Posted on 10/07/2022 6:11:24 AM PDT by Salohcin
Will 2022 turn out be a hinge year, as a moment when long-standing trends in geopolitics suddenly shifted in a different direction? This week, two important writers, one a long-established and prolific historian, the other a provocative presence on the internet, have argued persuasively that the answer is yes. But there's one other interesting point in common: Neither sees the United States as having played a decisive role in the sudden shift.
Over the years, Niall Ferguson has written admiringly about the 19th-century Rothschilds and the 20th century’s Henry Kissinger and has highlighted the positive achievements of Britain’s empire and America’s internationalist foreign policy. Over the past dozen years, he argues in his latest Bloomberg column, the world has “entered a new and more dangerous era, in which a superpower rivalry is likely to be associated with economic crisis, a 'democratic recession' ... and increased conflict.“
This sort of thing has happened before. Just as the World War I settlement was opposed by 20th-century revisionist powers (Germany’s Adolf Hitler, Italy’s Benito Mussolini, Japan’s military), so America’s 21st-century vision of a rule-based, democratic-dominated world order has been challenged by today’s revisionists: Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, Iran’s mullahs.
Revisionists gained ground through daring and luck in the 1930s and, in the awful years of 1940 and 1941, seemed on the brink of world domination. Twenty-first century revisionists seem to have made serious blunders and to have run out of luck in 2022.
Ferguson has backed U.S. aid to Ukraine and has called for more. He is pleased that “Putin has shrunk in stature on the international stage” as his plans to annex Ukraine have dissolved in pathetic failure. “A leader I have long defined as a Mafia godfather is looking less and less like Michael Corleone and more and more like Tony Montana in the last scenes of Scarface.”
And China, which many thought was heading toward economic superiority over the U.S. and strategic dominance in Asia, suddenly seems in sharp decline. “The stifling effect of Xi’s COVID policy on the Chinese economy is real,” notes Ferguson, “as are the dire demographic trends and the latent financial crisis within the real estate sector.”
He doesn’t predict Putin’s or Xi’s quick overthrow. But he predicts “the Chinese Communist party will not celebrate its centenary in power” in 2049.
Unlike Ferguson, Richard Hanania, an academic and relative newcomer (2018) to Twitter, advocates something like an isolationist foreign policy for America. But like Ferguson, he has been pleasantly surprised by Putin’s debacle in Ukraine.
In a Substack essay, he argues events in 2022 have vindicated Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 “end of history” thesis, that after the vanquishing of communism, “there would be no serious alternatives to liberal democracy.”
Both the Russian and Chinese alternatives, in his view, are now discredited. Putin’s Russia has proved “to be fundamentally incompetent and lacking in appeal even to Russians themselves that live outside its borders.” A skeptic about U.S. aid to Ukraine, Hanania seems content that “Russia is certain to remain a poor, backward country indefinitely into the future, regardless of whether it adds a few million more pensioners in the Donbas.”
Hanania quotes tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s observation that China is “a weirdly autistic country.” He calls Xi’s zero-COVID program “an insane policy choice,” given that even China’s vaccine mostly prevents deadly illness in the nonelderly. China’s rigid lockdowns have choked off economic growth and personal initiative in ways that seem difficult to overcome.
“I used to think that China could be the kind of autist that builds SpaceX,” Hanania writes. “Instead, it’s the kind that’s afraid to look strangers in the eye and stays up all night playing with his train collection.” If “Russia was too risk-acceptant, and intoxicated with masculine dreams of conquest,” then “China has been too risk-averse, and shown itself to be too neurotic to be able to respond to threats in a measured way.”
Both American political parties, as Hanania notes, have supported Ukraine against Russia and have signaled support for Taiwan against invasion by China. U.S. aid, doled out sparingly by the Biden administration, has at least marginally helped Ukraine, and U.S. support may be deterring China from invading Taiwan.
But the bulk of damage to Russian and Chinese revisionist ambitions has been self-inflicted and serious enough to make 2022 look like a hinge year in history. And maybe for the U.S. too — a subject for a later column.
A hinge year is bad - but not as bad as an inflection point. I really hate those.
The one thread that ties all of chinese history together is xenophobia. Whenever they venture out into the world, they soon become paranoid and withdraw into a cultural cocoon.
The West, for all our flaws is more like the Borg. We assimilate. It's messy as hell, and involves periods of rot, but after a period of pain (which we are entering), the offal is eventually swept away and we emerge stronger. Hell, even the Irish are somewhat civilized now.
Per the four-generational-cycle theory of history, it’s about time for PRC to experience a major shift, being 73 years since the revolution.
If communism collapses in China the way it did in the former USSR 72 years after its 1917 revolution, that doesn’t mean the result will be a John Locke-kind of republic, any more than it did in Russia.
The Chinese have been ruled by autocrats since the Shang dynasty, and moreover their defining political philosopher was Confucius, not Aristotle as in the West (until the rise of Romanticism and Hegelian dialectic 200 years ago).
And one more thing: the Romans had an empire, the Mongols had an empire, the British had an empire...the Chinese have never been into far-flung empires—they had their chance in the days of Zheng He and decided against it. Admittedly they’re trying to buy up the third world, particularly Africa and South America, but I suspect that has more to do with access to natural materials than actually wanting to rule the world.
Hinge Year?
We always think “now” is some peak point.
Although I will admit things seem to be changing quite a bit, it’s probably more magnified because we are imbued in it.
Can we break out all the old clips of “tipping point” and some of the other phrases we heard during the Trump admin?
What about Y2K. That went over without all the drama that got built up to.
I’m not trying to minimize the things that are going on right now. I think even a lot of us who predicted that brandon would be bad for the country never thought he could break it this quickly.
You cannot separate economic, military and ambition with the CCP. Economic and military are the two sides of the ambition coin. MODERN China considers itself the Middle Kingdom moving towards the Final Kingdom (unrivaled world domination).
Anacyclosis is the only predictor of history.
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