Hegemony sustains peace---A transition now causes war---without liberal institutions violent autocracies rise to power

It all sounds so sensible. The problem is that, after decades of living within the protective bubble of the liberal world order, we have forgotten what the world “as it is” looks like. To believe that the quarter-century after the Cold War has been a disaster is to forget what disaster means in world affairs.

Which other quarter-century would we prefer? The first quarter of the 20th century included World War I and the birth of communism and fascism. The second saw the triumph of Hitler and Stalin, the Ukrainian famine, the Holocaust, World War II and the invention and use of nuclear weapons. Even the quarter-century beginning in 1950 included the Korean War, the Vietnam War, three Arab-Israeli Wars and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Perhaps our biggest failure is our unwillingness to imagine that things could look again as they did in the first half of the 20th century, with a few besieged democracies hanging on in a world dominated by dictatorships. Aggression was the norm then, not the exception, and every weapon invented by scientists was eventually put to use.

It should be hard to have a 1930s mentality today, since we know what happened next. But we comfort ourselves that those past horrors cannot be repeated. We see no Hitlers or Stalins on the horizon, forgetting that our forebears did not see them either. Those ambitious tyrants rose to power at a time when they faced few constraints: No nation or group of nations was willing or able to sustain an international order of any kind, much less one that might resist them.

Today we know that Vladimir Putin has grand ambitions but not yet the capacity to realize them. He reveres Stalin, but he is not Stalin. What would a less constrained Putin do? A Russia that restored its Soviet and imperial borders would be a far different player on the international scene than the Russia now confined east of Ukraine and the Baltic nations.

Today a more powerful China, with a new premier-for-life, is moving away from the cautious foreign policies of the Deng era. We cannot yet know what an even more powerful and less constrained China will want or do as it expands its regional and global influence, especially if it does so by military means.

We should also recall that the European peace established since the Cold War is less than three decades old. Prior to World War II, wars in Europe were brought on by a combination of growing nationalism, collapsing democracies and global instability, all of which are visible today. Those who oppose the American promotion of democracy abroad generally have non-Western nations in mind, but let’s not have too much faith in the West. Few of Europe’s democracies date back before World War II. It was in the West that fascism and communism arose, and it is in the West that democracy is at risk once again.

The emerging consensus today is that the U.S. has been doing too much. But what if we have been doing too little? We wanted to believe that the course of history was taking us away from the war, tyranny and destruction of the first half of the 20th century, but it may be taking us back toward them, absent some prodigious effort on our part to prevent such regression. Those who call themselves realists today suggest that we can do less in the world and get more out of it. It is a lovely fiction. Our real choice is between maintaining the liberal world order, with all its moral and material costs, or letting it collapse and preparing for the catastrophes that are likely to follow.