Stephen Kotkin's Hopeful Future for the West

In 2017, Stephen Kotkin gave a 5 hour long talk about Spheres of Influence at the IWM Vienna. The talk is long not because he repeats the same ideas, but because he doesn't give conclusions. As I see it, his talks clearly step through both sides of an argument and then leave it up to the audience to decide what to believe; largely in-line with the Socratic method. One part of the talk stood out to me: he said that the West does not have a clear hopeful picture for the future anymore.

I think that argument was correct. It could explain why birth rates are going down all over the world. Why most things seem to become worse, not better. Why integrity seems to be on the decline. From what I hear from politicians, the only things we can work towards are anti things. Politicians to me seem to prefer breaking things down over building things up.

But I do still believe in democracy. I think it's quite amazing that there are many dictatorships over the world and by some miracle we in the West ended up living in a democracy. For example, as Ronald Reagan joked:

An American and a Russian are arguing about their two countries. The American says look: "In my country, I can walk into the Oval Office, pound the president's desk, and say 'Mr. President, I don't like the way you're running our country!'".

And the Russian says "I can do that." The American says "You can?" The Russian says "Yes, I can walk right into the Kremlin, go to the General Secretary's office, slam my fist on his desk and say "I don't like the way President Reagan is running his country."

This is true. I have myself been and have met many people who have criticized prime ministers of the Netherlands. And none of these people have been arrested. Although I don't say that all these criticisms have been valid, I do say that it's amazing if you think about it. Noam Chomsky, for example, has been criticizing the United States for half a century now and he is currently 96 years old and still living in the US.

However, many countries are now openly and covertly attacking the West. Autocratic regimes and dictatorships seem to be getting more and more powerful by the day. And we still do not have an answer. We seem to just be fighting internally.

On top of this, I've seen many foreign influences getting almost no push-back. For example, I recently was looking into alternatives for X (formerly Twitter) on Reddit. One of the main communities that was presented was Lemmy. Lemmy is an open source social media site for which one of the main communities is communism. And one of the main and anonymous software developers has Fidel Castro, the first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba, as his profile picture. Then I wonder, didn't humanity have this discussion before already? Didn't communism lose because many of the factories produced goods that were worth less than the sum of the inputs? Didn't communism under Stalin lead to millions of deaths? And to tens of millions of deaths under Mao Zedong?

Comment sections under Frank Dikötter's videos aren't much better. Frank Dikötter is an outspoken critic of the Chinese regime, but his arguments are mostly downplayed in the comment section. Top comments question his authority and show many other logical fallacies. These comments then get thousands of likes. Who is liking that exactly? And why does it seem we don't do anything to stop it?

And this is while China seems to be far ahead in many technologies. Almost all solar panels, batteries, and drones are produced in China. I recently spent time trying to buy a non-Chinese laptop charger. After searching half the web, I found a German company that could sell a charger via MediaMarkt. When I received the charger, I looked on the bottom and read "Made in China".

Sometimes I feel that we are currently heading to what Japan experienced in the 19th century. They were happily living on their island when the Perry Expedition showed up with modern weapons. This is like bringing a knife to gun fight. Or in the case of Japan, bringing a Gatling Gun to a Samurai sword fight. If the Chinese would show up with state-of-the-art AI powered drone swarms, and humanoid robots, would we stand there with our tanks and rifles? I'm not saying this is an inevitable outcome. I'm saying I'd rather not find out. I'd rather see a democratic society where people can criticize their leader and have state-of-the-art technology too.

But not all is lost, in a recent fireside chat with Stephen Kotkin & US House Select Committee on China, Stephen did paint an optimistic picture for the West and how to respond to China:

So winning is not planting an American flag in the middle of Chinese territory. It's not the Chinese vanish from the face of the earth. It's that America becomes America again. That's what winning looks like. It's investing in ourselves, playing to our strengths, most of all being ourselves. Not being China. That's what I understand winning to be. As far as whether the Chinese are going to roll the iron dice or not, that's one guy making that decision. But on our side, it's a whole society making the decision of how to respond. It's our universities, it's our scientific establishment, it's our Congress, it's our judiciary, it's our executive branch, it's our NGOs, it's our business community. Look at all the sources of power in the United States. The more they are energized, the more that they are the level that they can be at, the more we provide opportunity at home, and opportunity abroad for our friends and partners, the more we win.