Narcissism is the open-and-shut condition of the elites who fashion and execute American foreign policy. And they are utterly incapable of seeing their country as it is.

All those malign authoritarians, more than 20 of them, who gathered in Tianjin at the end of August for a summit of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation: This was a festival of anti-Americanism, you need to know.

No other way to understand it. Making it all worse, Xi Jinping then invited more than two dozen heads of state to Beijing to mark the 80th anniversary of the 1945 victory.

How dare the Chinese president organise an elaborate military parade to celebrate China’s role in the historical defeat of the Imperial Japanese Army? How dare he stir pride in the People’s Republic’s determination to defend its sovereignty while refuting the revisionism — nonsensical, but prevalent — that airbrushes the Chinese Communist Party out of the history of World War II.

The temerity of this man to suggest it was anyone other than the Americans and their corrupt clients, the Chinese Nationalists, who did the fighting and won the war. Let us not, for heaven’s sake, make any mention of the 12 million to 20 million Chinese — there is no precise figure — who died in consequence of Imperial Japan’s aggressions.

No, nothing to honour in any of this. Between the SCO and the festivities in Beijing, it was all faintly demonic, a thinly veiled challenge to what the US and the rest of the West insists is a “rules-based order”.

I keep a file labelled “Sentences to love in The New York Times". From it: “It shows how Mr Xi is trying to turn history, diplomacy and military might into tools for reshaping a global order that has been dominated by the United States.”

The mainstream reporting on the SCO and the subsequent gathering in Beijing went on obsessively for days. You would think the Chinese were on the brink of starting another Pacific War and “invading” Taiwan – “invading” in quotation marks because a nation cannot invade territory that historically belongs to it.

As I read through the coverage, I marvelled at the wall-to-wall West-centricity of it. The Chinese, the Russians, the Indians, various others, even the North Koreans: They think of nothing and do nothing that does not arise from their all-consuming animosity toward the........

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