Dmitry Orlov and Vladimir Putin believe the US is failing, because the US government, in Putin’s words, is “making sure-footed strides directly along the path of the Soviet Union.”
These strides are, in Orlov’s words: “exorbitant debt, problems in the energy sector and unreformable political systems mired in corruption, their elites delusional in their feelings of omnipotence. And now comes a truly eerie analogy: the powder keg that detonated under the USSR was ethnic nationalism and separatism; and the powder keg that is currently detonating under the US is “woke” (anti-)racism: another brand of ethnic fascism but with American characteristics.”