Beijing and Moscow unite in efforts to redefine democracy itself

The world scarcely needed another ominous portent just now, but the opening of the Winter Olympics in Beijing surely provided one with chilling global implications.

Officials of the U.S. and a number of its democratic allies are boycotting these games in protest of Beijing's human rights record, including policies that minority Muslim Uyghurs in China regard as genocide.

But there in Beijing, meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping as the games began, was Russian President Vladimir Putin in a grinning show of solidarity and simpatico. As former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor put it on CNN, "here are the [world's] two largest autocrats, apparently in sync."

Both have been at the top of their national power hierarchies for a decade or more (Putin's pre-eminence having begun in the 1990s) with no end in sight. Their authoritarian, one-party governments dominate public life in