America’s Midterm Elections and Its Future
I cannot confidently predict the outcome of the midterm elections. Of the 60 predictions I’ve made over the past 14 years, I believe only my prediction about the 2024 presidential election turned out to be wrong. The American people are no longer the people they once were. I used to understand them as though they were an open book. But today’s Americans? I no longer understand them.
If I had to place a bet, I would bet on a Democratic victory.
In numerous articles over the past several years—most recently, The Civilised World Is Moving Away from America—I have repeatedly discussed the priceless soft power accumulated by generations of America’s finest minds over the past 200 years.
That soft power was unconditional trust.
Every country in the world that has no desire to behave like a rogue state could count on two things:
- No matter how much more powerful America was than our country, even if an American military base stood just outside our capital, with special forces capable of storming our presidential palace and arresting our president within 15 minutes, we could still argue with America, even curse it to its face. We could pursue trade and political policies that Washington disliked. America would negotiate with us through international law rather than threaten military force. And we could ask the Americans to leave at any time.
- If our country were bullied by a powerful aggressor, America would, even if unable to intervene militarily, at least provide material and moral support.
Trump’s America has destroyed this priceless soft power in just two years.
It now despises the civilised, courteous nations of Europe. It has no hesitation in threatening to annex even its closest allies by force. It shows no compassion for Ukrainians being slaughtered, bends over backwards to help the murderous monster Putin, and cannot wait to make friends with dictators around the world.
Imagine a new student joining your class. After three months of getting to know him, you conclude that he is honest and kind. You come to trust him and depend on him.
Then one day, he betrays you and stabs you in the back.
How long would he have to work to regain your trust and friendship?
Never. Not in a million years.
Even if he merely wanted you to cooperate with him again on something relatively unimportant, he would have to spend years proving himself trustworthy.
Wouldn’t you agree?
That is why America will never, ever fully recover the soft power that its finest statesmen spent two centuries building.
Never.
Regaining some degree of trust from its former allies is still possible. But that would require Trump’s Republican lackeys to suffer crushing defeats in both the midterm elections and the next presidential election.
And I mean crushing defeats, not merely losing.
Trump and his accomplices must be held accountable. Their ill-gotten wealth must be confiscated. Politicians who knowingly supported Trump out of a selfish desire to preserve their positions must end their political careers in disgrace and humiliation.
If that happens, future American political parties and politicians will have a powerful lesson to remember. They will think twice before rallying behind another morally repugnant scoundrel who rises to power by inciting hatred.
[Prediction 1]
If the Republicans are not decisively crushed, and Trump and his lackeys are allowed to keep their ill-gotten gains, then even if the Republicans lose both the midterms and the presidential election, future American politicians will draw a very different lesson:
Winning power by inciting hatred is remarkably easy. Supporting a despicable leader without any moral restraint carries no consequences. Even if you eventually lose office, you can walk away with a fortune.
The result will be an endless succession of Trumps, each surrounded by his own army of sycophants. And just as bad money drives out good, politicians with a conscience will become increasingly scarce.
America will then be finished.
You may not like my predictions. You may prefer to listen to the countless political commentators who tell you exactly what you want to hear.
But you cannot ignore the fact that the overwhelming majority of my 60 political predictions over the past 14 years have come true.
Sooner or later, you will find yourself living in the future I predicted.
The War in Ukraine
Ukrainian forces have just completed Operation Vivaldi, recapturing 270 square kilometres of territory and achieving something unprecedented in the history of warfare: an attacking force suffering only one-seventh as many casualties as the defending force.
Ukrainian drones have gained complete control of the skies over Crimea. They can strike Russian military equipment almost at will. The roads carrying fuel and supplies into Crimea are littered with destroyed Russian military vehicles.
At the warehouses and logistics hubs of Wildberries—Russia’s equivalent of Amazon—virtually everything worth bombing has already been bombed. Now the distribution centres of Ozon, Russia’s second-largest e-commerce company, are going up in smoke one after another.
Three of Russia’s only five enormous data centres have been bombed.
And this is just the beginning.
Russia faces the prospect of being dragged back to an economy resembling the era before the digital revolution.
More than half of Russia’s oil-refining capacity has already been destroyed, and the proportion continues to rise.
The gap between Ukraine’s ability to attack with drones and Russia’s ability to shoot them down is widening, and this trend can only accelerate.
In In-Depth Analysis of the Ukraine War (44): The State of the War, I explained why in detail:
Ukrainians were the first people in the world to break through a limitation of military imagination that had persisted since the Second World War.
They realised that there is an enormous asymmetry between the difficulty of striking targets from the air and the difficulty of defending against those strikes. The former is a hundred times easier; the latter is a hundred times harder.
