This is a very funny article. Check the archives to see US commentators saying exactly the same thing about North VietNam in 1966. Oddly, things didn't turn out as predicted. In the real world, the West has failed entirely to react to Putin's expansionism while the Russian economy is now on a full war footing. People have been pretending economic factors will have a meaningful impact on the war, but history shows us this is never true. We should not be hiding under the metaphorical bed of deceptive self-soothing fairytales about some "inevitable" Russian collapse that is always somehow just a year or two in the future. We should be recognizing we've been stupid, spineless, and complacent. And now is long past time to change our posture.

Alas, we'll keep telling ourselves soothing fairytales even as the apocalypse consumes us. And no doubt as it does so, people will still be writing articles about how the collapse of Russia and China is really, honestly truly, just a year or two away.