Opinion | One Painful Debate Is Not Evidence of America’s Decline

There is, however, a profound flaw in the story Russia and China are selling. The disturbing sight of the American presidential debate immediately spurred a broad political conversation in the United States — the kind that would never be possible in China or Russia. These two autocracies are also run by aging men, but unlike Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump, they are entirely insulated from criticism, face no opposition and may very well rule their countries until they die.

Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi, both 71 years old, may delight in the advanced age of America’s leading presidential candidates, but they are fast approaching old age themselves. The difference is that no one will ever openly suggest they should step aside. They will hang on to power unchallenged, even if their regimes stagnate and wither. Mr. Putin’s criminal war in Ukraine, which has cost Russia billions of dollars while making it overreliant on China, and Mr. Xi’s disastrous Covid policies that sapped business confidence and lengthened China’s recovery, are just two recent examples of their dreadful leadership for which they have faced no meaningful domestic political repercussions.

China’s and Russia’s problems do not end there. Unlike democracies, which can set constraints on the powers of the executive in the form of term limits, autocracies, of course, do not. That makes younger leaders a different but equally dangerous threat. Joseph Stalin was just 58 in 1937 when he unleashed bloody purges, killing hundreds of thousands of his countrymen. China’s Mao Zedong started his murderous Great Leap Forward in 1958 when he was just 64. When they died, they left their nations in miserable messes that took years to sort out. The Soviets found themselves in such a deep morass by the early 1980s that their system proved unreformable, leading to a complete meltdown in 1991. Chinese citizens survived decades of political upheaval and unrest, only to find themselves under the thumb of another aging autocrat today.

America, by contrast, has so far managed to bounce back from its deepest crises. The civil rights struggle and the antiwar demonstrations of the 1960s generated intense polarization in American society. Then came Watergate, with its shocking revelations of corruption and conspiracy at the very heart of American power. Skyrocketing oil prices spurred a recession in the mid-1970s, and the American defeat in Vietnam delivered a grave blow to the United States’ global prestige, from which many thought the country would never recover.

At the time, the Kremlin was certain that the world was going its way and sought to extend power and influence to far-flung corners of the world. The Soviets were all too keen to take advantage of America’s problems by advertising America’s high crime rates and rampant drug addiction. In the words of one Politburo document from 1971, the Soviet policy was to discredit the United States, “thus undermining the U.S. position as the leader of the bourgeois world.”