Great Powers Trending Toward Self-Harm - Except Maybe India

(MENAFN- Asia Times) Howdy, folks! The theme of this week's roundup is“self-inflicted harm by the world's Great Powers.” I left Europe out of the mix this week, since their own improving growth, rearmament, decoupling from America and successful pushback over Greenland makes them look a little less like a basket case.

But the US, China, and Russia are each showing weakness in their own ways. For the US, the big problem is the MAGA ideology, which refuses to respect the law or interface with reality on many fronts.

For China, the problem is Xi Jinping's autocratic rule and the inevitable internal dissent this fosters. And of course for Russia, the problem is the Ukraine war. But I also note that India is being a lot smarter than the major powers, because it's focusing on growth instead of on domestic disputes or dreams of empire.

1. The execution of Alex Pretti was totally predictable

Just a couple of weeks after ICE agents gunned down Renee Good in her car, some other ICE agents just carried out an execution-style killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. There are plenty of videos, and here's a detailed blow-by-blow of what happened (and here's another if you want confirmation).

Pretti was a protester who showed up with a holstered pistol, which is legal in Minnesota. He was filming ICE, and then went to help a woman who had been shoved by ICE agents. ICE tackled him to the ground, took away his gun, and then fired at least ten shots into Pretti, killing him.

Stephen Miller immediately claimed that Pretti had been a terrorist intent on massacring ICE agents, while JD Vance blamed protesters and Democrats for the killing. But Americans are not fooled, and the administration may have made a tactical error by denying the existence of Second Amendment rights.

Some GOP Senators are calling for an investigation into the killing. Meanwhile, this just builds on the wave of anger at ICE that followed the killing of Renee Good; already, a majority of poll respondents in some polls favor abolishing ICE entirely.

Meanwhile, these killings are just the tip of the ICEberg, so to speak. Kyle Cheney has compiled a list of over 2,300 cases in which courts found that ICE illegally detained someone. The federal agency's lawbreaking is systematic and flagrant, and the fact that the Trump administration has gone to the mat for this illegality leaves little doubt about the true nature of the MAGA movement.

There's really not much to say about all this that I didn't already say in my post two weeks ago. The fundamental problem remains the same: The MAGA movement has convinced themselves that they're in an existential race war, that mass deportations are the only way to win that race war, and that anyone who opposes those deportations is their existential enemy.

That“Great Replacement” ideology is being used to recruit the ICE agents who carry out these killings, and is also the reason that Trump's base bends over backward to justify each killing.

Until we either A) assemble a sufficiently strong and durable political coalition to utterly defeat Great Replacement ideology, or B) disabuse large numbers of MAGA supporters of the idea that they're in an existential race war, killings like this will probably continue.

2. Xi Jinping's great purge

Xi Jinping is conducting yet another round of military purges. This one is the most far-reaching and astonishing purge yet:

It was later reported that Zhang, the top general who was purged, has been accused of leaking Chinese nuclear secrets to the US. If you think that accusation sounds incredibly suspicious, you're not alone. The real reason for the purge probably can't be known, and may never be known.

The most popular theory seems to be that Xi wants to attack Taiwan immediately, and is purging his military establishment of any leaders who have doubts about starting a war. But the purges now seem too deep and too wide-ranging to be just about ensuring conformity with Xi's goals and ideas.

If what you really wanted to do was fight a war, would you really fire every single general who had combat experience? It seems doubtful. Stalin did fight World War II after he purged his own military leaders in 1936-38, but he would have preferred not to.

And would you really want to go to war with a bunch of military leaders who had just witnessed nearly all of their predecessors - who were themselves originally hired by Xi Jinping - getting denounced and punished?

Nor does it seem likely that Xi is simply preemptively striking out against alternative centers of power who might someday defy his rule.

When Xi attacked businessmen in the software and finance industries four years ago, it was conceivable that he thought the country could simply do without a powerful class of businessmen in those industries. But China can hardly do without generals. Whoever replaces the purged military leaders will still have power over the same military, and will presumably be just as much of a threat.

So although I have no information to this effect, logic suggests that there's something more serious going on behind the scenes - perhaps a coup plot or something of the sort. In any case, this reinforces my argument that Xi's personalistic rule is the main threat to Chinese global hegemony, especially as he ages without a clear successor.

3. Russia is losing a whole generation of men

In 2024, Russia recorded 1.22 million births. Presumably, about half of these - let's say, 610,000 - were boys. That's almost exactly equal to the number of Russian men Ukraine believes it can kill over the next year:

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In other words, if Ukraine can accomplish its goal, it would wipe out an entire generation of Russian men - simply delete it from existence. Even the recent reported rate of 35,000 Russian deaths per month - 420,000 per year - is enough to mostly delete an entire generation, especially once you add those whose wounds will leave them alive but crippled.

Russia is trying to supplement its forces with North Korean allies and African mercenaries, but their numbers are in the low tens of thousands at most - not nearly enough to change the story. Ukraine's reports of Russian deaths may be modest overestimates, but they're not far off from independent estimates.

The reason Russia is losing so many men is that assaults by armored vehicles have become pretty useless on the modern battlefield. Faced with the inability of tanks and other armor to make headway, Russia is resorting to“meat assaults” - basically, World War I tactics. These assaults are getting a ton of Russians killed, but are not managing to conquer much of Ukraine:

Of course, Ukraine is taking grievous losses too, but warfare favors the defense, so they're likely to be less. That doesn't mean Ukraine will be in great shape after the war is over, but it does mean that Russia is really expending a vast number of its citizens' lives for not much territorial gain - similar to what it was doing in WWI.

