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. The last decades of the 20th century were eras of hope in American-Chinese relations because they coincided with the era of Deng and his like-minded successors. 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.
