Turns the case---causes Russian aggression and conflicts---and breaks the EU

To be sure, the United States has often been inconsistent and imperfect in its foreign policy. But over more than a century, it has also been what former secretary of state Madeleine Albright rightly called “the indispensable nation” for democracy—indispensable in advancing human rights, indispensable in stirring democratic hopes, indispensable in building the international institutions and alliances that have enabled freedom to thrive.

Ideals matter in world politics, but so does power—and the United States, for all its flaws and blunders, has been the rare great power to fuse both might and right to create space for the expansion of democracy. Since the end of World War II, a strong, steadfast American presence has kept the democracies of Europe and the more pluralistic states of Asia from throwing in their lot with the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and their successor dictatorships. Take away American power, presence, and principles, and most Asian states would jump on the bandwagon of the emerging Chinese imperium in Asia. Remove America as the bonding cement of NATO and a counterweight to Russia’s ambitions in former Soviet states like Ukraine and Georgia, and it will doom hopes for freedom throughout the former USSR—probably even in the Baltic states—and cast a long, dark shadow over the remaining democracies of Central and Eastern Europe. The European Union might not survive such a U.S. retreat, and if the EU did, it would feel intense pressure to reconcile with a resurgent Russian empire. The world without us would be a far more frightening and dangerous place, with muscular, corrupt dictatorships dominating large swaths of the globe through both blatant coercion and covert subversion.

To borrow a phrase from Bill Clinton, the power of our example has mattered more than the example of our power.2 The assistance we have provided and the example we have shown have helped inspire and support democratic change in Latin America, Africa, and even—after a long, sordid period of unquestioning U.S. support for Arab dictatorships—the Middle East. We have often erred and failed to live up to our best traditions. But on balance, American ideals, broadcasts, grants, and diplomacy have pressured autocracies to change, warned them not to resort to devastating repression, and opened up space for people around the world to claim their own inalienable rights. Take all of that away, and it is not clear when—or if—the transitions to democracy would have occurred in such places as Argentina, Brazil, and Chile; South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines; South Africa, Ghana, and Tunisia; and all the countries once locked behind the Iron Curtain.

Until recently, American power and principle have helped enable many societies to make peaceful transitions to democracy. American resolve has kept the ill winds of Russian rage, Chinese ambition, and populist authoritarianism from reaching hurricane force. But today, another gale is raging: that of America’s own political decay, rooted in cynical politicians, calcified systems, and complacent citizens, tarnishing the overall luster of democracy and pulling America away from the world. If we do not soon reverse this retreat, democracy worldwide will be at risk.

Already, we have seen twelve consecutive years of erosion in global levels of freedom, with many more countries declining than gaining each year, according to Freedom House. We have seen a gathering tide of democratic breakdowns, with the proportion of democracies (among countries with populations over one million) slipping back in recent years to barely half. But the numbers do not capture the full extent of the danger. Behind the statistics is a steady, palpable corrosion of democratic institutions and norms in a wide range of countries. A new global narrative is on the rise, hailing strongman rule—not parliamentary rules—as the way to govern in difficult times.

Slow descents have a way of lulling us into complacency. Things aren’t so bad, we tell ourselves; they’re just slipping a bit. But we ignore gradual decay at our peril. In Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the freewheeling, hard-drinking Mike Campbell is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” he says. “Gradually and then suddenly.”3 The demise of democracy is often like that too.

In Venezuela, the collapse started gradually, over a protracted period of corruption and complacency. The country had once been a vibrant liberal democracy, blessed with bountiful oil wealth, but the people grew steadily more alienated from a self-serving political class that was not delivering. This paved the way for a leftist, populist demagogue, Hugo Chávez, first to try to seize power by military coup and then to triumph through the ballot box.

Much of the decay of democracy in Latin America has been like this. In Mexico, Brazil, and Peru, widespread corruption, increasing crime, and feckless governance have thrown citizen confidence and the party system into crisis. As a result, democracy is now at risk across the region.

A similar erosion is painfully clear in Turkey, a Muslim NATO ally. For years after Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party came to power, they seemed to just be religious or social conservatives willing to abide by democratic rules. Western observers and governments ignored warnings from liberal Turks as Erdogan slowly tightened the screws on dissent and pluralism. Then, after a failed coup in July 2016, he crushed all political opposition. Turkish democracy died in two ways: “Gradually and then suddenly.”

We would like to think that American democracy is immune. It is not. Democracies are not gifts or miracles; they are painstakingly built forms of government, and none of them are invincible if citizens succumb to cynicism and complacency in perilous times.

We are at a precarious moment—the most dangerous I have seen in my forty-year career as a scholar of democracy. Several major democracies are either hanging from a populist thread—as in Poland and the Philippines—or showing large and growing signs of strain. Immigrant bashing, ethnic chauvinism, and anti-Muslim bigotry are threatening the civic fabric of many democracies we had previously considered stable, including countries in the liberal heart of Western Europe and now even the United States. If democracy could be effectively extinguished in an EU member state like Hungary, then who is immune? If an illiberal demagogue deeply contemptuous of the media, the courts, the opposition, and the truth could win the American presidency, then what ground is safe?

The problems span the globe. We should not underestimate the danger of religious intolerance, now on the rise in Indonesia and India. Like Erdogan, Narendra Modi, India’s Hindu-chauvinist prime minister, is a charismatic, ambitious populist and social conservative who extols religious virtues. Like Erdogan, Modi has amassed enough power to sideline one restraining institution after another. India’s countervailing power centers—the higher courts, the civil service, the media, and independent organizations—are strong. But will Indian democracy withstand a prolonged period of one-party dominance and religious intolerance? History teaches us—all of us—to take nothing for granted.

