Basically we are back to where we were in the 1980s in many ways.
When confronted with slightly more competent weak opponents (e.g. Taliban), the US military performs far more poorly. This poor performance worsens sharply as enemy competence scales.
Full-scale war with near-peer or peer adversaries? USA is SOL.
But aside from the loud-mouthed war hawks or perma-doomers on YouTube, I don't think anyone in the US or China (or Russia, for that matter) with decision-making power really has the appetite for direct open conflict, since it means the end of all things.
Expect more proxy wars like Ukraine...
Russia and America have fought albeit slightly indirectly.
US soldiers engaged Wagner in Syria in the Battle of Khasham.
Rough outcome of this battle.
US / SDF side - 1 wounded
Wagner / Syrian government side - 50 - 100 dead. upto 200 wounded.
My point is that the following paragraph doesn't exactly hold up if you consider Wagner to be "slight more competent weak opponents" which I would.
> When confronted with slightly more competent weak opponents (e.g. Taliban), the US military performs far more poorly. This poor performance worsens sharply as enemy competence scales.
And sure, the US has successfully 'fought' similar 'battles' against groups of Taliban troops before, but eventually lost the war.
Iraq and Afghanistan may very well be more detrimental than useful. They made the US military focus on aspects of warfare that aren't relevant to a near peer conflict, and unlearning that is a difficult task that's currently consuming a lot of resources.
In the last few decades, the overall Chinese population has seen dramatic upticks on all sorts of quality-of-life measurements. It doesn't look like an obvious kleptocracy. The surveys we have, regardless of how much it can be claimed they're cooked, indicate the public is broadly happy with the government. Maybe a single-party system works for them, at least at this point in time. I'd argue if you have multiple diverse functioning government types, that's worth preserving. Ecosystem diversity is valuable, just from a perspective of "when we get the next big crisis, maybe one has better tools available to solve it."
There's nothing wrong with dangling Western style democracy as an option to the Chinese-- "if and when you want to try it, here's a body of experience and we can consult", but treating it as an end-all-be-all for an audience that broadly isn't begging for it is asking for friction.
This, of course, assumes a level of good faith which I suspect is delusional. The real narrative was always less about democracy and human rights and more about property rights. Saudi Arabia has a terrible human rights record, but the West feels safe enough that they're not going to nationalize their investments, so it all gets swept under the rug, alongside bits of Jamal Khashoggi's corpse.
In my opinion, yes.
Any other system of government means that you're being governed without consent and without a means to remove those in power without violence.
In short, any regime without a democratic mandate is an illegitimate dictatorship. No mater how enlightened it claims to be.
It requires either a lot of good faith by participants (most participants actually striving for the public good, and voters being able to disagree with an opponent, but still respectfully accept defeat) or systemic guardrails to effectively enforce good-faith style behaviour.
Even with those guidelines in place, some countries are going to have a hard time with the nuts and bolts (How do you safely deliver ballots and count votes with an active insurgency? How do you campaign when only 10% of voters can read? How do you avoid a major ethnic/religious schism just being re-processed through the electoral system?)
It's an aspirational goal, to be sure, but we can also respect that other systems are working reasonably well for some audiences, and in some cases might work better than a "more legitimate" democracy.
The “state” does not know best.
The reason that dictators withhold the vote is the same reason they refuse to allow a free press. They are scared of criticism.
If they really knew what was best for everyone it would be obvious and people would vote for them.
…but it ain’t obvious, so the hang on to power by repressing anyone that points that up is up and down is down.
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I'm not sure most-- or even any-- people really know what's best for everyone. It gets even more complex when it turns into what's best for one group versus another, or what's best for today comes at a cost to be paid in 5-10-20 years.
It's easy to catapult yourself into office by promising people ice cream instead of broccoli. The leader you want has to be persuasive enough to convince voters they want broccoli. An autocrat can just mandate broccoli.
What if he just built a vanity project trans-fat factory and doesn’t want to loose face, so insists everyone must eat cheap trans-fats?
What if the autocrat decides to block access to a free-press and to jail anyone that dares to say ice cream makes you fat?
We can play what if scenarios all day but end result is always the same.
In an dictatorship you can’t remove a bad actor from power or even laugh at them.
In a democracy you can.
Imagine if Joe Biden went on TV tomorrow and said "we're taxing gasoline to USD100 per gallon to force private cars off the road. It's gonna be tough for a while, but you'll thank me in 2050 when the public transit is fully fleshed out and we hit a 1.5c climate goal." He'd be driven out of office in favour of someone who ran on a campaign of "let's roast the next generation so you can save a dime at the pump today." OTOH, Xi Jinping could probably get away with it.
Xi isn't enacting enlightened laws to protect the environment. Quite the opposite. He's opening more and more coal fired power stations. He doesn't care if the rivers overflow.
You're saying "but he could do good", he won't. Dictators never do.
Except we've allowed ourselves to loose our industrial base.
The US didn't invite china to anything. The US begged, threatened and cajoled china to open their immense and cheap labor force. China had what the US wanted. It was nixon that went to china, not mao that came to the US.
> The thinking was they would move away from communism and Russia and towards an open Democracy.
That's as stupid as saying we helped saudi arabia, kuwait, qatar, etc develop their oil and gas field so that they will become christian. If your assertion was true, we'd be trading with cuba and north korea today. If your assertion was true, we would have been top trading partners with the soviet union. Instead we isolated the soviet union and sanctioned them. Did we only want china to be a democracy? Not the north koreans, cubans and soviets?
> Such as the Democracy movements in the 80s that were ultimately crushed in Tiananmen square.
'Democracy' movement. Right. And look where china is today? I think china made the right decision to crush the 'democracy' movement. Don't you?
It's the same debunked propaganda I've been hearing from the likes of gordon chang since the early 2000s. Morons actually believed we invaded iraq to bring freedom and democracy. So it shouldn't be surprising that morons believe we exploited their cheap labor to bring democracy to china. It's cringe level propaganda.
This term is functionally meaningless. Authority is not a coherent ideology (an -ism), it's just the natural outcome of the state maintaining a monopoly on violence.
The real question is: whose authority, and for whom?
History has shown it to be right. All you have to do is look at the soviet union/russia.
> It doesn’t flow that their economic success was tied exclusively to authoritarianism.
No. But it is tied to the crushing of the 'democracy' rebellion.
> One might argue they would have a stronger domestic consumer economy if they hadn’t.
You can argue anything but you can't deny reality. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.