That may be in part to their 'president for life'. Leaders are not immortal though and transitions between them have seen large and sometimes catastrophic changes. China designed its modern political system to avoid that, only for Xi to undo it and purge younger potential challengers.
For life and is 71 in arguably the most stressful job in the world. The risk of mental decline cannot be ignored, particularly as he has now served longer than any US president in all of history.
Although I say that and then I went down the rabbit hole of trying to find which individual had the longest tenure of presidency and vice presidency combined. It seems like it’s either Nixon, HW Bush, or Biden.
As the US president is more or less in the same position as the monarch in the UK -- the main *official* task is to approve or reject legislation already passed by parliament -- you should perhaps look at the 63 years 216 days Victoria reigned, or 70 years 214 days of Elizabeth II, both far exceeding any recent US, Chinese, or Russian supreme leader.
I recently noticed with horror that my birth is now closer to the end of Victoria's reign in 1901 than it is to today.
If not exactly hostile then definetly untrustworthy, they certainly show that they are willing to blackmail their partners. No one can be surprised that others want to get rid of influence over critical products. I strongly support it.
It's like with russian gas once again, even the root of the problem is the same.
One man with infinite power and no accountability for his actions.
Just for clarification. I don't blame Americans, but at least from my perspective, this electoral system is very radical and gives almost "absolute power" to a person or party that almost always has marginally more support. You do not need to compromise by creating coalitions etc.
In the end, it is the fault of us Europeans who blindly believed that any successful candidate would be in our favour and perceived as friendly. Although everyone understands how fragile elections are, this was naively ignored.
You mean the history of enshittification by the monopolistic US companies with the lack of any regulation in their country? Also, forcing horrible IP laws on Europe. More details: https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/
And the history of NSA spying on the whole world, see PRISM.
"right now" being the key phrase here. On what length of time due you judge stability? The last 75 years or so in China... well amoung other things they killed over 50 million of their own people with a man made famine. The question is if the institutions that produced USA can hold. China on the other hand lacks the self correcting mechanisms that USA has built in.
China has a tendency to self-destruct every 300-400 years. The interesting thing is that many regions of the globe have a tendency to self-destruct every 300-400 years. Europe had major continent-wide cataclysms with WW1/2 in the 1900s; the Wars of Religion in the early 1600s; and the Hundred Years War + Black Death + Mongol Conquests in the 1300s. The Holy Roman Empire lasted from about 900 AD to around 1300 AD. The Roman Republic lasted about 500 years; the Roman Empire lasted another 400-500.
I think the logic might be that China just had their civilization-ending cataclysm, and so they're on the upswing now. Ditto Europe. This is probably not the end of the United States either, more like the Crisis of the 3rd Century. But it's just as logical to look back on the 400-year cycle and think "Better invest in the countries that have already had their crisis and dealt with it than ones that are starting to decay internally" than to look back on the last 75 years and think "Wow, that was chaotic, the next 75 years will be equally chaotic."
I'm not disagreeing - I think it's important to see China as the undemocratic, illiberal, authoritarian regime that it is. And it is foolish to think that China is interested in a rule-based world order because they believe in the same values many key post-war figures in Europe and the US believed in.
It's that China's economy is heavily dependent on exports - and dependability and the appearance of stability is generally good for trade. Obviously, this is helped by political stability, which means less scope for the kind of outward-facing destructive populisms we see in the US or parts of Europe. But with China's economy in trouble, that might very well change.
> The last 75 years or so in China... well amoung other things they killed over 50 million of their own people with a man made famine.
Such an event is also one reason India got my grandparent's generation to leave.
And the one about 175 years ago in Ireland probably contributed to both the (eventual) Irish home rule movement and the writing of the Communist Manifesto.
While the Great Leap Forward's famine was avoidable in theory, I think that the historical examples of so many others having similar experiences during the transition from agrarian to industrial, shows that in practice the mistakes are very easy to fall into.
I sincerely doubt much is left of those self-correcting mechanism in the US. They are being deconstructed at high pace currently, and not even in secret, and apart from a delay by a judge here and there, it's crickets.
We will see what man made disasters the current (and future) US adminstration will cause. By every measure it looks like they are determined to find out the hard way.
It would be a mistake to work with China for several reasons.
The EU needs to be in a position where it can decide what is best for Europeans and not be strong-armed or overly dependent on allies that clearly don't share the same concern.
It took 3 months for the US to shift from actively supporting Ukraine’s defense to actively undermining it. China is more ambiguous, with a neutral stance, the US is now actively going against Ukraine and Europe’s interests by siding with Putin.
So if you have a choice between a schizophrenic, antagonistic US, and a China who doesn’t care much about human rights but wants to keep stable international trade relationships, I’m really not shocked if you pick the later
Most authoritarian states are 'stable and predictable'. When you meet a lion on the savannah the beast is stable and predictable in that it will most likely try to eat you unless it isn't hungry. Step on a snake and the outcome is stable and predictable in that you will get bitten.
It is good for Europe to learn to stand on its - our - own legs, to become less dependent on the USA for territorial defence and probably also to learn the hard way that peace and tranquillity is the exception rather than the rule. Si vis pacem, para bellum. It is not good for Europe to swap dependence on the USA with dependence on China, we're more than 500 million people with access to most of the resources we need to stand on our own legs so let's get crackin'.
