As Swedish writer Malcom Kyeyune
, “the single most dangerous period for a political system is when it has ignored a looming crisis for years and decades, and then finally, backs snugly perched against a wall that cannot be moved, tries to apply wide-reaching reforms.” It is here that political revolutions are most liable to occur; consider the French Revolution, the fall of the Qing dynasty, or the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even the current
cause célèbre of defenders of the American-led order, the war in Ukraine, has its origins in a similar situation; the Maidan Revolution occurred in large part because the politically bankrupt Yanukovych regime tried and failed to save the country’s economy,
by the
Washington Post as “a legacy of 23 years of incompetent economic management.”