Trump, Putin And Xi As Co-Architects Of Brave New Multipolar World

2025-02-01 02:02:46

(MENAFN- Asia Times) The Soviet Union's collapse and America's current decline have remarkable similarities. The Soviet Union failed because it marginalized the entrepreneurial class. The United States is faltering because the ruling class sidelined the working class, leading to extreme economic disparity and political polarization.

In his first term, Donald Trump resembled Boris Yeltsin, the destroyer of the old order. In his second term, Trump may copy Putin's playbook-a nationalist builder focused on domestic affairs and rebuilding its industrial base.

Can Trump and Putin, along with China's Xi Jinping, become the co-architects of a new multipolar world order?

The United States and Russia have more in common than they would like to admit. As American futurist Lawrence Taub pointed out in the 1980s, both countries were born out of revolutions against European empires and were based on humanitarian political ideals (freedom and social equality, respectively). And both expanded by taking over the lands of indigenous peoples during the 19th century.

Moreover, both the US and Russia have federated political structures and primarily European cultural roots. Both are multicultural – they have multiethnic populations – but are dominated culturally, economically and politically by a main group (WASPs in the US, Russians in Russia).

Cowboy and Cossack

Alexis de Tocqueville and, more recently, Paul Dukes, in his book“The Emergence of the Super-Powers” (1970), also drew parallels between Russia and the United States.

Dukes wrote that until recently each believed it had a manifest destiny, a world mission, and that the other was the principal obstacle to its success. Moreover, they had the Cowboy/Cossack mystique and a related tendency to see all political and religious issues in simplistic, black-and-white terms.

Both countries are superpowers with superpower mentalities. They are huge in size, comparable in population, and similar in climate, temperate zone location and topography. Both nations have large weapons arsenals and both have decades of experience in space exploration.

In the 1980s, Gorbachev visited China under Deng Xiaoping. Deng successfully integrated capitalist principles into China's socialist system, fostering economic growth while maintaining the central control of the Communist Party.

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