For most of the Western world, 2020 will be remembered as the year democratic governments concentrated all their available resources – with varying degrees of success – on tackling the coronavirus pandemic.
Regimes of a more authoritarian persuasion, however, have seen the crisis as an opportunity to shift the global balance of power in their favour.
Take Russia's recent egregious behaviour. Having initially employed its considerable cyber warfare capabilities to hack into a number of Western drug companies and research laboratories – including several based in Britain – it transpires Moscow has undertaken a massive cyber attack on the US government with the aim of obtaining highly classified material.
Although the Trump administration has been reluctant to discuss publicly the true extent of the attack, it appears Russian hackers succeeded in breaking into a range of key US government networks, including the Treasury and Commerce Departments, where they managed to acquire access to the email systems.
Moreover, the cyber assault on the US, which experts believe constitutes the largest attack on the federal government in years, has taken place against a background of increasingly aggressive Russian conduct, especially in Europe.
As General Sir Nick Carter, the head of Britain's Armed Forces, warned in his annual speech to the Royal United Services Institute, this includes Russia deploying a dozen warships and combat aircraft from Russia's Northern, Baltic and Black Sea fleets earlier this month in what Sir Nick called a "show of force in the waters off the British and Irish coasts".
Nor is Russian President Vladimir Putin's desire to confound his foes confined to foreign adversaries. A clever sting operation by Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, with the Bellingcat investigative website, has revealed how Moscow's FSB intelligence service, which reports directly to Putin, attempted to murder Navalny with Novichok earlier this year.
China is another authoritarian regime that has exploited the pandemic to its advantage. Having started the year facing international ostracism over its efforts to cover-up the original Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan, Beijing now feels sufficiently emboldened to ramp up tensions in the Indo-Pacific region by sailing an aircraft carrier strike group through the Taiwan Strait for the first time this year.
Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives for the closing session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on May 27. Photo / AP
Meanwhile Turkey, where the Islamist regime of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has intensified its repression of secularist opposition groups, has taken advantage of the pandemic hiatus to flex its muscles in the South Caucasus – where Erdogan has provided Azerbaijan with military support for its assault on the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh – and the eastern Mediterranean – where Turkey's provocative gas drilling activities off the Cypriot coast have provoked the European Union's ire.
Efforts to thwart the rise of authoritarianism across the globe have not been helped by the divisions that have surfaced in the Western alliance. While many of the tensions in transatlantic relations have been blamed on Donald Trump's bombastic style, significant differences, too, are evident among European leaders, as the lamentable response of EU leaders to the discovery of a new strain of coronavirus in Britain has shown.
Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, left, with Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi in Ankara on December 17. Photo / AP
Despite repeated appeals for European leaders to combine their efforts to defeat the virus, the willingness of so many to impose draconian measures against the British people in their hour of need makes a complete laughing stock of the concept of European unity. The blatant attempt by more hardline member states to impose what amounts to a blockade against Britain certainly does not bode well for US President-elect Joe Biden's hopes of reviving the Western alliance when he takes office next month.
Biden says that one of his key priorities as president will be to stem the authoritarian tide that is sweeping across the globe. To this end he wants to revive ties with key democratic allies, thereby forming an effective bulwark against attempts by countries like Russia, China and Turkey to shift the global power balance in their favour.
Yet Biden's hopes of forming an effective coalition to counter the authoritarian threat will be seriously undermined if countries that are supposed to be allies are willing to abandon the principle of mutual cooperation the moment it suits their interests.
Freight trucks lined up in Manston Airport in the UK after French authorities closed the border earlier this week. Photo / AP
This reprehensible attitude is epitomised by French President Emmanuel Macron, whose willingness to inflict further hardship on the British people when they are already suffering the effects of further lockdown measures, has shown the entente cordiale in its true light.
The moral of Europe's disobliging response to Britain's coronavirus woes will certainly not be lost on the autocrats and dictators who have most to lose from a revivified Western alliance. For, so long as profound divisions exist among the leaders of the free world, there will be no one to resist authoritarianism's relentless march.
- Con Coughlin is the Telegraph's defence editor and chief foreign affairs columnist
