“Japan is similar to Germany, but with 1.5x its population, several times its problems (e.g. even more rapidly aging population—”

I don’t see aging as much of a problem. Ethic diversity, however, is a huge problem, since it always, without fail, 100% of the time leads to conflict. Germany is getting more and more diverse, while Japan is mostly staying homogeneous. Japan 1, Germany 0.

By the way, the riots that recently went down in Moscow would have been unimaginable in the Moscow of my youth. This is because the Moscow of my youth was far more homogeneous than the modern city.

“the current government is disinvesting in the future (university education)—”

We disagree here. Educating the best of the best minds is always important, but that’s not where most of the money in modern higher ed goes. It goes into wasting the most productive years of millions of average minds on stuff they don’t need and cannot possibly find interesting, and on creating meaningless work for the people employed by the system. Britain’s spectacular past was full of world-transforming geniuses (Newton, Darwin, Faraday, Turing, etc.), yet for centuries the Brits seem to have only had two universities. It was enough. Civilization is moved forward by a few.

“Though at first glance India might appear similar to China, or at least following in its footsteps, the real situation is far gloomier.”

The Chinese tend to be proud of China. In contrast, I’ve heard Indians badmouth India on numerous occasions. This is because they tend to reserve their pride for their castes or religious communities instead. If no one identifies with the state, then no one will feel any compunction stealing from it and the state will always be weak. When I think of this sort of stuff, I’m always reminded of the phrase “?? ??????? ??????” (“I feel sorry for the country”) from White Sun of the Desert. You can’t have a powerful state unless a lot of people feel that way.

“This makes [Turkey] a role model – and possible future leader – for many Muslims in the Middle East—”

That’s what the guys at the New York Times and the Economist want to believe. I don’t think secularism is likely to make anyone a role model in the Middle East. And as the West’s importance wanes, any prestige associated with being Westernized should go down, not up.