A lot of ink has been spilled over the rise of a new alliance of Authoritarian states including Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea. Let's call it CRINK. This new Axis of Assholes is being portrayed as ascendant and emboldened to challenge the West.
I have a different take.
Authoritarianism, fascism, it doesn't emerge from prosperity and stability, but from a demand for it. A population turning to strongmen to solve their domestic political problems is already unstable. That doesn't have to mean economic instability. Look at 2016 here. It was never "economic anxiety" driving Trumpism. The people supporting him lived in the fucking suburbs and flew to J6th on private jets, for fuck's sake. They were afraid of losing their hegemony and power. That's what destabilized America. But not CRINK.
No, the nations of CRINK aren't emboldened, but desperate. They are, individually and collectively, facing down demographic and economic collapse.
Russia is a failed oligarchy propped up by an aging mobster only too well aware of his own mortality. Trump was his last chance. Putin installed Donald Trump to destroy America from within. To destroy our institutions, end our democracy, and sever all of our alliances, starting with NATO, the single largest barrier to his expansionist aims.
And he ALMOST did it. If fewer than a hundred thousand votes in key swing states had gone the other way in 2020, we'd be halfway through the last 'elected' Presidential term in American history and well on our way to five-flagged fascism.
But, we saved ourselves, and simultaneously sealed Putin's fate. He wanted to clear the table before restarting the Soviet Empire. Ukraine would have been just a doormat to the rest of Eastern Europe without Joe Biden leading NATO and the Western World.
Now, Putin's Russia has been exposed as a paper bear. Their military is a shell of the Red Army, hollowed out by corruption, grift, and incompetence. The ruble is in freefall, Russian industry/economy are strangled by sanctions, and they're losing men at an unsustainable rate.
Russia's population is shrinking. From low birth rates, nonexistent immigration, wartime losses, and from people fleeing economic collapse. Invading Ukraine was a desperate roll of the dice to reverse their fortunes, and it came up snake eyes.
Russia's economy and industry are moribund, unable to innovate or compete internationally. They had two things going for them export wise, arms and fossil fuels. Well, the reputation of their weapons died in the wheatfields of Ukraine, and Europe isn't buying their gas.
Russia is already fielding defective, expired munitions from North Korean stockpiles in Ukraine. They're buying drones from Iran by the thousands because they don't have the industrial capacity to produce either in quantity. And they just caved to China's farming demands. Hundreds of thousands of hectares of agricultural land in Russia's far West have been granted to China's control for their own food production.
East. Messed that up.
Which brings us to Xi's China. For decades, the CCP has maintained otherworldly rates of growth, double digits most years. That shit is over.
China's crackdown on the relative autonomy enjoyed by Hong Kong was, in my opinion, misread by most Western analysts as an emboldened Xi and the central government consolidating power. I saw and see it as an admission of weakness. Hong Kong was a hot bed of dissent.
China is, more quietly, facing all of the same problems Putin's Russia is, but at a MUCH greater scale. China's economy has never been an innovation engine. More of a copyright theft and Xerox machine of everyone else's ideas with a much cheaper labor pool.
Trouble is, as the Chinese middle class has grown by the hundreds of millions, wages are rising, and those cheap products aren't so cheap anymore. Manufacturing orders are moving offshore to even cheaper competitors like Vietnam, and innovation is happening in Taiwan.
The vast migration of the Chinese people from rural areas to planned, prefabricated cities to support their never-ending, double digit economic growth, has stalled. Trillions upon trillions of dollars of real estate lay empty. Developers bankrupted.
Meanwhile the demographic bomb laid decades ago by the "One Child Policy," has gone off. The policy was rescinded a few years ago, but much too late. China's population, the largest in the world, is falling. At exactly the time a new middle class can't afford more kids.
Much like Russia, China doesn't have a culture conductive to immigration. The decline is here, and it's irreversible. China is set to lose as much as HALF its population over the next 40-50 years. And the ones who remain will trend older, less capable, and more dependent.
North Korea... is a fucking basket case of a country and has been for 70 years. There's really not much else to say there.
Which brings us to Iran. Unique among CRINK nations, Iran is fairly young. Their birthrate isn't fucked. But, like Russia, their economy is siloed.
Iran is an extraction economy, much like the rest of the Middle East. They rise and fall on fossil fuel prices at a time the developed world is quickly moving on from them. Peak Oil is either on the horizon, or already in the rearview, depending on who you ask.
We still here? I can go back to writing this book if y'all are spent.
There you are. Anyway, Iran has the same problem as most of the rest of the ME; how to pivot away from fossil fuels as the cornerstone of their economy. Trouble is, the only way to do that effectively is to be on good terms with the West, where all the money comes from.
They, to put it mildly, aren't.
And again here we can thank Putin's puppet for some of that. Trump's decision to unilaterally withdraw America from the Iran Nuclear Deal was a gift to hardliners in both Moscow and Tehran.
Iran was on a path for integration. That ended.
Perhaps I should even say "reintegration," because Iran was an open, democratic society on friendly terms with the West until... well until we overthrew the democratically elected Shah and sent it down a path to theocratic rule by fiat opposed by most Iranians, but hey...
The end result is Tehran is ruled by religious zealots the average Iranian would rather toss into the Gulf, but they're constrained by the military, intelligence services, and vice police, while their economy can't diversify like other Gulf states are attempting to.
Collectively, the CRINK nations are trapped between their authoritarian rulers, downward economic and demographic pressures, and the adversarial positions they've taken against the West. They're not emboldened, they're desperate, flailing. But they control their media.
And, frankly, a pretty big percentage of our media, too. Either because some jackboot-sucking suckknob paid 44 billion dollars to fuck up Twitter, or because Western journalists have had their budgets slashed until they're little more than stenographers.
There's a reason CRINK is spending so much money, military, and diplomatic effort focusing on winning over developing economies in the Global South, a part of the world the West ignores at our peril.
Because it buys them TIME. The GS will buy fossil fuels for decades yet.
Economic and political instabilities in Africa and South America mean markets for cheap weapons CRINK is only too happy to provide. Cheap, mass produced, unsafe cars that would be illegal to sell anywhere else will fill their roads in a new industrial boom.
Buying up cheap real estate in developing markets with little in the way of zoning or regulations. That's what CRINK is up to while using cyberwarfare to sow division and chaos among Western democracies.
The House Speaker disaster was engineered by Putin. Fact.
Trump through his proxies like Matt Gaetz tossed Kevin McCarthy even after he kissed the ring. They tried to get two of their own through and failed. Now today Trump decreed they have to eject whatever his fucking name was and they did it in four hours.
While funding for Ukraine's defense from Russian invasion is tied up. While Iranian-funded, Russian-trained Hamas attacked Israel and put the entire world on the brink.
The confluence of these events was not a coincidence, folks.
Everything you see on the world stage right now, all the hotspots and pressure points, they all lead in an arrow-straight line back to CRINK. And it's not because they're feeling confident. It's because they're all, collectively and individually, backed against the wall.
