I wonder if future historians are going to look back at this and call it the dawn of the Age of the Autocrats.
Assuming there are any humans left to write histories after the end of the world war an age of powerful nation-states ruled by mercurial oligarch-supported autocrats with nuclear weapons would inevitably spawn.
These are the real stakes in the next two elections. And most people won’t be able to see it that the real stakes are democracy itself and the survival of the world. They will will dismiss it as hyperbolic fearmongering, even as a critical fraction of them, many of them left of center, did in November, 2016.
And note that the leaders in this development were the two former Communist superpowers. Who once presented themselves as a wonderful economic and social egalitarian model for Third World Places like Latin America, who had a history of autocratic rulers.