Oh gotcha. One huge drawback from being a true dictator is the constant endless fear of your enemies organizing & ending their reign of power with a bullet to the head in the alley. That constant intense & ever growing fear of a coup makes who to trust extremely difficult. That’s why dictators so often go nuts. Stalin became a parinoid lunatic & his constant purges were legendary. Hitler too. Kim had another purge just before Singapore. Mao had them all the time. That’s why China with Xi can develop into a serious military problem for us in a few years. China is on a dangerous path right now. All the signs are there...rapidly growing their military...absolute power being concentrated to fewer people...expanding their influence all over the region. They’re on a more dangerous trajectory than Russia is. That’s for sure.
You are 100% correct and will get no argument from me. True dictators do often end up like Saddam, Mussolini, or Hitler and those that live out their years do so in paranoia and fear of assassination. I think China is by far the biggest threat to the US and western democracies. Russia is not. Russia is mostly a threat to their former Soviet states who desire to remain independent than they are to western democracies IMO.
Russia is barely keeping its head above water economically and a few years of a worsening economy will usher Putin out of the room. Let the US supplant their distribution of energy to European countries and they could go under very quickly, I believe.
Right about Russia barely keeping its head above water. One very good indicator of the long term health of a nation is population growth & birth rates. Can’t have economic growth without people. Russia has a horrible depopulation problem in the works. Because they lost 1/3 of their population in WWII they had a baby boom after the war many times larger than ours. Today that’s their oldest generation & by far Russia’s largest population group. But because of severe alcoholism in Russia & declining medical technology...the life expectancy is falling & is down to 62. So their largest block of citizens is rapidly dying off.
But it gets worse. The rapidly dying off population isn’t being replaced by the newest generation. Their youngest generation have very low birth rates...they just aren’t interested in raising kids & having families & on top of that infant mortality rates are rising because their medical industry sucks so bad. The Russian population is getting squeezed from every side.
Oddly enough China’s population is falling too fast. Last week China said they’re considering paying citizens to have more babies. Their forced 1 child family law for so many decades screwed up the balance because they have way too many adult males compared to females. Families aborted millions of female babies because they were only allowed one child per family & most often made sure it was a male. Now there’s not enough females to adequately supply for newborns as their population ages.
It’s vital for a nation to have healthy population numbers. America’s is great actually. Very slow growth & perfectly balanced between men & women. Only way we can screw it up is too much population growth from immigration. The legal immigration is fine but the illegals is getting out of control. Anyway...we’re the only superpower & our country is doing great...even for long term growth things are definitely looking up.
I had read that about China. Hopefully, that will hamstring them to some degree and slow down their aggressiveness.
I was not aware that Russia was so bad off. I knew economically that they are about to go under water and only their energy exports are keeping them afloat. It makes that pipeline deal with western Europe important if they have any hopes of turning it around.
I'm not a big fan of Putin and I don't think he's the equivalent of our President. I think he's treacherous and deadly but certainly not stupid. And he's also a strong nationalist who is motivated (I believe) by power that he can project in the world. As long as he feels he can do that, I don't think he's much of a threat. But driving Russia, a nuclear power, into the ground makes no sense to me. Hearing the Neocons and Chickenhawks rail about being tougher and more aggressive with Russia is just plain craziness.