Jan Krikke
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 Vladimir 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.
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