This is some next-level orientalism right here. On the assumption you're talking about China or Russia—neither regime is even close to "ancient". Neither has any meaningful organizational continuity going back further than their 20th-century revolutions.
I think he's thinking something else. Ancient enemies planning things that we can't even comprehend in a human lifespan. So some sort of conspiracy involving aliens, demons, Cthulhu, or something else.
Well if you look at China, being that you can change the policy but not the party, they plan for 50 years in the future. Where as the democratic nations can be hamstrung planning for 4 years at a time, with 2 years spent planning how to win the next election.
The USA is just lucky it has a deep state or special interest groups that continues pushing things ahead regardless of who is in in power. Sadly its mostly driven by corporate greed, it just happens to align with furthering US state power. You can see things like the Qatar-Turkey pipeline and Iraq war breaks out of the 4 year cycle cos they are good money makers.
> Well if you look at China, being that you can change the policy but not the party, they plan for 50 years in the future.
This is the theory behind authoritarian regimes, but it doesn't actually play out that way. There's too much internal politicking in order to keep power concentrated, so you end up with a state that on paper should be able to execute faster and more coherently than a democratic state, but in practice is so hobbled by the internal conflicts and power games that it doesn't actually have all that much extra energy to solve real problems. An authoritarian regime's primary concern is maintaining its authority, everything else is secondary.
China grew rapidly as it industrialized not because of any strength in the communist regime, but because that's what happens when you have a lot of babies who suddenly stop dying—your working-age population explodes and your economy booms. Then China established the one child policy to try to cap the growth and prevent famine, took too long to repeal it and failed just to change the culture back toward large families, so now they're facing demographic collapse. Some 50-year plan that turned out to be.
