China isn’t too far off from its end either.
It’s one-child has been so successful that parents are interested in more than one children. In thirty years, China might fall under a billion people.
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Who and what comes after Putin? I can more easily see China trying to seize parts of Siberia - sparsely populated and rich in natural recsources which the Chinese need and are better positioned to exploit - than China going to war with us. They can always go to war with us later, watching us weaken year by year.
Russia has a problem. Extremely rich in resources, not many people to defend those resources over the distances they must control.
Nobody in the West trusts them because they kill their own people with little remorse.
Chinese will move into the “far East”.
Personally, I think Nukes in Washington DC, Moscow, and Bejing, destroy those three cities( and the government there) and the entire world would be a better place.
Just an opinion.
We need Russia to join with us against China.
“the territorial disintegration of the Russian Federation” is the most likely scenario unless they find a strongman to succeed Putin and rule the country with an iron fist.
The Democrats have done us no favors with the Russia collusion hoax. Putin understands the US and can see there are a lot of self serving politicians under the thumb of China that cannot be trusted. It is an opportunity that has been wasted so far.
The Polish are never right in their predictions for Russia and this one is not an exception.
Four negative scenarios are wishful thinking unrelated to reality, the “positive” scenarios do not reflect the popular sentiments and the goals of the elites as well.
Real Putin’s problem is that his popularity historically stems from improved rule of law and significant growth in living standards. The latter is under ginormous foreign pressure over the last decade, there he manages to competently handle it on macro-level, but for the average person, it seems stagnant at best.
There are two lines of opposition towards the current status quo, where the left views Putin as a corporatist elitist who lets big business not pay its fair share, and the right sees him as a Westernist who spent too much time in Germany, weak on defense and foreign policy.
Whoever replaces him in 2024 will have to address these two problems. The reconstitution of “Empire” is not on the menu because everybody is tired of the fSU countries and doesn’t want to support them anymore. “Reforms with Western help” are a tough sell because everybody remembers the Yeltsinite oligarchy, and there is a fresh example of the trainwreck Ukraine under Western “reformers” nearby.
It looks like Russia has gone back to 1890, a large but unstable giant. Tsar Vladimir has his hands full.