Japan and South Korea are suddenly good buddies:
Having had custody of trilateral relations in GW Bush's second term, I find the meeting at Camp David mind blowing. We could barely get South Korean and Japanese leaders to meet with us in the same room.
— Dennis Wilder偉德寧 (@dennisw5) August 15, 2023
As they say, an imminent execution concentrates the mind wonderfully. Fear of China is now more important than leftover WWII grievances, just as fear of communism united a fractious Europe and the US during the Cold War.
It's conventional wisdom these days to say that democracy is waning and authoritarianism is ascendant. The evidence for this is paper thin, based on little more than the turning of normal political cycles and a few larger-than-life assholes on the world stage. But these things are transitory. Wait a few years and they turn again. Suddenly Brazil is leftist again, the Tories are facing annihilation in Britain, and Donald Trump is dealing with four separate felony trials.
More important by far are the fortunes of the world's two most powerful anti-democratic regimes, Russia and China. Both are in bad shape. Vladimir Putin has united his neighbors in almost unanimous hatred of him. The ruble has crashed and sanctions are squeezing his economy. Xi Jinping is in little better shape. His bellicose rhetoric has increasingly turned his neighbors against him and the Chinese economy is in turmoil as property values collapse and foreign investment dries up.
Despite everything, Western democracies are in pretty good shape while the world's two biggest autocracies are flailing. This is the real shape of the world. By comparison, momentary autocratic impulses in places like Hungary and Italy, while deserving of resistance, are fundamentally small beer. Eyes on the prize, people.
On the topic of things turning again, the real question is whether or not the oscillations are dampening.
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We all know the major mistakes the US has made over the past few years: Iraq, Katrina, the Great Recession, Afghanistan, the COVID screwups, the endless mass shootings, Jan 6th. We know them because Americans are very vocal about when things go wrong. People are less familiar with the disastrous happenings in China - the Uighurs, Hong Kong, their own failure on COVID vaccines, their empty over-built cities, their lifeless educational system, their pollution and enormous emission of CO2 (more than the US, EU and Japan together), the failure of Bridge and Road, their population collapse. Just as Xi was touting his leadership as of the rival superpower, they look like no positive example at all, and an active enemy to all their neighbors.
Belt and Road
Sleepy Joe is doing a horrible job creating communism in America
I realize I'm hardly the first person to observe or theorize the following (and to be sure I'm painting with broad brushstrokes): but I'd say the world has seen several distinct waves (by my count three) of liberalization/democratization, each of which has been followed by a counterreaction of illiberalism/authoritarianism.
I'd say the 3rd democratic wave likely peaked in the 1990s, and has since been followed by a counterraction (the rise of right wing populism, MAGA, Putin, the hardening of CCP authoritarianism, etc).
So, yes, I more or less agree with Kevin on this. I reckon if we can continue to avoid blowing up the world over the next decade or so (hardly a given) the forces of authoritarianism and illiberalism will once again be in retreat, pressured globally by resurgent democratic values.
Russia and China are not reinvigorating democracy. Both Russia and China have almost always been autocratic themselves. Both became more capitalistic after the collapse of the socialist regimes, but except for a brief period in Russia when there was a disastrous economic collapse, the autocrats have remained in charge. If the Xi regime loses power there is no particular reason to think that it would be replaced by a western-style democracy. The post-Mao Chinese leaders have presided over remarkable economic growth and China will continue to grow even if there are setbacks. China was not destroyed by the Great Leap Forward. The Chinese have little knowledge of real democracy.
Many countries cycle through democratic and autocratic regimes. When one regime doesn't deliver on material improvement, the other side takes power. Countries don't become democratic to protect themselves from foreign danger - they are more likely to turn to autocracy in time of war or near-war.
What will continue is the military-economic rivalry of the major powers, whatever type of governments they have. This is not really a clash of democracy vs autocracy. The interregnum of this after the fall of the Soviet and Maoist regimes is not the norm. Maybe many people now writing about this grew up in that interregnum.
If China were a democracy I would not give a fuck if it eclipsed the US and began to boss us like we do Europe.
And, let me guess... you are a liberal or a leftist. How did I know?
Oh, and since when do we boss around Europe?
You seem to have misinterpreted the post. Kevin is saying that China and Russia are reinvigorating the democratic ideals in democracies, not in their own benighted countries.
There was an old joke about a fictional Arthur Leading Company. It made terrible products that other brands could compare their products to: "Compare our toaster with Arthur Leading Toasters..." These days, Russia and China are the Arthur Leading Companies for the Democracy Brand. Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others, of course, but Russia and China are doing their best to highlight its virtues.
My dude, Lula is all but saying Russia should win the war.
Also for the first time in a long time most of the world's population lives under illiberal aithoritarian regimes.
"It's conventional wisdom these days to say that democracy is waning and authoritarianism is ascendant. The evidence for this is paper thin, based on little more than the turning of normal political cycles and a few larger-than-life assholes on the world stage. But these things are transitory. Wait a few years and they turn again. Suddenly Brazil is leftist again, the Tories are facing annihilation in Britain, and Donald Trump is dealing with four separate felony trials."
Look, we all wish this were true. And, who knows, maybe it will turn out to be true. But the symptoms of democratic failure are eerily similar to what happened in the thirties. Strong faith driven authoritarian right wing parties (or factions in 2 party systems) put themselves in power by allying themselves with traditional conservatives. All of the eventual allied countries were in danger of falling to fascism in the the decade before the war. They survived as democracies only with luck. And fixing the problem ended up costing millions of people their lives.
Both Russia and China are land empires - relics of darker times. The last two imperialist states need to be right-sized.