Democratic erosion spurs world war----stability ensures global peace

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 wreak 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.