WESTERNERS ARE CONDESCENDING TO IDEOLOGIES THAT ARE BENEATH DECENT PEOPLE:

[A]ny historian worth his or her salt will tell you that dictatorship, economic prosperity and growing international influence cannot exist side by side for long. Either the dictatorship has to go, or the prosperity and influence begin to dwindle. This is what has happened to China. As the dictatorship has grown stronger, the country's prosperity and influence have waned.

Today, China admits to a debt that is over 250% of its GDP (Greece was declared bankrupt at 127%). China experts warn that there is additional hidden debt, which is around 44% of the admitted debt. Add all this up and we are talking about a total debt in the region of 350% of GDP -- a completely incredible and totally untenable situation.

Plain-clothed security personnel scuffle with demonstrators outside a People's Bank of China building in Zhengzhou, China July 10, 2022

China's declining prosperity: security personnel scuffle with demonstrators during a protest over the freezing of deposits by some rural-based banks in Zhengzhou in July

When dozens of provincial banks became unable to serve their customers recently, tanks were sent in to protect the banks from the incensed population.

Xi Jinping wants to be re-elected General Secretary of his party. Yet he cannot afford to stand in that election as the man on whose watch the economy went "belly up," as the Americans say. He has obviously decided to "do a Putin," in other words to mobilize support with belligerent behavior.

We no longer see a China that is confident that the future is hers. We see a failing authoritarian regime on the verge of panic. [...]

Only 10 years ago, while China looked like the great economic power of the future, Russia seemed to be a hegemonic geopolitical power in the making. Back in 2006, it had even cobbled together an international alliance called BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China, joined by South Africa in 2010), the stated aim of which was to end global American hegemony in the field of advanced technology. The original BRIC states also vowed to undermine the international standing of the US dollar by producing their own BRIC currency. In Europe, Russian hybrid "soft power" was taking over politics, culture and the media.

By 2020, however, it was becoming clear that the BRICS alliance was unable to achieve any of its stated aims. BRICS had not superseded the Americans in the field of advanced technology nor managed to dent the US dollar.

Meanwhile, Russia's version of "soft power" was also beginning to fizzle out. Trump lost the election in the US, and in Europe, authoritarian and populist parties sustained and (in some cases) financed by Putin were rapidly losing ground.

In 2017, Emmanuel Macron won the French presidential elections against Putin ally Marine Le Pen, running on a modern, progressive, non-nationalist platform. In the Bavarian elections of 2018, the far-right AfD party, instead of sweeping the board as expected, was undermined by the Greens, which became the second most powerful party.

In 2019, the Strache scandal decapitated the Austrian far right. In Poland and Hungary, the regimes began losing control of big cities in local elections. Finally, despite much pre-election bombast, the European far right did not win the 2019 elections to the European Parliament.

Europeans were turning Putin's friends out of power, replacing them with centrist-liberal-green coalitions. In 2021, the far-right was thrown out of parliament in Bulgaria, as people elected to power a progressive center-green coalition. Two months previously, Germany had elected a left-green-liberal coalition government. [...]

Against this backdrop, the FBI's raid on Trump's home is a signal not only that the political time of such men (why does it always seem to be men?) has passed, but also that, as their political futures disappear, what awaits them are criminal charges.

People like Putin, Xi Jinping and their imitators will be around for a long time. But theirs is not the future. The "tide in the affairs of men" has turned. Now it is our job to take it "at the flood," securing a future in which government of the people, by the people, for the people remains dominant.

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