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A couple of quotes from "The Vladimir Putin School of Leadership", by Leonid Bershidsky:
The US no longer offers a role model for modernizing a country. The recent financial crisis, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the failure to support Hosni Mubarak (one of the few long-term US allies in the Middle East), the NSA scandal, etc. put a serious dent into other countries' desire to follow the American democracy model in their modernization efforts.
On the other hand, over the last 20 years China has been growing like crazy and Russia managed to climb back from the abyss. If the west retreats in the current confrontation with Putin it will send a message to the rest of the world that belligerence, not cooperation, is the best way to assert oneself internationally. The biggest danger is that China might decide to follow the Russian example and flex its economic muscle in Asia.
The leaders of some of the biggest developing nations -- China, India, Turkey, South Africa -- are increasingly acting like Russian President Vladimir Putin. It may be that democracy as the West understands it will have to compete with a new strain of authoritarianism, much as it did with communism in Soviet times.
It's not that Putin himself is inherently evil or contagious. The crucial similarities are not really among the leaders themselves but among all authoritarian regimes regardless of the continents on which they operate.
The US no longer offers a role model for modernizing a country. The recent financial crisis, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the failure to support Hosni Mubarak (one of the few long-term US allies in the Middle East), the NSA scandal, etc. put a serious dent into other countries' desire to follow the American democracy model in their modernization efforts.
On the other hand, over the last 20 years China has been growing like crazy and Russia managed to climb back from the abyss. If the west retreats in the current confrontation with Putin it will send a message to the rest of the world that belligerence, not cooperation, is the best way to assert oneself internationally. The biggest danger is that China might decide to follow the Russian example and flex its economic muscle in Asia.