Putin, Xi and One Dead Pope

By Daniel Henninger,

Russia and China want to replace the West. Benedict wanted to save it.

A big story the past year has been the firming alliance between the world’s two leading autocrats, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, predicated on their conclusion that the West is in terminal decline. Fortuitously, the world has just lost its most relevant analyst of the presumption that the West is finished—Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.

Benedict’s funeral is Thursday, and what we should not do is let him pass into history. He was a man for our season.

It would be insulting to the seriousness of Benedict’s criticism of Western culture to say he shared the views of Messrs. Putin and Xi, whose ideas about the West’s moral decline merely support strategies of cynical opportunism. Russian bots feed destructive garbage into the West’s social-media ecosystem, which is also the reason U.S. national-security specialists—like many parents—believe the TikTok platform is being used by China’s leadership as a force multiplier of cultural erosion.

Benedict, by contrast, desperately wanted to save the West and the Judeo-Christian tradition to which he had devoted his life.

Their conclusion is that the West’s populations have become morally soft and politically disconnected from any firm belief in the liberal democratic values that won two world wars and helped the West rise to economic and cultural dominance. Messrs. Putin and Xi think the Western belief system is vulnerable now and replaceable.

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