PATRICK LAWRENCE: New Year’s Notes on Purported Leaders
PATRICK LAWRENCE: New Year’s Notes on Purported Leaders December 31, 2025 Shares It is no use hoping for any alteration in the collective West’s course so long as today’s “purported leaders” remain in office. European leaders in group photo with U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky during their Aug. 18, 2025, visit to Washington. (Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street/Flickr/CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) By Patrick Lawrence Special to Consortium News “H eaven is high and the emperor is far away.” So did Chinese peasants celebrate their distance from the Forbidden City over many centuries now past. I imagine a similar sentiment may prevail in the hyper-centralized People’s Republic. When power is to one or another degree autocratic, power is best when power is distant. So it was for me, if briefly, as 2025 drew to a close. I spent the Christmas holidays, courtesy of my kindly mother-in-law, in the Pacific Northwest and was blessedly far from post-demo...
