The thing about Russia is that it had its reality check with the fall of the Soviet Union and can see the same sort of delusional thinking taking hold in the West. So while they certainly have their issues, they are in a situation where it pays to be relatively objective.

Good and bad are not some cosmic dual between the forces of righteousness and evil, but the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental, so as an evolutionary process, societies evolve upwards, as resources allow, not granted some dispensation from above. The US has had only growth, geographic, industrial, cultural and doesn’t have a lot of cultural connectivity to hold itself together, should that stop, as the Chinese do, so we have pushed the wave through debt since the 60’s, with various exponential explosions of it and consequently do not have much grasp of the downside, should there be a currency meltdown, since that is the primary mechanism holding the system together.

Organisms function by synchronizing all their varied clocks and necessarily rise and fall as one wave. While ecosystems harmonize their varied clocks, so some are coming and some are going. The functionality of a market based economy is that all the varied actors harmonize their activity, yet with capitalism, the tool that enables markets to function, money, has become their god and goal, so the entire economy becomes geared to the production of money as an end in itself, not larger social uses. Consequently it all becomes synchronized to the health of the currency. Which becomes this colossus riding an increasinglyly threadbare economy. Until it turns to confetti.