USA: How America's obsession with global democracy has led us astray - by Damon Linker

Democracies are obsessed with "democracy."

That makes some sense. 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. 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.

All of this is important and troubling. Yet the way it gets expressed in terms of our relations with the rest of the world is often misguided.

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. The idea behind the summit is clear: Democracy is under threat from authoritarianism around the world. 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 United States and its allies do face challenges around the world, with China and Russia posing two of the biggest ones. But the primary source of this rising tension isn't democracy or its lack. The strain has far more to do with power and clashing interests than regime type. 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.

This hasn't always been the right way to proceed. 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. The world seemed poised to become all one thing or all the other. In that zero-sum competition, it often made sense for geopolitical decision-making to take regime-types into consideration. Democracies were America's natural allies; communist regimes were our enemies. (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.

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