The United States and Russia are both losing wars.
And they are losing wars that make no sense, in an uncanny folie à deux, to the benefit of China.
This video, which I filmed after dozens of meetings and public discussions in Europe this month, supplies an explanatory concept: the superloser.
A superloser is a leader of a great power, or (onetime) superpower, whose disastrous choices lead to a crash. He possesses a combination of skills that allow for a rise to personal power and the collapse of state power.
In the video I spell out the five C’s of the superloser phenomenon:
A conflict that is being lost, in the strong sense of a war: Iran for Trump, Ukraine for Putin.
A concept of power that is betrayed, by the war and generally, such that it is not only defeat that is at hand, but the continuous undermining of structures.
A corruption that makes national interests irrelevant; a shared example, one of many, is giving tax money to billionaires.
Cooperation with the other superloser, which somehow makes matters worse both for the other superloser and for the world; Trump’s nonsensical war, for example, funds Putin’s criminal war of aggression by raising oil prices, but Putin is still unable to win and now lacks excuses for failure.
A special superloser charisma, a subjective sense in society or the media that the superloser is somehow a strong man, which makes it harder to describe losses as such, and allows the damage to continue.
And there is of course a sixth C: China, which despite its own enormous problems is being handed a leading role in the world by the superlosers.
I will write this all out at some point, but for now I hope that this video will help you to make sense of the events of this year — or for that matter of the past few days, as both Trump and Putin have had to pay court to Xi in Beijing.
