ANDREW NEIL: In the week the attempted assassination of the Slovakian PM made the world even more dangerous... Putin and Xi have now met 43 times and look stronger than ever. As for the West, forget a new Churchill. We barely have a Chamberlain

The world’s two most powerful despots met in Beijing towards the end of this week. Such top-level pow-wows are a regular occurrence these days.

Almost unbelievably, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping were meeting for the 43rd time and Putin was making his 19th visit to Beijing in 24 years.

The economic ties between the two dictatorships are closer than ever, their military links deep and deepening, just as Russia ramps up its spring offensive against Ukraine.

Their common purpose is to challenge the power of America and its allies across the globe. As if to leave the democracies in no doubt about their united intent, Xi saw Putin off on Friday evening with a hug, a rare expression of affection from the normally undemonstrative Chinese leader.

The day before the dictators met there was an assassination attempt on Slovakian prime minister Robert Fico, a long-standing Kremlin fanboy. Fortunately, the gunman failed to kill his target, though the PM remains critically ill in hospital.

But the incident served to remind us that democracies don’t just face dangers from foreign despots such as Putin and Xi. In these febrile times, democracies can also find themselves threatened by the enemy within.

Russia's President Vladimir Putin and China's President Xi Jinping met this week for the 43rd time - which was Putin's 19th visit to Beijing in just 24 years

The hallmark of democracy is that political differences are settled peacefully in debate and at the ballot box. Yet even placid Britain has suffered from exceptions to that rule.

Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered in 2016 by a far-Right fanatic and only three years ago Tory MP David Amess was assassinated by a deranged Islamist.

German politicians are now regularly assaulted when out campaigning, sometimes seriously. Yesterday morning, French police shot dead a man in Rouen as he attempted to set fire to a synagogue.

Elected politicians across the democratic world are having to take security precautions as never before. These new internal threats are clearly linked to the dangers from abroad.

Russia and China spend hundreds of millions on spreading poisonous messages and debilitating fake news via social media in a bid to sow dissension among us.

Nowhere more so than in Slovakia, where the Kremlin’s relentless online campaign of propaganda and disinformation has split the country down the middle into pro and anti-Russian camps.

Fico, an ex-communist turned Right-wing strongman, was elected prime minister for the third time last autumn on a pro-Russian, anti-American ticket.

He pledged to halt arms sales to Ukraine on the campaign slogan: ‘Not a single round’ (of ammunition for Ukrainian forces). He was in the process of taking control of the broadcast media in much the same way as that other East European pro-Kremlin strongman, Viktor Orban, has in Hungary.

Robert Fico, an ex-communist turned Right-wing strongman, was elected Slovakian prime minister for the third time last autumn

He was shot at point-blank range, requiring life-saving surgery, while visiting the town of Handlova on Wednesday. A 71-year-old man was arrested, pictured above

There have been regular street protests against Fico’s rule. When he was last in power (2012-2018) they were so serious he was forced to step down.

The rhetoric is ugly (one of his supporters blamed the media for the attempt on his life, calling them ‘dirty anti-Slovak prostitutes’) and the threat of violence simmers just below the surface of this highly polarised society — so much so that the country’s moderate president decided not to stand again because of relentless death threats to her and her family.

It was Neville Chamberlain who dismissed the Nazis’ annexation of the Sudetenland in the old Czechoslovakia as ‘a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing’, but events in little known nations have a habit of blowing up into major conflagrations.

It was 110 years ago next month that an assassination in Eastern Europe led directly to the prolonged carnage of World War I.

Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was on a state visit to Bosnia, which had been annexed by the Austro-Hungarian empire, when he and his wife were murdered by a young Serbian nationalist.

After the attempt on Fico’s life this week, people have been understandably worried that it could spark a similar powder keg. I doubt it. There is not the same network of interlocking alliances as there was back then.

Within a month of Sarajevo, the Austro-Hungarian empire had declared war on Serbia, egged on by Germany which, in turn, decided it was a good time to declare war on Russia, Serbia’s ally. Germany also decided to invade France through Belgium, which brought Britain into the war.

And four years of grim, murderous trench warfare began.

Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was on a state visit to Bosnia when he and his wife were murdered by a young Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo in 1914

These are unpredictable times so it is wise not to be too categorical. But Slovakia 2024 is not, in my judgment, Sarajevo 1914. Nevertheless, our age is fraught with danger.

Faced with a growing autocratic threat, the world’s democracies are riddled with internal divisions — and divided among themselves — when they should be united. It is tough enough to stand up to the likes of Putin and Xi when there is general agreement. It is all the more difficult when some democratic leaders, like Orban and Fico, are essentially batting for the other side.

Democratic disarray is matched by autocratic unity. Xi and Putin, and their junior partners Iran and North Korea, are united in their mission to change the world order to their advantage.

The most vital element in the Xi-Putin ‘no limits’ bromance is China’s crucial support for Russia’s defence industries.

Chinese technology now flows in large quantities to Russian weapons manufacturers — such as £800 million of machine tools (almost 90 per cent of all Russia’s machine tool imports), electronics, semiconductors (over £300 million-worth last year) and numerous ‘dual-use’ items (which can be used for civilian or military purposes).

Trade between Russia and China is booming, as it is between Russia and India (another democracy you can’t trust to stand up to the autocrats).

‘Russia would struggle to sustain its assault on Ukraine without China’s support,’ says U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. It is allowing the Kremlin to produce arms and ammunition at a faster pace than it did during the Cold War.

