Many declinists begin to measure the start of America’s fall from eminence from 1945, when it is typically assumed that U.S. power was unequalled in the world and could only diminish.
The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” once wrote Mark Twain. “Greatly exaggerated” also described the repeated, periodic predictions of American decline. Indeed, [...]

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In reality, the conflict between Russia and Georgia is not just about Abkhazia but about Russia’s lingering resentment at what it regards as Western encirclement. Following the end of the Cold war and demise of the Warsaw Pact, Russia believed it had an assurance from Nato and the West that there would be no expansion [...]

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Vladimir Putin’s appointment this spring as prime minister of the symbolic “union” of Russia and Belarus was yet another example of the troubling similarities between today’s Russia and the other most stable and prosperous Russian regime of the past 80 years: Leonid Brezhnev’s Soviet Union in the 1970s. That economy, too, was fueled by then-record [...]

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Putin may be endangering Russia’s future by revisiting the past.
The Byzantine Empire fell in 1453. But you wouldn’t know it in Russia, where Vladimir V. Putin has been behaving as though the 15th century never ended, as though he is the direct descendant of the Byzantine kings and Moscow remains the “Third Rome” it declared [...]

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