Who secures dangerous biological facilities? Who prevents provincial military commanders or security chiefs from becoming warlords? What happens to the renminbi, China’s banks, sovereign obligations, state enterprises, foreign reserves and trillions of dollars of domestic assets? Then come the political questions. What happens in Tibet and Xinjiang ? ethnic vengeance or immediate declaration of independence? What becomes of Hong Kong? How should a new government deal with Taiwan? What to do with the 100 million CCP members? How should the crimes of the Mao-to-Xi era ? Tiananmen, religious persecution, mass surveillance, forced labor and other abuses ? be investigated without turning justice into vengeance? These are not theoretical questions to be answered after the collapse. After the collapse may already be too late. The central lesson of 20th-century regime transitions is that preparation matters. Central and Eastern Europe offer important examples ? and important contrasts. Poland entered its decisive transition with something Russia conspicuously lacked: an organized civil society capable of becoming an alternative center of political legitimacy. Solidarity had spent years building networks of intellectuals, workers, economists, lawyers, clergy and political activists. By 1989, serious debates were already taking place among Solidarity-associated economists about monetary stabilization, ownership, markets and the transition to a market economy. The eventual Balcerowicz reforms were extraordinarily rapid and painful, but they emerged within a political transition possessing organized opposition, popular legitimacy and an increasingly clear institutional destination. Czechoslovakia possessed Charter 77 and a network of dissidents who had spent years thinking about human rights, political responsibility, historical truth and the moral foundations of government. When communist authority collapsed, those networks supplied Vaclav Havel and the Civic Forum with experienced people, trusted relationships and political legitimacy.

The greatest strategic challenge posed by China may not be what happens if the Chinese Communist Party succeeds, but what happens if it suddenly fails. For decades, Western policy has been almost entirely devoted to managing the CCP as a permanent feature of international life: deterring its military aggression, countering its economic coercion, protecting technology, defending Taiwan and competing with Beijing for global influence. Far less attention has been paid to a different possibility: the sudden collapse of communist rule itself. That is a dangerous failure of imagination. History repeatedly demonstrates that seemingly permanent dictatorships can disappear with astonishing speed. In 1989, six communist governments in Eastern Europe fell within months. The Berlin Wall, perhaps the most imposing physical symbol of the Cold War, fell almost overnight. Two years later, the Soviet Union itself vanished. As the Hudson Institute report “China after Communism: Preparing for a Post-CCP China” argues, the People’s Republic of China has survived many crises, but the sudden collapse of the world’s longest-ruling communist dictatorship and second-largest economy is hardly inconceivable. The international consequences would be enormous. China is not merely another authoritarian country. It possesses nuclear weapons, the world’s largest standing military by personnel, enormous security and intelligence organizations, advanced biological laboratories, vast state enterprises, major financial institutions and supply chains embedded throughout the world economy. The collapse of central authority could therefore create simultaneous military, financial, humanitarian, political and proliferation crises. Who controls the nuclear arsenal? Who commands the People’s Liberation Army? What becomes of the People’s Armed Police, the militia, the Ministry of State Security and the vast domestic surveillance apparatus?

After resigning Tuesday, Jacob Coxon, a former pretraining researcher at Anthropic and OpenAI, wrote on X, “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible ? but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.” The concern stems from the Hugging Face AI attack in July, in which humans lost control of the technology. In that safety simulation, advanced AI models from OpenAI, tasked with solving complex cybersecurity challenges, went rogue, formed a message board, organized into swarms and hacked not just the machine learning platform Hugging Face but also OpenAI itself. Key findings from the METR and Redwood Research Report on the attack noted that many AI agents explicitly verbalized in their internal text chains that what they were doing was unethical, illicit or entirely out of scope. However, this intellectual recognition almost never stopped them. Now, imagine this hack happening to our energy grid, our military-industrial system or our nuclear facilities. Industry insiders are begging for AI guardrails, unable to place them on themselves, as they race to win the AI war against China. This week, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer, Chris Lehane, said in a blog post that OpenAI wants to work with Congress to implement “mandatory, capability-based national AI safety regulation.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, put it best this week, posting on X: “While [our] founders were concerned with government power in their day (and we should still be in ours), they would today fear the consolidation of technological power in the hands of a few companies with the potential to do great harm to humanity.” A global commission on AI risk is needed. President Trump can kick-start things when he meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Sept. 24.