Also, let's drop the silly panic around Trump, the man is doing what he was elected to do which is put America first. We should do the same, in a serious way. Not in an isolationist way but sensibly. Stop importing the world's problems, stop with the silly self-chastisement around 'climate' and 'colonialism', stop the import of islamism and make serious work of getting rid of the islamist factions which have been allowed to establish themselves or Europe as it once was - the birthplace of the enlightenment - will succumb to the sectarian infighting which destroyed Lebanon after they invited Arafat and his PLO.
So, 'Europe first' in the sense that the ideas which formed the continent are worth defending and so are people who subscribe to those ideas no matter where they come from. Those who want to get rid of these ideas to replace them with their own intolerant society - whether that be an islamic caliphate or a Chinese-style fascist [1] surveillance state - are not welcome. I realise this includes a number of EU bureaucrats who are enamoured of the latter system and I would be pleased to see these individuals removed from power, preferably by truly democratic means.
[1] Fascism and Communism are closely related so it is not that odd to call the current government form in China by the former name even if they claim to be the latter. See https://www.britannica.com/topic/fascism for a definition or read what Mussolini had to say about the subject and you'll see the parallels.
You're going well off-topic here and into inflammatory territory. This whole debate should probably best happen somewhere else.
But just one thing: while I personally share your take on the political and societal issues, I do think it's unfortunate that you lump "climate" in there, in scare quotes. The climate issue is informed by hard science. America's tendency to politicize everything will have terrible outcomes if climate gets completely caught up in the culture war. Whatever we think about the solutions, we have to find a way to agree that this particular problem is bad and needs to be addressed urgently.
Still, again, here is not the best place for this whole discussion.
For secular and democratic nations, multiculturalism isn’t inherently dangerous if there are principles and ideals around which newcomers to any nation can assimilate and integrate. America attempted that to some degree of success with its melting pot ideals till the 90s, but there wasn’t enough emphasis on civic duty, from either the commoners or the elite. The US founding fathers included everyone in their vision, btw, including Muslims. The failure in any integration and assimilation goals from the past few decades result from enabling unjust narratives which pose America as the only country with the social ills and issues it’s being criticized of, when there isn’t any other country in recent memory with a more socially diverse congress.
That’s not a fair or reasonable thing to point out given that few countries at that time gave slaves or women voting rights. The U.S. was one of the first majority White countries to give Black men voting rights in 1870, after France did some time in late 1700s. Haiti was the first country to give all people, regardless of race, voting rights in 1804. I agree that the U.S. was really late to enter into women’s suffrage compared to other majority white countries.
So the vision included a tiny minority of land owners.
General suffrage in 1789 was about 1 in 20 people, almost entirely white land owning men.
20 years later the vote was actually taken alway from many of the few black men who had it. White men still needed property. In parts of the US this property requirement lasted until the 1850s, and after that the requirement to be rich enough to pay taxes survived well into the 20th century.
I’m not criticising anything other than this idea that america was a government of the people by the people - at least until the 20th century.
I don’t dispute anything you’re saying, I just don’t understand what frame of reference any leader or policymaker at that time could have used to do anything differently. What country at that time was some paragon of social justice or progressivism? I think the US founding fathers did pretty well for their time, when most countries in the world were part of empires, or were monarchies.
People are more socially progressive now because of the passage of time, and the accumulation of sociopolitical observances it allowed. The average person now is only less of a brute because of the cultural training they’ve experienced, but it’s not something to be taken for granted.
In general, there are very few people (sages) who are more moral, ethical or curious than the average person of their own time. Often times their behavior makes them look like a loser or a weirdo to their contemporaries or society.
I am judging it from today—if the founding fathers developed that framework today, Enlightenment ideals would rationally lead them to include everyone based on the progress of social thought up to this point. I won’t hold their lack of social progress against them because they were pioneers for their time.
> It is good for Europe ... to learn the hard way that peace and tranquillity is the exception rather than the rule
I don't know if you're being serious here, but this (Ameri-centric? C21-centric?) view is laughable. Europe is well-acquainted with war and never saw lasting peace for much of it's history until the second half of the 20th century.
> Europe ... saw lasting peace [in] the second half of the 20th century.
Which happens to coincide with the lifetime of the majority of Europeans. War was mostly something which happened to other countries, in other places - not in 'civilised' Europe, surely?
So yes, I am being serious - deadly serious. Most European countries neglected national defence after the fall of the Soviet Union in the expectation that Fukuyama was right when he claimed we were at 'The end of History' [1]. There is a good Swedish term for this condition: fredsskadad which translates to 'peace-damaged', the opposite of 'war-damaged'. It is the condition of a people who have gotten so used to peace being the norm that they assume that everyone everywhere else also considers peace to be the goal and thus no longer need to consider the possibility of ending up in a conflict.
> So, 'Europe first' in the sense that the ideas which formed the continent are worth defending and so are people who subscribe to those ideas no matter where they come from. Those who want to get rid of these ideas to replace them with their own intolerant society - whether that be an islamic caliphate or a Chinese-style fascist [1] surveillance state - are not welcome. I realise this includes a number of EU bureaucrats who are enamoured of the latter system and I would be pleased to see these individuals removed from power, preferably by truly democratic means.
Predictable to an extent. President Xi has effected a number of rather drastic changes internally; it's possible that external policy changes may follow.
Yup, relying on sadistic, communistic regime that puts people into concentration camps is a great idea! What can go wrong!? For instance trading with Russia, Nord Stream, didn't have any bad results...
Oh, crap, no, we have some full scale war going on in Europe now, because Putin thought he keeps Europe on the gas & oil leash (and he was almost right).
