In an article for The American Conservative magazine, Patrick Buchanan, an ex-senior advisor to US Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, wrote that Russia, which “had risen like the phoenix from ashes”, and “non-democratic” China are gaining ground, while the US “is beginning to resemble” France in its last days before World War II.
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The politician suggested that a state no longer has to be democratic to prosper and thrive, referring to Russia as a “ruined nation” that was restored to a “great power” in the eyes of the international community.
“This century, China has shown aspiring rulers how a single-party regime can create a world power, and how democracy is not a necessary precondition for extraordinary economic progress”, Buchanan wrote.
According to Buchanan, it is the diversity that the American democracy now offers the world as its "foremost attribute, its claim to greatness". But, he stressed that it is also the diversity that Europe is “openly fleeing from” in an apparent allusion to the migration crisis on the continent.
“Broadly, it seems more true to say that the world is turning away from transnationalism toward tribalism, and away from diversity and back to the ethno-nationalism whence nations came. The diversity our democracy has on offer is not selling”, he wrote.
He further cast doubt on the fact that the world still wanted to be more like the US due to the pressure on US President Donald Trump having reached its climax, as well as ongoing discussions on the elites’ attempts to take the 45th down and send him to jail.
“And what will a watching world be thinking when it sees the once-great republic preoccupied with breaking yet another president?” Buchanan penned.
The politician elaborated that amid “this horror”, the Reagan-era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty that banned all US and Soviet nuclear missiles with a range of between 500km and 5,500km is facing collapse, and Trump’s initiative on the Korean Peninsula’s denuclearisation is also in jeopardy.
“Yet for the next two years, we will be preoccupied with whether paying hush money to Stormy Daniels justifies removing a president and exactly when Michael Cohen stopped talking to the Russians about his boss building a Trump Tower in Moscow. We are an unserious nation engaged in trivial pursuits in a deadly serious world”, Buchanan concluded.