In December, amid sub-zero temperatures, thousands of Mongolians turned up in Sükhbaatar Square in the capital, Ulaanbaatar, to protest about rampant corruption, and for a moment the Asian democracy, sitting uneasily between China and Russia, looked as though it might crumble.
That this would have mattered to the west is shown by the number of European politicians who since have travelled to the capital, including Emmanuel Macron, the French president, the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, the German foreign
