Asian Confucian norms that exist, which frown on corruption more than elsewhere.

China is VERY corrupt. They have "anti corruption" campaigns all the time to pretend the government cares about it, but in fact those campaigns are just a pretext to purge CCP members deemed insufficiently loyal to Xi Jinping.

American influence has been highest on Japan and secondarily on Taiwan, which I would call the least corrupt Asian countries. There has been some American influence on South Korea, but the South Koreans have had a very different attitude, with a lot of anti-Americanism and rejection of American culture. South Korea also resents and rejects Japan.

Now why would southern Italy be more corrupt than northern Italy?

Southern Italy, which used to Sicily has for a long time historically been poorer and was the product of Norman conquest and domination. It was essentially a stagnant empire. By contrast, Northern Italy had rival trade empires and economic/cultural competition, which spurred innovation, growth, and wealth.

France is also not very corrupt (by European standards), despite being Catholic.

It's more a product of broader cultural values, of which religion plays a part, with Protestantism giving an advantage because of its decentralized and competitive nature, whereas Catholicism is a top-down monopoly and hierarchy that resisted change. France has also been pretty weakly religious and prone to rebellion for a long time.

A great economic and cultural force which creates the conditions for its own destruction is not good at all.

No, the USSR is the parent of all this leftist shit you see in the US today. It's just mutated since the Soviet days from Cold War spies, agents, and propaganda. We didn't create the conditions at all, we are just struggling against an opponent which has been willing to make larger sacrifices to gain ground for generations while the Right sat overconfident and complacent.

There is no way the Left wins in the end. It's policy goals are simply too grotesque and absurd. You can see this for yourself in preview form in very liberal big cities and how they have decayed and become a farce. At worst, there will be a great Left/Right schism in America, splitting apart, and then the Right will easily surpass the Left. At best, the voters will belatedly wake up to how stupid Wokeness is, and hand the Right a decade or two of dominance much like in the 1980s until they forget again how stupid and damaging lib policies are. At this point we are repeating the late 70s in roughly a 40 year cycle, two generations.

The only one who is even competing is China.

China is going to eat shit in the next 5 years. Its economic model is based on exploiting and cheating its trade partners, and we are all starting to get fed up with it. Once we put a stop to the rigged and unfair trade relationship with China, its economy will collapse far worse than Japan's did in the early 90s.

If the CCP starts a war at some point, that process will be greatly accelerated.

The EU still has innovation and competition with the US, the main difference being that the US has more economic freedom and we work more hours, which gives us a systemic advantage.