Azar Gat: Who Needs America? We Do.
[Azar Gat is professor of national security at Tel Aviv University and the author of "War in Human Civilization." A longer version of this article appears in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs.]
Today's global liberal democratic order faces a significant challenge from the rise of nondemocratic great powers - the West's old Cold War rivals, China and Russia, now operating under "authoritarian capitalist" rather than Communist regimes.
The category is not new - authoritarian capitalist great powers played a leading role in the international system up until 1945.
But they have been largely absent since then. The liberal democratic camp defeated its authoritarian, Fascist and Communist rivals alike in all of the three major great-power struggles of the 20th century - the two world wars and the Cold War.
It is tempting to trace this outcome to the special traits and intrinsic advantages of liberal democracy. But the reasons for the liberal democracies' victories were different for each type of adversary.
The Soviet Union failed because its economic systems limited it. But the nondemocratic capitalist great powers, Germany and Japan, were defeated in war fundamentally because they were medium-sized countries with limited resource bases.
Thus contingency, not inherent advantages of liberal democracy, played a decisive role in tipping the balance against the non-democratic capitalist powers and in favor of the democracies.
The most decisive element of contingency was the United States.
Because of its continental size, no less than its democratic-capitalist system, the power of the United States consistently surpassed that of the next two strongest states combined throughout the 20th century, and this decisively tilted the global balance of power in favor of whichever side Washington was on.
So if any factor gave the liberal democracies their edge, it was above all the existence of the United States rather than any inherent advantage. In fact, had it not been for the United States, liberal democracy may well have lost the great struggles of the 20th century....
Read entire article at International Herald Tribune
Today's global liberal democratic order faces a significant challenge from the rise of nondemocratic great powers - the West's old Cold War rivals, China and Russia, now operating under "authoritarian capitalist" rather than Communist regimes.
The category is not new - authoritarian capitalist great powers played a leading role in the international system up until 1945.
But they have been largely absent since then. The liberal democratic camp defeated its authoritarian, Fascist and Communist rivals alike in all of the three major great-power struggles of the 20th century - the two world wars and the Cold War.
It is tempting to trace this outcome to the special traits and intrinsic advantages of liberal democracy. But the reasons for the liberal democracies' victories were different for each type of adversary.
The Soviet Union failed because its economic systems limited it. But the nondemocratic capitalist great powers, Germany and Japan, were defeated in war fundamentally because they were medium-sized countries with limited resource bases.
Thus contingency, not inherent advantages of liberal democracy, played a decisive role in tipping the balance against the non-democratic capitalist powers and in favor of the democracies.
The most decisive element of contingency was the United States.
Because of its continental size, no less than its democratic-capitalist system, the power of the United States consistently surpassed that of the next two strongest states combined throughout the 20th century, and this decisively tilted the global balance of power in favor of whichever side Washington was on.
So if any factor gave the liberal democracies their edge, it was above all the existence of the United States rather than any inherent advantage. In fact, had it not been for the United States, liberal democracy may well have lost the great struggles of the 20th century....