While all of this is a heavy tangent to the actual article we're discussing, I'm not sure if Russia, China, Iran et al are exactly the kind of competition we should be fostering and cheering on.
They still keep the good guys more honest than they'd be with no competition.
There are 10 members and 26 applicants. Combined some ~57% of the world population and they have twice as much land as the EU and US combined.
They also have terrifying amount of cheap labor and China is far ahead of the west in many kinds of manufacturing.
The US has even been here before. After Lincoln was assassinated, he was replaced by a guy who many historians agree was the worst president in the history of the US, a man who arrived to his own inauguration drunk and someone who plunged the country into a shameful part of its history. Im not saying we aren't in for some serious tough times but I am feeling confident that in the long run it will swing back into the direction of progress.
The US is currently in a period of immense transition to a new chapter. The upcoming generation (Gen Alpha) will be the first generation that is majority non white. What will the country be like when they come of political age? What values will it have? Given what I have seen so far from Gen Alpha (and Gen Z) Im feeling quite good that they will be positive values.
>When was the last time an authoritarian system was toppled from within anyway, without a big western power coming in and doing it for them by force?
Well you could argue the Soviet system was bound to fail due to the inherent hypocrisies it had. China is powerful enough that they cannot be easily influenced by the US but there is still massive trouble ahead for them. Their birth rate might stall their economic growth and that is the only thing really keeping the machine going there. I'm not saying they are guaranteed to collapse but it isn't looking good.
From stuff I'm reading (and what I've seen myself too), the men of Gen Z are much more conservative than older generations. The women are the opposite, of course, and as a result they're not dating each other and Gen Z men are basically turning into angry incels. Hopefully the media is overblowing the proportionality of this, but it doesn't sound good.
>The upcoming generation (Gen Alpha) will be the first generation that is majority non white. What will the country be like when they come of political age?
I don't know, but I do wonder if it's going to just cause more trouble. Do we have examples of other cultures that had huge ethnic divisions like this, yet were successful? As it is, it already seems like the US completely lacks any kind of real shared culture, and is basically a bunch of radically different cultures living among each other but not interacting more than absolutely necessary. It's been like this for ages (centuries really) but with a dominant ethnic majority, it didn't matter so much (though of course it frequently sucked for the minority groups, unfortunately). But in a situation where there's no majority, I really wonder how effective the nation will be, or if it'll balkanize. And these days it isn't just racial either: there's an enormous division (probably the biggest division), for instance, between white rural culture and the culture found in many cities (which seems to be majority-white but with some other groups assimilated); the two groups really don't share the same values at all (e.g. religion+guns on one side).
It fell, but not for very long: they briefly tried out a democracy, but then Putin took over and ever since then, it's been effectively a dictatorship with elections similar to the "elections" in North Korea, and now the dictator and the people alike all wanting to re-establish the old Soviet Union, including taking former Soviet-controlled territories/nations by force. So I don't think this is a very good example.
As for China, that's just conjecture; almost all the western nations have similar problems with their birthrates. Many have tried to turn to massive immigration, and that's just led to a huge rise in far-right-wing parties and likely coming authoritarianism.
I honestly can't think of many times when an authoritarian system was toppled from within, without the US or similar doing it by force. Perhaps Spain, but they only turned democratic because their dictator died of old age. Maybe Greece? The UK did it, but it took literally centuries, in a very slow process of moving power from the crown to the democratic parliament until the king/queen was nothing more than a figurehead.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/saudi-arabia-has-not-yet-joine...
Why a communist state was afforded WTO status is puzzling. Look at the situation now. Slick Willie did that.
Press release about how bad we fscked up: https://ustr.gov/about-us/policy-offices/press-office/press-...
I suspect a lot of powerful people knew that it would hurt US workers, US industrial strength, were neutral on the latter, positive on the former, and very positive about profits (during their lifetime).
They export all industry for short term profit, the people whose lives are destroyed are then exploited further(all good property is sold at fire sale prices, they are sold drugs to cope with the pain,are sent to war because the military is the only good employer) until they revolt, they elect a demagogue, disaster finally erupts among the population and the people causing this mess go elsewhere to wait it out(EU, Israel, New Zealand, the Bahamas etc.) until there has been enough of a destruction, industry is painfully rebuilt and then the cycle starts again. The people making the decisions never got hurt, never will suffer any consequences of their actions and will continue to play chess while everyone else plays checkers.
I know several people who play games like this. They have like 3-4 citizenships, they buy up as much property as they can, own assets and even give up their US citizenship for tax purposes to then intend to buy it back with an investor visa when they decide to retire in someplace like Montana.