To prevent that westward drift, Putin appears willing to risk conflict with the United States and Europe. Today, Russia is a stagnant power whose leadership wants to maintain or reassert its historic sphere of influence over, and cultural kinship with, Ukraine - something Russian President Vladimir Putin considers incompatible with Kyiv moving deeper into the orbit of the European Union and especially NATO. Our situation today is much closer to that reality than it is to the uniquely ideological circumstances of the Cold War. That's because their interests and points of conflict weren't caused by their forms of government. Monarchies, empires, republics, city-states - all of them had interests that sometimes put them at odds with one another, but they could also avoid conflict by reaching mutually beneficial accommodation. France in the 18th century and Great Britain in the 19th didn't view countries that weren't monarchies as uniquely threatening, and the suggestion that they should would've sounded absurd, had anyone proposed it as a principle of international affairs. The Roman Republic didn't determine its relationships with other political communities based on whether or not they were republics too. (Of course, we were sometimes inconsistent on this, forming alliances of convenience with brutal authoritarian governments when doing so made possible what we considered to be more important moves on the geopolitical chessboard.)īut the distinctive character of the great Cold War power struggle was highly unusual in world history. Democracies were America's natural allies communist regimes were our enemies. In that zero-sum competition, it often made sense for geopolitical decision-making to take regime-types into consideration. The world seemed poised to become all one thing or all the other.
At its core, the Cold War was a struggle between hostile comprehensive ideologies, each of which (democratic capitalism and communism) thought of itself and its opponents in something approaching eschatological terms. This hasn't always been the right way to proceed. That's one powerful reason ( among others) why it would be a good thing for those formulating American foreign policy to spend less time worrying about whether or not our rivals are democracies. The strain has far more to do with power and clashing interests than regime type. But the primary source of this rising tension isn't democracy or its lack. The United States and its allies do face challenges around the world, with China and Russia posing two of the biggest ones. Democratic governments, therefore, need to work together to defend themselves and their common interests against hostile anti-democratic regimes that aspire to remake international order in their own image. The idea behind the summit is clear: Democracy is under threat from authoritarianism around the world. Take Joe Biden's ongoing "Summit for Democracy," which is taking place against a backdrop of rising tension with Russia over Ukraine, and China over Taiwan. Yet the way it gets expressed in terms of our relations with the rest of the world is often misguided.
Indeed, some countries that have long thought of themselves as fully consolidated democracies - including the United States - have begun to undergo a process of backsliding away from democratic norms and expectations.Īll of this is important and troubling. Basing politics on the consent of the governed, limiting government power, respecting the rights of citizens - all of these are important human achievements, ones from which even nominal democracies often fall short and toward which they must continually strive. Democracies are obsessed with "democracy."
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