In Africa, democratic institutions are increasingly under assault. South Africa’s wantonly corrupt president, Jacob Zuma, and his kleptocratic cabal have mercifully lost power in South Africa, but the country’s deeper problems of corruption and extreme, racially fraught poverty and inequality remain. Aside from Ghana, democracy has been either decaying or failing to take root in most other larger African states, such as Kenya, Tanzania, and Nigeria. As we have seen, despite the pervasive poverty that supposedly leads people to choose bread over freedom, most Africans still passionately want democratic and accountable government. But they need help. Instead, the current world realities of Chinese swagger, European distraction, and American retreat are enabling African autocrats to have their way.

In the Middle East, the lone Arab democracy still standing after the 2011 revolutions is Tunisia. Its breakthrough was extraordinary but fragile, and it is now struggling amid its own ill winds: a reeling economy, powerful Gulf autocrats who would like to see democracy wither, and political survivors from the old dictatorship reluctant to give up the corrupt privileges and authoritarian practices of the past. In Egypt, after the fall of the longtime Mubarak dictatorship, the military has now crushed all opposition and dissent. The oil-rich Gulf states now believe that they have forced the genie of the Arab Spring back into the bottle of state repression. Meanwhile, the Middle East’s one long-standing democracy, Israel, has been drifting increasingly toward an illiberal populism that consigns its own Arab citizens to second-class citizenship—and the Palestinians of the West Bank to none at all.4

And this could be just the beginning of the drop. Suppose that the drift in U.S. global leadership persists and even intensifies. Suppose that illiberal populism gains an even stronger footing in the United States and Western Europe. Suppose that autocratic leaders conclude that we just don’t care anymore—that there is scant price to be paid for abandoning democracy. Among the world’s fifty most populous countries, slightly less than half are now democracies, but that could well plunge to just a third or less, even as the possibilities for democratic renewal dry up in swing states that might have moved or returned to democracy under more favorable international conditions.

Here’s how that story might unfold. A third reverse wave of global democratic failures would see much of Central and Eastern Europe joining Hungary in silent defection from democracy. With the European Union’s eastern flank swinging truculently away from liberal values and its western core absorbed with anti-immigrant passions and meltdowns of national self-confidence, the EU could break apart.

A reelected Donald Trump would feel himself free to more brazenly advance an isolationist, despot-friendly, pro-Kremlin posture. Without its foundation, NATO could then disintegrate too, freeing Vladimir Putin to achieve his ultimate dream: the resurrection of the Greater Russian Empire, a new heir to the Soviet Union whose demise he has long considered a tragedy.

The Baltics would again be abandoned to a ruthless Russian bear. Hopes for democracy in Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and Armenia would drown in a wave of Kremlin coups and aggressions. A despotic Russia would once again surround itself with client and puppet states that would do its bidding.

The lengthening shadow of authoritarianism would also reach out from Beijing. An increasingly assertive and nationalist China would demand and compel submission to its growing strategic ambitions—not just in southeast Asia and the South China Sea but in the Indian Ocean, all the way to the Middle East at one end and deep into the Pacific Ocean at the other.

As China continued its march to technological supremacy and global leadership, a declining, demoralized, and discredited United States would have to decide whether to go to war to defend democratic Taiwan from being forcibly absorbed into China’s Communist dictatorship. Surging Chinese despotism would threaten the freedom of much of the rest of democratic Asia, even if Japan, South Korea, and other U.S. allies—at best exposed, at worst forsaken—were able to resist Beijing’s growing efforts to penetrate and compromise their democratic political systems.

It would be a hinge in history. How would democracy in Latin America fare in the face of this massive shift in global power and momentum, with the corrupting influence of Chinese money eroding democratic forces in party politics, the media, and government? How would the brave dissidents and demonstrators who cherish the values of self-government and human rights argue for the moral force of democracy as an idea with China on the march and America in retreat? How many weak and tentative democracies would survive in Africa as its elites saw ever more clearly which way the winds of global power were blowing? How many multinational companies would conclude that their interests compelled them to ride the dictators’ bandwagon? How many global broadcasters and social media companies would resist the autocrats’ demands for censorship and complicity?

In such a near future, my fellow experts would no longer talk of “democratic erosion.” We would be spiraling downward into a time of democratic despair, recalling Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s grim observation from the 1970s that liberal democracy “is where the world was, not where it is going.”5 The world pulled out of that downward spiral—but it took new, more purposeful American leadership. The planet was not so lucky in the 1930s, when the global implosion of democracy led to a catastrophic world war, between a rising axis of emboldened dictatorships and a shaken and economically depressed collection of self-doubting democracies.

These are the stakes. Expanding democracy—with its liberal norms and constitutional commitments—is a crucial foundation for world peace and security. Knock that away, and our most basic hopes and assumptions will be imperiled.

The problem is not just that the ground is slipping. It is that we are perched on a global precipice. That ledge has been gradually giving way for a decade. If the erosion continues, we may well reach a tipping point where democracy goes bankrupt suddenly—plunging the world into depths of oppression and aggression that we have not seen since the end of World War II. As a political scientist, I know that our theories and tools are not nearly good enough to tell us just how close we are getting to that point—until it happens.