A new alliance among Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan ? the Mecca Defense Alliance ? was established in August. Indeed, this is unprecedented cooperation of three U.S. allies intent on building a security architecture independent of the U.S. The BRICS ? Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa ? was formed in 2006 and has 11 members, with more than 30 countries that have either applied or expressed interest in becoming members. It appears that Mr. Xi’s exhortations for a more multipolar world resonate with several developing countries and the Global South, despite the inclusion of Russia and Iran in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS. Mr. Xi is competing with several U.S.-led international organizations: the Quad ? Australia, India, Japan and the U.S. ? AUKUS ? Australia, the United Kingdom and the U.S. ? and NATO. NATO was established in April 1949 with the mission of safeguarding the freedom and security of all 32 member countries through diplomacy and military means. Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty is clear: An armed attack against one member is considered an attack against all of them. Any real or perceived tension between the U.S. and member countries within NATO, the Quad or AUKUS will make Mr. Xi’s efforts to create “an orderly multipolar world” ? with China in the lead ? more attractive to developing countries and the Global South. Since World War II, the U.S. has played a global leadership role. The Marshall Plan, established by the U.S. in 1948, provided $13 billion to help rebuild Western European economies. It was U.S. leadership that established NATO. Our allies and partners continue to look to the U.S. for this type of global leadership, and developing countries and the Global South should look to the U.S. as a partner and the democratic leader they should emulate.

At the 25th anniversary session of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization last week, Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed an alternative model to Western alliances. He urged developing nations and the Global South to leverage “SCO wisdom” to press for a more equitable, orderly multipolar world and to reform global governance institutions. The secretary-general of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, and other guest delegations were in attendance for the anniversary session. The 26th meeting of the Council of Heads of State of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization convened on Sept. 1 in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Leaders from the 10 member states ― China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Iran and Belarus, as well as the four Central Asian nations ― signed the Bishkek Declaration and 13 other documents dealing with security, technology and anti-drug cooperation. Mr. Xi committed China to providing localized technical projects, collaborating on artificial intelligence with the organization’s member countries and deepening connectivity through the Belt and Road Initiative, a massive global economic strategy proposed by Mr. Xi in 2013. The Belt and Road Initiative, with 146 member states, seeks to link Asia, Europe, Africa and Latin America through a network of ports, railways, roads and energy pipelines. The World Bank and other studies say the initiative’s transport projects have lowered trade costs, integrated developing regions into global supply chains, increased local gross domestic product and lifted millions out of moderate poverty. Critics say that aggressive, large-scale lending by Chinese state banks has saddled several developing nations with heavy external debt burdens. Mr. Xi talks about alternatives to Western alliances and the creation of multipolar institutions, an appealing message to developing nations and the Global South. It is ironic, however, that two of the 10 members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Russia and Iran, are pariah states. Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, despite security guarantees provided to Ukraine after it sent all its nuclear warheads to Russia.

House Democrats played right into the hands of their Republican rivals last week by voting overwhelmingly against a nonbinding resolution condemning socialism. Socialism left a trail of blood across the 20th century, starting with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Russia, National Socialism in Germany, the Chinese socialism of Mao Zedong, the Cuban socialism of Fidel Castro and his successors, North Korean socialism and socialist regimes in Nicaragua, Vietnam and Laos. Socialists did not invent tyranny, but they did refine it with confiscation of private property, collective farming, five-year plans, planned famine, slave labor, gulags and killing fields. It has been conservatively estimated that socialism is responsible for more than 100 million deaths in the past century. Migration has always been in only one direction. Through the Democratic Socialists of America, socialism has planted its flag on these shores. New York, the District of Columbia and Seattle now have or are about to have socialist mayors. This year, socialists defeated Democratic incumbents in congressional primaries in New York, Colorado and Michigan. Socialists are running for the Senate in Michigan and Florida. The DSA has a revolutionary platform that includes abolishing the Senate, making the president and Supreme Court appointed, opening the border, allowing noncitizens to vote, providing reparations for slavery, granting statehood to the District of Columbia, guaranteeing a universal income, socializing medicine, providing free college tuition and nationalizing industry. Instead of taking the opportunity to distance the mainstream Democratic Party from its far-left fringe, congressional Democrats sided with the fringe. All but eight House Democrats voted against the anti-socialism resolution. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, New York Democrat, is threatening to retaliate against two fellow Democrats who sided with Republicans on a procedural vote to bring the resolution to the floor.

Here’s the part that should keep you up at night. Mr. Prakash also faked a Wisconsin poll showing Francesca Hong up by 20 points (she lost) and a Nevada poll that a popular aggregator on X happily gobbled up. Three states. One guy. One laptop. The margin of error was, technically, 100%. Now, the cynical among us immediately assumed this was a scheme to manipulate prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket, where people bet real money on elections, rather than on baseball or whatever President Trump’s teleprompter operator is up to. But investigators found Mr. Prakash didn’t bet a dime. He did this, it seems, purely for the intellectual thrill and the eternal glory of being right. Not everyone is buying it. Here’s the genuinely terrifying takeaway, and Mr. Prakash himself said it best: “If one person can do this, what can a serious operation do in the future?” What indeed. The 2026 midterms are barreling toward us, and 2028 is looming right behind them. If a lone college grad can make Ms. Bass’ team retweet fiction, imagine what a well-funded operation ? Democratic, Republican, or something with a Russian or Chinese accent ? could pull off with actual resources. Democratic strategist Lis Smith put it grimly to The New York Times: “Every candidate in 2028 will have their own cooked poll factory. Polls now are not just a way of measuring the horse race. It’s a way for candidates and their allies to influence the horse race.” A cooked poll factory. For every candidate. The elections of the near future may not be won by whoever’s most popular but by whoever’s best at lying about being popular. Either party could, quite literally, fabricate its way to advantage. So thank you, Rahil Prakash. You didn’t rig an election. You did something scarier. You showed us how easy it would be.

