Sarah Paine

But this breaking up of the earlier version of the bromance allows the United States to play the swing role, and then we cooperate.

Both Nixon and Mao think ganging up on Russia would be a good thing.

and overextending Russia financially by overextending it militarily with all these armaments and things.

So in addition, what's going as part of the China's rise are internal reforms under Deng Xiaoping when he abandoned certain communist principles of economic management and gets much more productive agricultural sector and industry and commerce.

And so China's running double digit growth rates for about 20 years with significant compounding effects.

Okay, that's the story of China's rise.

Now for this dystopian alternate universe of Russian decline.

You have pictured here on the left is Leonid Brezhnev, who apparently had a stroke in 1976 that permanently impaired his thinking, which his death in 1982 finished off.

And then...

He was replaced by Yuri Andropov, whose own health was pretty parlous, and he dies within two years.

And then Konstantin Chernenko barely makes it a year before he's dead.

I mean, it sort of sounds like us.

But anyway, it doesn't work well.

So if you look at Soviet growth statistics, they're really good right after the end of World War II.

They're busy rebuilding.

But then when you get to the mid-70s, they're going into terminal decline.

So when Gorbachev comes to power in 1985, Soviet growth rates have been either 1% to 2% less than U.S.

growth rates for the preceding decade.

And the compounding effects of that are pretty horrendous.

In addition to other problems, Leonid Brezhnev was in power for 18 long years.