So expanding capitalism, trade and social liberties eventually make Russia and China into US/European style liberal democracies. The USA can now be said to have served it’s purpose, and can now be retired as global leader in favour of China which has multiple times the population and all the manufacturing power.
After penning a US inspired constitution, Beijing becomes the centre of world democracy and business.
…demonstrating Alvin Toffler’s observation that the financial centre of the world is constantly moving westwards…
It’s not just democracy and capitalism that makes the US the indispensable nation. It’s the idea that freedom and democracy aren’t good because they “work”, as in they are the best system to ensure a nation’s prosperity and peacefulness, but because human freedom is an end in itself and would be desirable even if totalitarian systems did in fact work better.
When China adopts a Bill of Rights and a constitution limiting the power of their government even when it’s inconvenient, and sticks with it about 100 years, and becomes a melting pot of many different peoples all sharing the same basic ideals, then they’ll be ready for world leadership. But I just don’t think a nation based on ethnic identity can ever be the preeminent power. Maybe in 2200 China will become the United Republic of East Asia and be 30% made up of non-Chinese, but as long as it’s called China and is 91% Han Chinese(with many of the non-Han considering themselves under occupation), the best China can hope for is to be a secondary power.
Hear, hear.
Oh, and in order to be a center of business, investors have to be comfortable that you won’t just take their money. The US and Britain are the most stable democracies in the world, others being much younger and having flirted with dictatorship fairly recently(even France did under De Gaulle). Investors will continue to bet on New York and London as safe places to do business for at least the next hundred years.
I do not see how one thing follows from another or that the USA has a ‘purpose’…
written constitutions are easy, applied constitutions are harder.
the US consitution seems adapted for the USA culture (or have both adapted to each other), the record of the adapting of that to other countries without this history is not very good.
I do not think an old and not-immigrant settlement country will ever have the political culture of a USA. The adaptation of old structure is usually better.
being a large economic center does not equal the fact of being a financial center.
but already the Hong Kong is one of the top five financial centers of the world… and Hong Kong is part of the PRC.
Indispensable? …always it is impressive the americans self regard.
this is the good point.
melting pot is an american mythological point (not without a truth in it I think but also overly mytholigical) - it does not have relevance to most other countries histories or circumstances. I do not see any relevance to the China. you mistake an american partiuclarity of being a country of immigration for a general thing…
that is ridiculous. the history of the French, the German, and even the United kingdom highlight it is silly to mistake of confusing specific particularities of your history for a general rule.
a financial center is a pass through place.
the Hong Kong is already one of the top five. And not ever has it been a democracy.
???
Please try not to talk about other places histories, it is very painfully clear you have a very superifical knowledge through an extreme ango-american nationalist lens…
You never know. You just don’t know.
It’s possible China and Russia would be MORE hawkish, belligerent and dangerous if they were more democratic. The ordinary man on the street in China may be far more nationalistic than the Communist Party leadership. A government that reflected the will of the Chinese people might be less cautious and more inclined to do something rash like invade Taiwan.
Well I’m starting to wonder if a democratic world would be a threat to American leadership ? But I suppose that would be the point of being a country with a responsibility for global revolution, self sacrifice for the sake of a principle.
what is meant by American leadership and what is meant by threat?
Global revolution?
freedom and democracy for whom? The US is home of the world’s largest prison population by far, and democracy does nothing to ensure that minorities aren’t trampled on just as surely as any despot can accomplish. The constitution is only worth something when enforced. There are so many examples of america failing to live up to its ideals that it would take a dissertation to go into
Capitalism also has less than nothing to do with freedom and democracy, as corporations just buy candidates and bailouts when it suits them
Ignoring the Americanism Glurge, and Democracy crap above; it might as well be worth pointing out that world, nor any other, power, does not project from morality of any kind, nor the fearful doctrine of Deserts — and it will happen regardless of any desire or opinion — but from wealth and the physical power wealth affords.
The state with the most will always be on top, be that most military prowess, wealth or persuasion.
Until it’s not.
yes, this is entirely possible. Last i checked, communists weren’t behind the iraq invasion, and the US has the largest military in the world
When you make everything profit driven, even lofty principles fall to shit.
Last I checked, North Korea imprisons somewhere around 100% of its population.
I don’t know anything about China, but the idea of Russia becoming a liberal democratic country seems extremely unlikely. For that matter, I don’t think they’ll necessarily stay capitalist once Putin dies (he has enough personal charisma to stay in power for a long time, and he also has the advantage that the communists, the liberals and the nationalists all hate each other more than they hate him). The Levade Center opinion polls in Russia (which i’ve linked to here before) suggest that currently, a ‘Soviet style political system’ beats liberal democracy by 35% to 10%, and ‘centrally planned economy’ is more popular than ‘free markets’ by about 55% to 25%.
in other words, if Russia ever had a free vote, it’s much more likely that some kind of neocommunism wins than anything resembling capitalist liberal democracy.
I’m afraid you’ve made it clear that my tiny intellect cannot say anything coherent to you, which relieves me of the burden of having to respond - it would be futile 
But the Levada Centre is pretty much respected isn’t it ? So are Putin’s high ratings not reflected in high electoral success, rather than high electoral cheating ?
But in principle, if the claim is that capitalism promotes democracy, the triumph of capitalism in China and Russia will create powerful democratic business rivals. Why would a competitive nation want to foster rivals that could dominate it ? To avoid that it would have to control the development of free markets in those countries, but that would mean they were not so free. Therefore in order to stay dominant (which has been the stated objective of many of it’s leading strategists) the USA has to actually suppress the development of free markets. And as the claim is that democracy follows business, then that means suppressing democracy.
But if that’s not the case, then how long do we have to wait until every country yields to the tide of history and becomes free like the USA ?
Can someone put a date on total global freedom ? How about 2075 ? The principle of democracy promotion will have triumphed by 2075 and the world will have seen the light ? 2100 at the outside.
My sense is (and this is confirmed by an American statistician/elections analyst that I know) that there’s a bit of cheating at the margins, but not enough to really affect outcomes, and that Putin’s electoral victories do reflect broad popular approval. Statistically, though, he has to be getting a good chunk of his support from people who actually don’t share much of his ideology (i.e. the 55% of people who think things were better when they had central planning). That’s the real thing that puzzles me, why people who tell pollsters they like communism then turn around and vote for a centrist conservative strongman.
I think his success is a combination of 1) personal charisma, 2) economic growth and demographic turnaround under his watch, reversing the economic and demographic collapse of the 1990s, 3) foreign adventurism that makes people feel patriotic, and 4) the fact that two of his major enemies, the Communist Party and the pro-western liberals/social democrats, dislike and fear each other more than they dislike and fear him. He reminds me a bit of Napoleon III (the mid-19th century French president/emperor) that way.
I’m not by any means a fan of Freedom House, quite the contrary, but their general assessment seems to be that the world has becoming less free since the early to mid 1990s, not more free. There was a massive wave of moving towards liberal democracy around 1990 (in Africa, Latin America, eastern Europe and the Russosphere). Since then there has been a gradual move back towards authoritarianism in the Russosphere, and to a lesser extent in some Latin American and Eastern European countries (Venezuela, Hungary, etc…). Africa has too many countries for me to be sure what the trends are, but one of their ‘model’ liberal democracies was Mali, which was overthrown in the aftermath of the Libyan civil war.
That’s what I thought, if there was massive obvious fraud the gloating and meeowing would be unavoidable in the media, but all I ever heard was a bit of muttering.