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There is a Japanese proverb "A thousand years of good reputation is ruined in a single hour." Trump has burnt up the single most valuable asset any country or

• don_esteban 25d ago
  This is very west-centric view. The countries of the south on the receiving end of US/western 'help' have been disabused of viewing US as 'a shining city on a hill' by their own experience, long time ago. They saw Carney's Davos speech recognizing the hypocrisy of 'rules-based international order' as just another hypocrisy: you were quiet while those rules suited you, now you squeak, when you are on the receiving end. But yes, the people in the west are waking-up. I have gone through the fall of communism. From years when most people actually believed in it (I did not live through that, too young), to years where people knew the system is a sham, but things looked unshakeable, to years where 'something' was in the air, but a real change was unimaginable, to the sudden and very real fall. We are in 'something is in the air' with the current western system. The problem is that for the communist countries, there was an alternative - the western system (yes, the west's soft power of jeans & coca cola worked). And the communist elites lost their will to power (or had already pre-planned path to oligarchy). Nowadays, there is no clear alternative, and the western elites seem determined to keep the system at all costs (see all the surveillance technology, the push for AI is also relevant). So, the change will be much messier and possibly bloodier than the fall of communism.