They realised that this extreme asymmetry could be exploited to win the war.
Therefore, even if Russia enjoyed a generational technological advantage over Ukraine, it would still be unable to reverse this trend.
And Ukraine is not developing its new weapons alone. Behind all its weapons programmes stand its European allies.
Europe does not want to provoke Russia too openly, so European countries quietly provide Ukraine with technology behind the scenes.
That is how Ukraine has managed to develop attack drones that use AI for autonomous terminal guidance, making them resistant to jammers installed at their targets.
Developing a ballistic missile normally takes at least seven years. Yet Ukraine has simultaneously developed two ballistic missiles, the FP-7 and FP-9, completing their development in less than two years and achieving unexpectedly high accuracy.
Without Europe secretly supplying crucial technology, this would simply have been impossible.
Ukrainian drones are already Russia’s worst nightmare.
But drones have one major limitation: they are slow.
Russia’s high-value targets can receive several hours of warning. Fighter aircraft, missile launchers, radar systems and other mobile equipment can be relocated. Facilities that cannot be moved can at least prepare their anti-aircraft guns and other defensive systems.
When Ukraine sends 100 drones against a target, 95 or even 99 may be shot down. Success depends on the one or two that manage to slip through.
That is why each drone cannot carry a tonne of explosives. Such a drone would be larger, easier to intercept and considerably more expensive. Losing 99 of them would be financially unsustainable.
Consequently, the explosive payload of these drones is generally limited to a few dozen kilograms.
Ballistic missiles are a different matter entirely.
They travel at several times the speed of sound. From the moment Russian radar detects one until the moment it strikes, there may be only a few minutes.
Even mobile targets such as fighter aircraft may not have enough time to react.
Russia has no record of successfully intercepting ballistic missiles. So once a Ukrainian ballistic missile is launched, its Russian target is, for all practical purposes, doomed.
A drone striking the roof of a factory may not even penetrate it. Even if it does, it may destroy only one or two pieces of machinery.
A ballistic missile carrying nearly a tonne of explosives, by contrast, could destroy dozens of machines across an entire factory workshop.
A drone might destroy a critical distillation tower at an oil refinery. Although such equipment is difficult to repair, it can eventually be restored.
But after several ballistic missiles, each carrying nearly a tonne of explosives, strike that refinery, there may be little point in attempting to rebuild it at all.
Meanwhile, Europe and Ukraine are on the verge of introducing jointly developed air-defence missiles offering capabilities approaching those of the Patriot system, but at a fraction of the cost.
[Prediction 2]
Ukrainian forces are already gaining momentum. But their achievements so far will pale into insignificance compared with what will happen once the FP-7 and FP-9 ballistic missiles enter combat in large numbers—and especially once the new air-defence missiles are deployed on a massive scale.
This is why Vladimir Trump is now pulling out all the stops.
Even though his identity as a Russian spy is plain for all to see, and despite widespread condemnation from across the American political spectrum and throughout Europe, he is throwing himself openly into helping Russia force Ukraine to surrender.
Because if he waits much longer, it will be too late.
Yes, Russian forces are still advancing on some fronts, paying the appalling price of at least 1,200 soldiers killed every day to gain a few dozen metres.
But a few months later, Ukrainian forces can retake that territory—and more—at minimal cost, just as they did in Operation Vivaldi.
Continued Russian offensives are precisely what Ukraine and its allies want.
Only through these futile assaults can Ukraine keep inflicting more than 2,000 Russian casualties every day at relatively little cost to itself.
Only when three to five million, or even tens of millions, of Russian corpses have been left to fertilise Ukraine’s black soil, and Russia’s economic foundations have been set back thirty years, will this nation of beasts finally awaken from its belief in the bloodiest law of the jungle.
(My apologies to the beasts for insulting them.)
If Russia ever stops attacking, digs in along the entire front, concentrates on developing drone technology, and begins systematically destroying everything behind Ukrainian lines with large-scale drone and ballistic missile strikes, that would be the scenario Ukraine and its allies should fear most.
The Iran War
In my articles The US–Iran War: America’s Crushing Defeat, The US–Iran War: America’s Crushing Defeat (II), and Trump Supporters Are All Paying a Heavy Price, But…, I discussed in detail how that idiot Trump launched this war purely to satisfy his own vanity, ignoring warnings and objections from every direction.
The war has inflicted enormous losses on the entire world.
The Middle Eastern royal families that practically worshipped Trump have suffered particularly badly.
Previously, these countries relied completely on American protection. Now Iran and its proxies are repeatedly beating the hell out of them, while America simply looks the other way.
[Prediction 3]
The military alliance between Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan is merely the earliest hint of the Middle East’s move away from dependence on America.
