Lessons of the past: principles must be “accompanied by steel along with good intentions,” or liberty itself will wither.

In Brief by Probe International

For the original commentary by Maurice Cousins, go to the publisher’s website here.

China knows exactly what it is doing. This is old wine in new bottles. The Soviet Union long ago mastered this kind of cynical information warfare. Moscow understood that the West could be weakened, not only by sowing internal division, but by its own ideals. It excelled in a form of moral arbitrage: the exploitation of Western virtues that sat uneasily with the West’s strategic interests. 

Maurice Cousins, the campaign director of Net Zero Watch—a critic of the U.K.’s government’s “climate crisis” policies— argues that China is strategically using climate commitments, such as President Xi Jinping’s announcement of a 7–10% emissions reduction by 2035, to manipulate Western ideals while continuing to expand its fossil fuel use.

This approach, he says, mirrors Soviet-era tactics of exploiting Western values to weaken its resolve. While Western media celebrated China’s pledge as a significant step, Cousins points out that it falls short of the Paris Agreement goals, serving more to flatter Western moral sensibilities, even as China increases coal production and monopolizes critical minerals.

He cautions that the West’s focus on symbolic climate targets is leading to industrial decline, economic vulnerability, and worse. Drawing on the wisdom of Margaret Thatcher who “saw this danger very clearly,” Cousins writes:

In Statecraft, written a decade after the Cold War, she warned that Western democracies were prone to “a recurring mixture of naïve idealism with a distaste for power.” Seduced by the “end of history” mindset, elites thought only of “the arts of peace.” Human rights and welfare crowded out security, defence was cut, and vigilance ebbed. Her warning was blunt: principles must be “accompanied by steel along with good intentions,” or liberty itself would wither. “And, yes, all this does matter now,” she wrote. Forgetting what we faced in the Cold War, she argued, meant we would be “incapable of securing, let alone enlarging, the gains that liberty has made.”

Thatcher’s words gain renewed urgency in the example of modern-day Beijing and President Xi Jinping’s use of the climate agenda to strengthen China’s economy while undermining others, dominating the global wind and solar markets despite the unreliability of its own renewable energy infrastructure. [See: China’s Energy Dream, a prescient 2021 Probe International report illuminating the reality of China’s reliance on fossil fuels and the naïveté of “green losers” in the West believing otherwise.]

This approach enables China to profit from selling costly and unreliable energy technologies to the West, while Western nations, through unilateral climate policies, harm their own economies with escalating energy prices and supply shortages. For the Chinese Communist Party, securing fossil fuels is vital for economic growth and survival, making CO2 reduction a priority only for those it aims to weaken.