To organize a durable global coalition against President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and also for the long term against President Xi Jinping’s China, consider what exactly the U.S. and its allies are fighting for. This may sound like an easy question, but it isn’t.
President Joe Biden talks of Russia’s war in Ukraine as part of a “battle between democracy and autocracy.” But we are not actually in a fight for democracy, however counterintuitive that seems. After all, Ukraine itself for many years has been a weak, corrupt, institutionally underdeveloped basket case of a democracy.
The fight is for something broader and more fundamental: the right of peoples the world over to determine their own futures and to be free from naked aggression. This requires an orderly world where the law of the jungle does not operate. Thus, we should welcome a number of autocracies into this struggle.
Indeed, if you survey the world beyond North America and Europe — giving the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America the same importance — it becomes unclear whether parliamentary democracy is an absolute necessity for the general spirit of liberalism to develop.
As a foreign correspondent for four decades in Eastern Europe and the developing world, I came to see authoritarianism as a broad category, composed of many gray shades, not an unmitigated evil — except in certain places like Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Putin, with his project of pitiless imperialism, has little in common with the relatively enlightened autocrats of Morocco, Jordan and Oman — who, by the way, are all U.S. allies. The fact that nondemocratic systems have been so widespread (and growing in number) is not because evil rules the world, but because in many places circumstances are simply not ripe for stable democracy.
A half-century ago, the humanist philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote: “Men who live in conditions where there is not sufficient food, warmth, shelter, and the minimum degree of security can scarcely be expected to concern themselves with freedom of contract or of the press.” Indeed, order and initial development come before freedom because without such things there is no freedom for anyone.
Around the same time, the Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington began his greatest book, “Political Order in Changing Societies,” with the observation that the differences between democracy and dictatorship are less important than the differences between states with strong, well-institutionalized systems of governance and those that have weak or nonexistent institutions. Liberal societies can only emerge from the first category of states; not from the second. And there are still many of the second in this world.
As I have traveled the globe, especially in the Middle East, most of the people I interviewed yearned for competent technocratic governance, personal freedoms, meritocracy and a sense of justice from their regimes. Few longed specifically for democracy.
It isn’t that they are opposed to democracy per se. It is simply that personal freedoms — protecting minorities, freedom to travel or to order any book from abroad, etc. — and efficient governance matter more to them than the ability to vote every few years. This may seem strange to Western elites who take mundane personal freedoms for granted, and thus are consumed with politics — and therefore assume everyone else should be, too.
The best laboratory for a rebuke to Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 “End of History” thesis — basically, that the arc of history bends toward democracy — may not be some weakly governed, coup-ridden country in Africa, but Saudi Arabia, where I recently spent several weeks.
Under the rule of an absolute autocrat, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, personal freedoms have dramatically expanded. Until a few years ago, women were unable to drive or go anywhere without being accompanied by a male relative or attendant, and were required to have their hair and body covered in black, and sometimes their faces, too. They now can drive, go out alone and dress as they please.
The proportion of women in the workforce has increased from 17% to 33% since 2015, and is going much higher. Saudis say they can now complain or comment about government services on Twitter. “I can now renew my passport online within minutes, without waiting in a long queue for hours at some government office. That’s a human right,” one young Saudi told me. “Women, even after a long maternity leave, can still leave work early until their child is two-years-old. That’s a human right. Reducing corruption, even if it means arresting hundreds of wealthy princes and imprisoning them in the Ritz Carlton to set an example [as the crown prince did in 2017], that, too, is a human right.”
Few of the roughly 40 people I interviewed in Saudi Arabia thought that any of the plethora of liberal changes now occurring there would have been possible — or at least would have gone as smoothly — without the iron-fisted leadership of the crown prince, however brutal his murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Saudis make a distinction between liberty and democracy. Liberty to them means new personal freedoms, which would be endangered by democracy with its electoral process that could be taken advantage of by Muslim fundamentalists.
“Look at what happened in Egypt between 2011 and 2013,” another Saudi told me, cringing at how the Muslim Brotherhood swept to power after the fall of the Hosni Mubarak regime.
Not only in Saudi Arabia, but throughout the Gulf, there is a social contract between ruler and ruled that is a reproach to the supposed end of history, since it basically tolerates dictatorship in return for good governance that is perceived as just.
Lee Kuan Yew, the longtime ruler of Singapore who died in 2015, is the spirit hovering over change in Saudi Arabia and much of the world beyond the West. Lee is one of the great overlooked men of the 20th century because he provided a model for development featuring technocratic competence, rule of law, honest dealing and meritocracy under a soft authoritarian regime. Western elites have always been uncomfortable with Lee because of his belief that democracy is not necessarily the last word in human political development. The Ukraine war, no matter how it turns out, will not change that fact.
Considering all this, President Joe Biden’s Summit for Democracy last February was an absurdity. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, a semi-anarchic country besieged with rampant crime and with little or no governance outside its main cities, was invited to the summit. So were countries featuring relatively weak institutions along with problems of corruption and organized crime, like Montenegro and Moldova. Meanwhile, Singapore, one of the most well-governed states on earth, did not receive an invitation. It seems that Isaiah Berlin and Samuel Huntington don’t have many close readers at the U. S. State Department.
Indeed, ironies abound in this world. The autocratic regime of Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi in Egypt is still generally popular a decade after taking power. Egyptians, as I learned during a long visit, have searing memories of the anarchy that accompanied Egypt’s experiment with democracy between 2011 and 2013.
Likewise, the Kurdish region of northern Iraq is technically a democracy, but governance is really divided between two clans, one in western Kurdistan and one in the east. The more dictatorial of the two families, the Barzanis, have provided better governance and economic development. Ethiopia’s move toward a more centralized and democratic system contributed to its slide toward a civil war far more deadly than what’s happening in Ukraine. Last year saw four coups in Africa — in Chad, Mali, Guinea and Sudan — and there have been two coup attempts this year, in Guinea-Bissau and Burkina Faso.
Then there is Iran, a highly educated country whose population really does yearn for democracy. The problem is that the clerical regime is so deeply entrenched, and internal factors so convoluted, that just as the collapse of the Berlin Wall had no effect on internal politics there, neither might the demise of Putin.
Indeed, few of the above places will be much affected by what happens with Putin’s invasion. Of course, what occurs in Russia and Ukraine can have a moral, political and psychological effect on places nearby that are geopolitically linked with the former Soviet Union: such as Belarus, Hungary and Turkey.
Given these realities, leading a worldwide coalition against the two great Eurasian revanchist powers — Russia, which seeks to annex Ukraine, and China, which seeks to annex Taiwan — requires the sort of pragmatic vision that Secretary of State James Baker employed when organizing 35 nations, including autocracies, to stand against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Baker’s strategy was not to change the world, but to undo a particular territorial conquest. The Biden administration’s strategy toward Russia and China should be likewise: oriented not to fight autocracy the world over, but to stop the armed aggression of two military powers.