Democrats v Autocrats

July 2008

Kagan is by no means pessimistic about the outcome of the competition between the democracies and the autocracies. He argues that the US still has an “indispensable” role to play, not because it is better than other countries, but simply because it is the world’s only superpower, even if a “flawed” one. There is, Kagan acknowledges, “an American problem”, due to “errors of commission and omission, not only in recent years but throughout America’s history” — a tendency towards unilateralism and a “proclivity to use force”, alongside “generosity of spirit” and “enlightened self-interest”. Nevertheless, much of the world looks to the US for support, and even Russia may some day do so against a powerful China. And it is in America’s interest, Kagan argues, to play the role of the “keystone in the arch”. That is true, but the US could probably do a better job of leveraging help from others.

Kagan concludes with his most controversial suggestion, although advanced somewhat tentatively: that we take steps, “moving informally at first”, towards a “league of democracies” that would provide more legitimacy than unilateral action — and more effectiveness than the United Nations version of multilateralism. This strategy has been criticised as likely to promote, rather than reduce, conflict between the democracies and the autocracies — and there would be some grounds for that fear if the lines were drawn too sharply, in the spirit of a new Cold War. Kagan’s own analysis of the autocrats’ defensiveness and sense of fragility argues for caution. But that doesn’t mean that no lines should be drawn at all. An imperfect but perhaps useful analogy is the way that the line between members and non-members of the European Union has effectively pulled the excluded countries in the direction of European values and interests.

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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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