural industries. These policies have also benefited China which has taken on the industrial capacity of most of the West. China has also has also benefited from decades of US wishful thinking while it granted its enemy unreciprocated access to its markets. The worst mistake the West could make now is to overestimate the strength of the Crinks and make concessions.