I truly wish I could share your optimism about the West, but when we consider facts the picture is so bleak that all roads lead not to Rome but to ruin. The USA does not always "do the right thing" in the end. VietNam (for example) was always a total mistake and an astonishing one for a nation that won its independence fighting a colonial power. The USA propped up the colonial power in VietNam (France) because the USA always failed to realize that a domino analogy was silly and superficial and that Ho Chi Min could actually have been an ally - as could some of the left-wing elected leaders the CIA decided to kidnap and kill to permit ultra-right thugs (hey there Mobutu, hey there Pahlavi) to take over and systematically loot and impoverish their nations. Likewise the USA's blind support of Israel regardless of its illegal occupation of land allocated to the Palestinians and the unrelenting brutality of the IDF against Palestinian civilians has been a stragic blunder of monumental proportions and yet shows zero sign of abating.

In the end, the real cause is the fact that democracy today requires no requirements from voters other than the ability to remain alive until the age of majority, and no requirements from candidates other than the ability to package simple-minded lies into easy-to-chant soundbites. Thus ignorant foolish people elect babbling incompetents. We can hardly expect good results when the fundamentals are totally wrong. And so the West truly is doomed, not because of pathetic little halfwits like Putin but because we have failed to understand that a complex inter-connected technological world requires a great deal more than a perpetual stumbling and failing amateur hour.