Reports of the West's demise have been greatly exaggerated

To begin the 21st century, the United States was involved in two failed wars, Iraq and Afghanistan. The wars weren't outright defeats, but neither were they conclusive victories. Land wars in Asia are rarely commodious to the outside aggressor. However, what has been the result of these misadventures? Aside from adding to the debt, not much. The US hasn't lost its prestige. It hasn't lost its empire. It is still the world's only superpower; it's not a "first among equals," but the clear leader of an alliance of nations. Nothing of import can be accomplished without its assent. We see this most clearly in climate change.

Now, let's turn to the two nations which have been posited as the "anti-America": Russia and China.

Russia parlayed border wars and its intervention into Syria's war of all against all into conning the West that it was a strong, militarily potent state. It held military exercises which cowed military observers. It made diplomatic inroads into the Middle East which had its handmaidens in the West crowing about its puissance.

Then it decided to invade Ukraine.

Two things have happened. Firstly, its military has been shown to be a shambles. Dispirited and undertrained conscripts have fared poorly against Ukrainians defending their homeland and very existence. But secondly, and most importantly: Its claims of technological nous have been shown to be empty chimeras. From using Ukrainian cell phone towers to conduct easily overheard military communications to Ukrainian farmers having one of the largest tank fleets in the world, its military technology has been shown to be no better than what it is: that of a second-rank, developing nation. Furthermore, the utter effectiveness and deadliness of US and NATO military technology has been proven. While Russia is pulling out old T-62 tanks from the 1960s to send to the front lines, Ukraine has been armed with the latest weaponry from the storehouses of the West, using it to devastating consequences. Unlike the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, this eventual defeat of Russian war aims will deal it a devastating blow to its geopolitical standing. Russia, far from being an equal of the United States, owes its influence on the world stage only due to its nuclear arsenal. That is not sufficient.

And then there's China. It, too, has pretensions of dethroning the US and the West at large. But let's look closer.

In an opinion piece in The Times, Gerard Baker had this to say about China and its military ambitions:

If you’re Xi, president of a country whose most important military engagement in the past 40 years involved putting down a few thousand of your own students in Tiananmen Square, are you really confident your fresh-faced troops are a match for the veterans of Fallujah and Kamdesh? Are you sure the weapons coming out of your often corruptly run factories are up to the standards of the most advanced producers of materiel in the world?

Indeed. This same writer also wrote this:

Generals will tell you there is no substitute for battlefield testing to install mettle in an army.... The US has, astonishingly, been engaged in a serious war in every decade except the 1980s since the Second World War: Korea in the 1950s, Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, Iraq and the Balkans in the 1990s, Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s and 2010s. These haven’t always gone well. But that battle-hardened experience has taught the US, and its main ally the UK, vital lessons and built a resilience few other armies can claim.

When President Joe Biden gave Taiwan a renewed US military guarantee, this is what he drew on. We can argue about the frequency with which the US is involved in overseas wars. But the fact of it is that the US, and its Western allies, are tested in a way that its adversaries are not. Add to this China's disastrous and failed "zero-COVID" policy, which is ravaging the economy, and President Xi Jinping begins to look less like Mao Zedong, and more like an emperor about to lose the Mandate of Heaven.

Rather than a Century of Autocrats, we're seeing the shelf-life of autocracy. The West, for all its problems, can weather storms which autocratic regimes cannot, because Western nations have the safety valve of democracy. 

Winston Churchill is said to have averred that democracy is the worst form of government, save for all the other ones. But here is his quote in full:

[I]t has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, and that public opinion expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters.

Far from a world-weary acceptance of a second-rate form of government, Sir Winston's full quote is a full-throated defense of the necessity of democracy, of its value apart from results. The decisions democracies take last. Autocracies are subject to the whims of the world. Remember this when the smart people tell you that the future is autocracy. They know not of which they speak.