The Sino-Russian trade might be essential to Moscow but Beijing is doing very nicely out of it, too. Over 20 per cent of its oil imports now come from Russia — China’s single biggest source of imported oil — and natural gas is also flowing fast from Russia, up 62 per cent year on year. Nor does the co-operation stop at trade.

Last March, the navies of Russia, China and Iran took part in a joint exercise in the Gulf of Oman, a crucial seaway for the Middle East oil and gas trade, the latest in a series of naval drills which started six years ago. Last summer, there were even joint Russian-Chinese naval patrols off the coast of Alaska.

The dictators are emboldened by the dearth of democratic leadership. Europe is especially bereft of it. French President Emmanuel Macron sees himself as the voice of the Continent but he can’t even speak for his own country, where he is deeply unpopular, never mind Europe.

His musings on geopolitics have the trajectory of a ricochet. He cosied up to Putin even as he was preparing to invade Ukraine.

Now he says Nato, an alliance he recently pronounced as brain-dead, might have to deploy boots on the ground in Ukraine, a policy for which he has zero support anywhere else in Europe.

Macron has already lost much of Francophone Africa to Putin, whose paramilitary groups have wreaked havoc in the huge Sahel region, resulting in anti-French coup d’etats in the former French colonies of Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso.

The Ukrainians would be mad to think he could be their saviour. No wonder the Chinese refer to him as ‘Macaron’ — maybe hard on the outside but definitely soft in the centre.

There’s even more of a leadership vacuum in Germany, where Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition government of Social Democrats, Greens and free-market Liberals is tearing itself apart over public spending cuts as the economy teeters on the brink of recession.

A round 80 per cent of Germans tell pollsters they are unhappy with their leaders. Scholz barely has the charisma to run the Dusseldorf Rotary Club much less rally the democracies to stand up to the despots.

Then there’s dear old Blighty. As Europe’s foremost military power, we should be in a position of some leadership. But Prime Minister Rishi Sunak seems to have little interest in defence or foreign affairs and none of the leadership qualities the situation demands.

He did attempt this week to address our precarious position: ‘The dangers that threaten our country are real. They are increasing in number. An axis of authoritarian states like Russia, Iran, North Korea and China is working together to undermine us and our values.’

Fair enough. All true. But if he really took his own warnings seriously, he’d be doing more than increasing defence spending by a mere 0.2 or 0.3 per cent of GDP.

And he’d be pumping far more into intelligence agencies like GCHQ, which works closely with its American equivalent to counter the growing danger of Chinese and Russian cyber attacks.

Like every other major democracy, despite all the talk of danger, he is not prepared to put the economy on a war footing, a deterrent the dictators would take seriously. Instead we’ll debate endlessly about gender self-ID, which the dictators take as a sign of our decline.

I have no hope of things being better under Keir Starmer. The Labour leader has no experience of geopolitics, defence or foreign affairs — and no historic knowledge to guide him through any of it.

He will be even less of a war leader than Sunak. His party’s instincts on foreign affairs are generally abysmal, more posturing than policy. Our voice in global affairs, currently diminished, would be barely a whisper.

Of course, only America can provide the leadership the democracies require with, as in the past, strong supporting roles from important allies like Britain, France and Germany.

But just to assert that is grounds for despair, given the presidential contest currently playing out across the Atlantic between two gerontocratic contestants, both unfit to lead America in these dangerous times.

The fact Joe Biden and Donald Trump are the best the U.S. can come up with when autocrats are on the march is a cause for despair among all democrats — and much chortling in the redoubts of the dictators. Ukraine has every right to be worried.

As the China-backed Russian war machine churns out a mass of weapons and military kit, Biden has been slow to send Kyiv the weapons it needs to win.

Meanwhile, Trump shows little interest in helping Kyiv and his MAGA wing of the Republican Party is openly hostile to Ukraine. His idea of a peace agreement seems to involve giving away huge chunks of Ukraine to Putin.

No wonder Ukrainians view the prospect of a summer Russian offensive with trepidation.

The dismemberment of Ukraine would encourage Putin to seek further territorial gains elsewhere, placing Eastern Europe in great peril.

Yet even that might not be the greatest threat to our way of life. That is more likely to come from a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

Putin and Xi's friendship is an ever-growing concern to the Western world, Andrew Neil warns

We do not know if that is on Xi’s immediate horizon. But if the West was to suffer a major setback in Ukraine he could be emboldened, if not to mount an invasion then perhaps a naval and aerial blockade to bring the island to its knees.

Be in no doubt, the global consequences of either an invasion or a blockade would be disastrous — far more serious than anything that might happen in Ukraine.

The world’s economy depends on semiconductors, or chips, which are ubiquitous in almost everything we use these days, from phones to fridges.

Taiwan makes around 90 per cent of the most sophisticated ones. Should that supply dry up, the world economy would very quickly be brought to its knees.

Every major country would be plunged into a downturn as bad, if not worse, than the Great Depression of the 1930s, with all the terrible political fallout that comes in the wake of an economic slump. That is why the current dearth of democratic leadership is so dangerous. Dictators are only deterred by democracies that are robust, consistent, well-armed and well-led.

For the moment, we have none of the above. I have enough faith in our system and way of life to believe we will eventually rally behind leaders who see the dangers and are up to the challenge.

But for now I cannot discern from whence they will come. It could get worse before it gets better. Forget a Winston Churchill. We barely have a Neville Chamberlain at the moment.