This doesn't mean Europe can breathe a sigh of relief. If Ukraine does eventually fall and become a Russian satrapy, Russia will enslave millions of Ukrainians and send them to fight in the next war (likely against the Baltics, Moldova and possibly Poland). That is exactly what Russia has done with the populations of the territories it has already conquered in Ukraine.

But what Russia's losses show is that Europe's strategy of defense is working. The longer Europe can support Ukraine, the less Russia will be able to recover from this disastrous military misadventure.

4. America's medieval period

Here's a scary chart of US measles cases:

Axios reports:

Measles is skyrocketing for a simple reason, which is that fewer Americans are getting vaccinated; almost all of these cases are among the unvaccinated. And the reason for low vaccination rates is the antivax movement, which has spread from the leftist fringe to the conservative mainstream.

The Trump administration could fight against this trend by reassuring everyone that measles vaccines are safe and effective, but as Axios notes, the Trump administration has sent mixed messages on the topic:

In fact, the Covid pandemic cemented opposition to vaccines as a core pillar of the new right-wing belief system in America. This isn't just going to stop people from vaccinating their kids for measles - it's going to negatively affect the progress of scientific research in the field. Here's a report from Bloomberg:

That's pretty scary, given the increasing power of AI-assisted amateurs to create bioweapons in their garages! There's also the chance it might slow down progress in mRNA cancer treatments, which are also vaccine-based. This might condemn lots of Americans to unnecessary death from cancer.

In fact, the assault on vaccine science is just the most egregious part of a general assault on science by the Trump administration:

The example of the antivax movement shows that the MAGA folks don't really care if the science they cancel happens to be stuff that saves lots of people's lives. Their crusade against the progressive-leaning scientific establishment can't be interrupted by such trivialities. Meanwhile, America continues its slow deterioration into anti-science, anti-technology medievalism. And America's international position in scientific research continues to deteriorate:

I suppose countries get the futures they choose for themselves.

5. India electrifies

So far the theme of today's roundup has been the world's Great Powers doing stupid stuff to harm themselves. But it's worth noting that there's one rising power that's doing a lot of smart and effective things these days: India.

Where America has been weakening its own scientific establishment, India's is growing rapidly in strength. Note India's skyrocketing performance in the publication of the well-cited papers, overtaking the UK, Japan and Germany in just a few years:

This rapid ascent - which mirrors China's two decades earlier - undoubtedly contains some amount of fraud and self-dealing, just as China's did (and does). But ultimately, China's research turned out to be mostly real, and India's will too.

India also seems to recognize the importance of electric technology - the essential physical technology of the future, which China has embraced and the US has downplayed. A new Ember report shows some numbers on how fast India is electrifying. Here are three key charts, showing that India is embracing electric power even faster than China did:

Ember notes that the potential advantages to India go far beyond climate and cheap power:

China leapfrogged America, Europe and Japan in electric technology; India may end up leapfrogging China.

One tailwind here will be India's huge domestic market growth, which will give Indian manufacturing a big edge. The OECD now expects India's economy to be bigger than China's by the end of the century, due in large part to diverging population trends:

At a time when every other major power seems to be shooting itself in the foot, India is making smart moves and accelerating its development.

6. America's economy isn't nearly as bad as socialists think

So far this roundup has been pretty down on the US, which is making some very stupid moves under Trump. So I think I'll balance it out by pointing out that many criticisms of the US are not true.

For example, the left-leaning economists who have spent the last decade and a half decrying America as a failure of capitalist excess are being forced to come up with ever-less-credible reasons to pooh-pooh the strength of that capitalist approach. For example, Gabriel Zucman recently tweeted a chart which he claims as proof that income in the U.S. has been growing no faster than in Europe:

In fact, this chart doesn't show what Zucman claims. First of all, Zucman's claim that America hasn't grown“one iota” faster than Europe is falsified by his own graph, in which the US is ahead of Europe in every category.

Second, there is no reason to think that GDP per adult (which I assume means GDP per working-age adult, for the math to work out) is a worse measure of income than national income per adult; the latter includes income from overseas investments, while the former includes only production within a country's borders.

Third, Europe includes East Europe, which has been growing more quickly than West Europe as it completes its catch-up from the communist era. The major West European economies have all fallen behind the US in recent years:

Note that the US is richer, meaning that European countries should be catching up. Instead they're falling behind. Something is wrong, and left-leaning economists like Zucman need to acknowledge that fact.

Meanwhile, the socialist conviction that America is a hellhole of ever-increasing inequality needs a major update. The Congressional Budget Office just published an analysis showing that once you account for the increasing generosity of the American welfare state, inequality in the U.S. hasn't actually gone up much at all since the 1980s:

And Arin Dube finds that the compression in American wages - the strong rise in low-end wages since the early 2010s, coupled with anemic wage growth at the top of the distribution after the pandemic - seems to be persistent so far:

Socialists who keep repeating the mantras of the 2010s without looking at updated numbers sound increasingly out of touch with the facts. The US has an inequality problem, but it's not nearly as bad as socialists think, and US growth really has been robust in recent years. Capitalism has not failed.

This article was first published on Noah Smith's Noahpinion Substack and is republished with kind permission. Become a Noahopinion subscriber here.

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