More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
February 1 - February 8, 2025
leadership is vital to a great power or empire. It constitutes the Shakespearean element that ultimately eclipses the vast impersonal forces of geopolitical and economic fate.
Xi Jinping’s obsession with absorbing or even conquering Taiwan
Shakespearean decline. I refer to the inner demons that drive all powerful leaders to a certain degree of madness, best exemplified in some of the plays of Shakespeare.
And the more concentrated and unchallenged their individual power, the greater their proclivity to do real damage to the worldwide geopolitical equilibrium.
Taiwan
Iraq War
Iraq
the most clear-cut example of the general deterioration in the quality of American leadership since the end of the Cold War.
related to a decay in the culture of public life, especially the media, in which the forces acting upon all of these men had become more divisive, intolerant, and even hysterical at times.
as the media has become less serious, so have our leaders.
Passion, often the enemy of analysis, is precisely what is encouraged by social media,
To some extent, nations, especially in democracies, get the leaders they deserve. America was a great and well-functioning mass democracy in the print-and-typewriter age. It is unclear whether it can continue as such in a digital-video age aggravated by social media, which promises to be further manipulated by artificial intelligence.
America’s weakness and its capacity to decline is rather subtle; that is, unrelated to fundamental structural forces: geography, for instance. It may be in decline, but it remains a powerful behemoth.
Whatever social and political decline has occurred in the United States following the end of the Cold War, the Ukraine War showed Russia—especially as revealed by its war machine—to be in a far more advanced state of rot.
wars can be audits of whole societies.
Russian politics, to judge from the audit of the Ukraine War, require rebuilding almost from scratch.
What only the passage of time could reveal in its true enormity was how Russian political culture had been so deformed and debased by the long, morally destructive decades of Communism and especially Stalinism that only a replica of sorts, in this case Putin’s style of rule, whose bedrock was utter cynicism much in the tradition of Lenin and Stalin, was possible in the aftermath.
Kirkpatrick
Revolutionary Communist regimes destroy societies utterly—by removing all the layers of civic organizations between the regime at the top and the family at the bottom—and thus repairing them, as she likely well understood, would be the project of decades. The debacles of the Yeltsin and Putin regimes in Russia, which followed Communism, again prove her right.
Thus, the enduring legacy of Communism (with all of its cynicism) in our world today must be added to the deadly mix encompassing the dystopian uses of technology, the finite size of the earth, the ravages of climate change, the ends of both monarchy and empire, the fast-forward development of precision-guided weaponry as well as of artificial intelligence, and so forth. And this deadly mix also involves the pathologies of urbanization that I will describe in the third part of this book—all in all accounting for the permanent crisis, which, as we will see later on, approximates the inner logic
...more
Had Putin not invaded and instead negotiated Ukraine’s neutrality from a position of strength, Russia would likely still be perceived as a daunting great power.
American decline was in relative terms subtle and qualitative, with both major political parties at times gravitating toward the extremes, with racial tensions periodically on the boil, with cultural standards in disarray, with the liberal arts that educate new generations of Americans threatened by ideology, and so forth. But Russia’s civilizational decline was fundamental and quantitative: it simply had no usable institutions, no system of leadership replacement even.
no one dared to tell Putin the truth.
the chief problem with authoritarian leaders.
Authoritarian leaders like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are, to some extent, operating blind. And because of their enormous power over events, they endanger not just their own countries but the whole world as a consequence.
Democracies can be undynamic, late to the party, and weak in decision-making. But in their consultative ways they have generally less of a capacity for outright blunders than authoritarians do.
A world where major powers are governed by authoritarians is, therefore, that much more unstable.
Putin’s eventual downfall will more likely lead to anarchy than to stable democracy, or more likely to a messy and ill-defined political situation in Russia. We should keep Russia’s semi-anarchic situation in the 1990s in mind
Because Jeane Kirkpatrick’s analysis of the difference between right- and left-wing dictatorships was correct, and has admirably stood the test of time, we must be patient regarding Russia.
As Daniel Patrick Moynihan reminded us, the central conservative truth is the preeminence of culture, not politics, in determining the success of a society.
In Russia’s case, the damage of over a century of extreme misrule on the culture will not be wiped clean in a week or a year even. To repeat: just as 19th-century European diplomats faced the Eastern Question brought about by the weakening of Ottoman Turkey, 21st-century Western diplomats will face the Eurasian Ques...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Deng is what is missing in today’s global environment. The absence of his likeness contributes to the permanent crisis. It may be too much to expect that great powers like China and Russia be both stable and democratic. It would be enough that they be stable and ruled by leaders who are both enlightened and bureaucratically competent.
Deng lived in constant fear of chaos,
in his own way a Burkean conservative, seeking the preservation of existing systems and values while concomitantly forcing them to evolve.
party reform, with term limits, over the introduct...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The world has become what it is to a significant extent because we have autocrats like Xi and Putin holding sway rather than Deng and Gorbachev.
As for the decline in U.S. presidential leadership, it has been real, but minor, compared to the decline in Chinese and Russian leadership, where pragmatism has given way to Leninist ideology in Beijing and to Great Russian imperialism in Moscow.
China’s political stability has been for too long taken for granted. But China, like the United States and Russia, though in varying degrees, is in decline.
China has lost almost all its friends in Washington.
China’s annual economic growth has been slowing
The globe is becoming the worst of both worlds: a unified theater of conflict, but one where each far-flung extremity of that theater can tweak the other end thousands of miles away and cause an eruption.
under Xi’s totalitarianism the difference between it and the United States is that much harder: there is a total philosophical clash of systems of governance. And with that comes mutual animosity and suspicion, in which every dispute is imagined as existential.
Because all three great powers—Russia, China, and the United States—are in decline, though in different ways and at different rates, it may be that the United States, which maintains the capacity for democratic renewal, has a comparative advantage over the two authoritarian powers, despite its soaring deficit.
the decline of the great powers signals another death knell for the stabilizing virtues of imperialism and the relative political order it brings—which go back to the dawn of history, however out of fashion imperialism has been since the second half of the 20th century.
But, because the declines of the three great powers are relative to one another, there will be twists and turns in this process. For example, because Russia is declining at a faster rate than China, China’s leverage over Russia has increased.
China, in other words, because of Russia’s weakening position, has gone from being a Pacific and Asian power to becoming a Eurasian one.
Once more, empires arise out of chaos but their weakening and dissolution give way to new forms of chaos.
Because the decline of imperial powers can mean more aggression on their part (as they become more insecure and desperate), even as there is increased chaos in their shadowlands, global geopolitics will become more tumultuous, not less.
Europe’s stability will continue to be undermined by Russia.
enlarged and sprawling NATO