The erosion of American influence in the Middle East, and its far-reaching consequences, have barely begun to emerge. Over the next ten years, we will witness these developments and their consequences again and again.
In this idiotic war, Iran and Trump’s America are a perfectly matched pair of world-class idiots.
America had absolutely no need to start this war and was utterly unprepared for it.
Meanwhile, Iran’s theocratic regime has stubbornly insisted, for no good reason, on being the worst of the bad guys, determined to fight to the bitter end against a giant hundreds of times its size.
Time and again, the giant has said:
“Look, I don’t want to fight anymore. Even if I kill a thousand of your people for every three of mine, I still don’t think it’s worth it. Why don’t you back down a little? I won’t try to wipe you out. We can just stop fighting. How about it?"
And time and again, the religious fanatics have replied:
“No! You must fight us to the death!"
When two once-in-a-thousand-years idiots are locked in battle, conventional logic is of little use in predicting who will emerge victorious.
Even if the Democrats win a landslide in the midterm elections, I cannot imagine America making any meaningful concessions to Iran over control of the Strait of Hormuz or the question of nuclear weapons.
Therefore, if Iran’s theocratic regime retains even a shred of sanity, it will, after taking another severe beating, reach some kind of deliberately ambiguous agreement with America.
Both sides will interpret the agreement in ways that allow them to save face and claim victory, while the practical result will be a return to something resembling the pre-war situation.
- The Strait of Hormuz: Iran will proclaim that it controls the strait, patrol it with great fanfare and occasionally board ships for inspection. But it will refrain from bombing or hijacking commercial vessels, allowing Middle Eastern oil to flow freely to international markets.
- The nuclear issue: Both sides may agree to continue negotiations, with Iran undertaking not to take provocative steps during the talks, such as building new centrifuges or nuclear reactors.
Unrest in France
[Prediction 4]
The riots currently sweeping France will not inflict fundamental damage on France or Europe.
France’s fundamental problem is that its excessively generous welfare system has, over many years, grown beyond what the country can afford, leaving it buried under mountains of debt.
The only solution is to adopt the kind of spending cuts and welfare reforms that Greece was forced to implement after its financial collapse.
But there is a political trap: whichever party dares to implement such reforms will lose to another party that promises not to.
This is a fundamental weakness of democracy: voters are short-sighted and too easily tempted by immediate benefits.
Nevertheless, this weakness is far preferable to the fundamental flaw of dictatorship, where rulers indulge themselves in extravagant luxury while treating ordinary people as resources to be exploited.
There is no need to worry too much.
The French can continue borrowing money to finance their generous welfare benefits until the day comes when they can no longer afford the interest payments and no bank is willing to lend them another cent.
At that point, no political party will be able to keep promising that everything can continue as before. France will have no choice but to follow the path Greece took.
France’s economy is actually quite strong and dynamic.
Imagine a young man earning $40,000 a month in a very secure job. He spends money like water, lives extravagantly and eventually finds himself unable to pay his bills.
All he needs to do is give up his extravagant lifestyle. Within a few years, he can repay his debts and get back on track.
France is in much the same position.
China
I will write a separate article about China’s future in approximately one month.
For now, here is a preview of my conclusions:
- China has definitively escaped the middle-income trap.
- If Xi Jinping retires and is succeeded by a relatively enlightened leader such as Wang Yang, allowing China to return to a path of peaceful development, then the probability of China overtaking America will no longer be below 10%.Before Trump’s election, I believed that probability was zero. But after witnessing the comprehensive, deep-rooted damage Trump has inflicted on America, and after spending several months examining developments in China, I have come to realise that China is nowhere near as stupid or as insane as America has become.
- If, on top of those conditions, Trumpism also wins the midterm elections and the next presidential election, the probability of China overtaking America will exceed 50%.
Conclusion
The worst possible outcome for Ukraine would be the far-right parties coming to power in both France and Germany. Both are openly pro-Russian.
Imagine that happening alongside a Republican victory in the American midterm elections, followed by JD Vance or Marco Rubio winning the next presidential election and continuing Trump’s pro-Russian policies.
The pro-Russian governments in Washington, Paris and Berlin would then reinforce one another.
Under those circumstances, Ukraine would face an extremely difficult future.
[Prediction 5]
But even if pro-Russian governments take power in America, Germany and France, and even if propaganda gurus such as Niu Tanqin publish thirty triumphant essays in a row proclaiming, “Zelensky had it coming! He should have surrendered long ago! Now let him weep!", you will discover that support for Ukraine from the free world will not disappear. It will not even diminish dramatically.
Ukraine will hold its ground.
Remember my prediction.
