( Tom Engelhardt Substack ) – It wasn’t so very long ago that there were three great powers reasonably ascendant on planet Earth. In the future, there may only be one — at the moment, the quietest and least aggressive of them — China. (In 2014, of course, Russia had already seized the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine.) His financial rise, of course, should also be considered the definition of American imperial decline. And strikingly enough, every step he takes and every act he engages in seems to involve (or do I mean devolve?)