The old global world is going down. Biden’s political challenge is how to avoid becoming the Chernenko of a collapsing edifice. He will either transition to a new, more sustainable political order or go down in history as the captain of the new Titanic.
Biden and the generation of Kerry, Clinton, Romney, Pelosi etc are probably too old to change. They just can’t. The younger generation of hidebound progressives, who rose to prominence on copycat mediocrity lack the ability. This leaves room for a fiftyish outsider like Gorbachev, from the Democratic or Republican ranks to pick up the pieces.
The most likely scenario in the West is the emergence of a conciliatory figure who can unite the populists and pragmatic Democrats into some coalition of survival. The challenge will be to manage China, get existential technological risks under control and reverse social entropy by finding new sources of physical and cultural energy. That person or party has not yet emerged but likely will.
It will be a hard task but both Russia and China will be facing their own crises. Biden was supposed to preside over a Restoration only to be confronted by the collapse of the global world.
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