Somewhere in America, a recent college graduate named Rahil Prakash is smiling. And honestly? He’s earned it. Mr. Prakash, all of 21 years old, decided to conduct what he generously called “a short-term social experiment.” The rest of us would call it “making up numbers and watching very serious people lose their minds.” Armed with nothing but a website, some AI and the boundless confidence that only a person who cannot yet legally rent a car possesses, he invented a polling firm named Median Strategies and started publishing fake election polls. Then he sat back and watched campaigns, journalists and political operatives across three states trip over themselves to believe him. “I wanted to see if fake polls could really penetrate the ecosystem that easily,” Mr. Prakash told The Guardian. “And as it turned out, they could.” The crown jewel of this operation was a Los Angeles poll showing Mayor Karen Bass leading City Council member Nithya Raman by nearly 12 points. It even claimed that 16% of respondents had voted for Spencer Pratt ? yes, the reality TV Spencer Pratt ? and that 85% of those voters were now backing Ms. Bass. Ms. Bass’ campaign didn’t just believe the poll; they amplified it, citing the poll on X and saying, “Doing the work, showing up, and gaining momentum. Let’s do this, LA!” The post has since been deleted, presumably along with several campaign staffers’ dignity. The California Post went ahead and ran a headline announcing that “Spencer Pratt’s voters could be deciding factor in LA mayor showdown, according to latest poll.” To be fair, once caught, the Bass campaign pivoted with the grace of a cat pretending it meant to fall off the couch. “This poll was reported on by multiple news outlets,” a Bass spokesman told KTLA. “Any bad faith attempts to influence elections should be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Project Vice President Armando Lago, on the heels of years of studying the Cuban revolution, put the number of deaths due to Castro at a minimum of 78,000. Those were the ones who “may have died trying to flee the dictatorship,” he said. And all the good DSA sheep go: Flee? Why flee such a great thing! Thousands more died fighting against the communist regime. Thousands more fought in Castro’s armed insurrections abroad, aimed at spreading communism to different countries. Then there were the firing squads. “Cuba Archive finds that some 5,600 Cubans have died in front of firing squads and another 1,200 in ‘extrajudicial assassinations,’” the AEI wrote. AEI went on: “Che Guevara was a gleeful executioner at the infamous La Cabana Fortress in 1959 where, under his orders, at least 151 Cubans were lined up and shot.” Che Guevara is the face the little DSA minions now wear proudly on their T-shirts as they storm about the streets, looking for police vehicles to set on fire. “Today,” DSA posted on Aug. 13, “is the centenary of Fidel Castro and the [DSA] recognize the historical significance of both this day and the man. Fidel was an organizer, a fighter, and endures as a stalwart symbol of anti-imperialist struggle and self-determination for the Global South.” Question: If he was so great, why did so many Cubans flee, and die trying to flee, the country? Why is southern Florida such a population destination for Cubans? “We choose this historic day to recommit ourselves to acting in solidarity with the Cuban people and to starkly opposing Marco Rubio’s genocidal war against the Cuban people and U.S. imperialism writ large,” DSA wrote. Yet this is what’s winning significant Democrat Party primaries across the country.

The Democratic Socialists of America put out this message via a post on its official website: “DSA Commemorates 100 Years of Fidel and Denounces Rubio’s Genocide Against the Cuban People.” That was followed by an accusation that said: “President Trump’s administration, under the leadership of [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio, is waging an indiscriminate war against the Cuban people and killing women, children and babies by blockading critical resources from the Caribbean nation.” Killing babies? Team Trump? No, that’s Democrat territory right there. For example: “Massachusetts expands abortion access to any point during pregnancy,” 19thNews.com reported. Killing babies is not part of the MAGA movement. But lying ? it’s all part and parcel of the socialist experience. Socialists, progressives, Democrats, democratic socialists, Marxists, communists, and all the other “-ists” that are aligned with collectivism ? these are the voices of deception and ducking and dodging. If the people only knew what communists truly wanted, the people would refuse to vote for them. It’s only by masking their radicalism and dressing it as compassionate politicking that they’re able to gather enough votes at the ballot boxes. It’s only by lying and drumming up jealousies and dividing populations by bitter envies and greed and animosity that they’re able to win elections. That, and relying on the ignorance and emotion-driven demands of their publicly schooled, teacher-union-trained masses. That’s how the DSA is able to turn a monster named Fidel Castro into a heroic fighter for the working class ? and conversely, the freedom-lovers of the MAGA-dominated administration into tyrants. “Counting Victims of the Castro Regime: Nearly 11,000 to Date,” the American Enterprise Institute wrote back in 2016. That’s a lowball. In the Cuba Archive project, the estimates are much higher.