In history’s latest surprising twist, just who really are the late Soviets now?

Long after the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989, Westerners and, secretly, even some within China, were thinking that if the communist country was going to follow the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, the crackdown would have been the trigger.

But history is full of surprises.

Nowadays, some prominent intellectuals in the Anglo-American world are fretting over whether their own countries are looking a lot like the late Soviets. The historical parallels they have drawn are plausible.

Even some mainstream newspaper op-eds have been borrowing from the analogy. “Britain is the Soviet Union in the 1980s,” one opinion writer declared this week in The Telegraph.

“Britain’s managerial class increasingly resembles that of the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. They know that change is coming, but they’re doing their utmost to ignore the fact as best they can, for as long as they can,” he wrote.

“Like the USSR of the early 1980s, political rigidity and borderline terror at the idea of questioning obsolete dogma infect almost every corner of institutional Britain.”

Whether history will prove such critics right is less important than the fact their warnings at least warrant serious attention. For better or worse, the mere decline of the West – never mind its collapse – is enough to have serious consequences for the world.