Democrats v Autocrats

July 2008

A very different objection to Kagan’s proposal is that a “league of democracies” will be a fragile basis for collective action. When crises develop over local problems — in Asia or Eastern Europe or the Persian Gulf — democratic solidarity is not likely to trump individual countries’ strategic or commercial interests. But although the idea of “coalitions of the willing” has taken a beating in recent years, there is no obvious substitute for it. While shared democratic values may help to draw such a coalition together, they are not necessarily the strongest link. A shared sense of threat — along with the confidence that there is will and capability to resist it — is not only the strongest motivating factor bringing countries together, but also the strongest deterrent to aggressive action by any regional power.

How much will the Iraq experience affect America’s ability to lead in the future? Kagan doesn’t address that question but his answer is implied when he says that the democratic world will still look to the sole superpower for leadership, no matter how “flawed”. It is striking how US leadership recovered after Korea’s unpopular and stalemated war – and even after Vietnam. Whether Kagan believes that history’s return will include the return of US confidence, and how quickly, is unclear.

History’s answer to that question will depend on several factors, including the leadership capacity of the next US administration and whether Iraq ultimately comes to be viewed as a failure or a success – albeit a costly one. But America’s future leadership role may depend even more on how threatening the world appears. Historically, that leadership role has often emerged out of a compelling crisis: Pearl Harbour, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran hostage crisis, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, or the attacks of 9/11. Paradoxically, the relative security which Americans have enjoyed since 2001 makes it easier to doubt the necessity of shouldering the burden of leadership. One hopes it will not take another calamity to convince us of the need for a vigilant foreign policy.

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Franklin D. Lomax

July 7th, 2008
12:07 PM

editorialstaff net notes: The inevitable SinoRussian energy/commodity blackmail alliance is coming together, as the PC colonialist nations ignore, at their immediate peril, China buying up petty dictators, their enslaved peoples, and the energy and commodities their dictators are engaged in stealing, with a pitiful few millions of "No strings attached cash aid, " spirited away to Swiss bank accounts. The wastrel Carter's tossing of the Panama Canal, with the decline of the necessary Monroe Doctrine, have opened even the South American patch to monster regimes from the Levant, China, et al. A new free world alliance, with active competition, containment for the wholesale purchasers of backwater monster regimes is the absolute minimum survival level for the PC wobbly leaders of the temporarily free world. Sarko leading France back into the fold, taken with the abject failure of socialism, and the welfare state, everywhere bode well for the establishment of some adult supervision for the filth we have allowed to build up in the regimes of Mugabe, the Burma junta,and others engaged in simple robbery of their peoples. Timely decapitation of those outlaws, allowing the elected leaders of the nations to bring the survivors of their beleaguered peoples into the sunlight of the free world family will be a start. It is to be the cold war, without MAD, since the goons enslaving the Chinese, Russians, et al, have the will, but not the superpower tools to actually destroy the world.

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