As far as I know, this is the most correct, least wrong analysis of comparative civilizations:
Asian civilization had naturally defensive boundaries, fewer competitors than all but the Indians, relative racial homogeneity easing Han conquest and integration, rice that produced more calories than wheat, natural rivers. But still, Asians stagnated and failed. Why? Asians practice delay and deceive warfare, harmony rather than market competition, face before truth rather than truth, family rather than commons, and failed to develop Rule of law that is necessary for market competition. so as soon as the state could no longer govern empirically it converted to rule by morality and stagnated. Why? Civilizations develop the three necessary institutions in one order or another: State and Bureaucracy, Law and Rule of Law, and Religion-Philosophy-Science. Most civilizations developed religion first (slow adaptation), East Asia alone developed state first (faster adaptation). Europe alone developed Rule of Law first (fastest adaptation).
So, Europeans, on the other hand, created the indo european expansionary revolution (horse, bronze, chariot, paternalism, sky worshipping, militaristic, expansionary) in just a few hundred years in the bronze age; Created the Rational Revolution and Law-State in the Ancient World, and created Scientific and Technical Revolution and Law-State in the modern world.
The question is why Europeans can’t maintain their social order consistently, and why the Chinese can but stagnate, and the Semitic can but decline, devolve, and destroy everything they touch.
Chinese were not first, but were most successful at ‘medium pace’ of colonization (expansion) by emphasizing control (security motive). Europeans were successful but cannot maintain control because the state is less powerful than the market (profit motive). Islam is the most regressive because it’s strategy is to remove competitors in states by undermining (destruction motive).
This also explains how our civilizations colonize: Europeans fast and painfully but beneficially. Chinese slowly beneficially and relatively painlessly. Abrahamic rather rapidly and painfully but durably at the cost of decline. Hindu (Indian) civilization has a natural defense (the vast size of its underclass, it’s vast territory, and the ‘way’ of life that Indian civilization recommends is largely harmonious and beneficial at the cost of stagnation and vulnerability to every passing conqueror.
Today it is rather obvious that Chinese ethnonationalism, a systemically educated professional bureaucracy, and using the state as ‘venture capitalist’ is the optimum political system. It is also obvious that european rule of law, courts, are the optimum system by which to regulate such an ethnonatioalist state. And that all other systems are either fragile, make a people vulnerable to conquest (Europeans), or destructive (Islam, Judaism, Christianity) by comparison.