NEW YORK—If there is one general lesson to learn from the long history of great-power competition, it’s that the state or alliance with the larger economic base tends to emerge victorious from long-term strategic competition—if it can mobilize the necessary resources in a timely and sustainable manner.
That lesson applies today, with great-power competition returning to the scene. In East Asia, the United States and its allies face pressure from a rising, more assertive China. In Europe, a declining but aggressive Russia is challenging the status quo and the regional balance of military power. In both theaters, the United States is well-positioned to help maintain the balance of power: it is committed to defending the status quo, it is a great power with an extensive alliance network, and it can bring significant military power to bear around the world.
Networks matter because they act as force multipliers and because democracies rarely look to authoritarian powers as their preferred security patrons. Their preference for democracies is known in political science as democratic alliance theory. A case in point: a broadly democratic NATO is squaring up with an undemocratic Russia, whose most important sources of support have come from other nondemocratic countries such as Belarus, Iran, North Korea, and China, over a democratic, if fragile, Ukraine. Meanwhile, in East Asia, a US-led alliance of democracies, including Australia, Japan, and South Korea, faces off against China over—among other things—a democratic Taiwan. At the same time, China has no formal treaty allies in the region beyond North Korea.
Another political science concept, modernization theory, holds that economic development leads to democratization. As societies become richer and more complex, citizens, particularly those in an emerging economic middle class, demand greater political participation, which encourages a move toward greater democracy. Indeed, the Atlantic Council’s Freedom & Prosperity indexes show that economic development and political freedom are highly correlated. Of course, economic modernization does not necessarily and in all cases lead to democratization. Other factors, such as centralized government ownership of natural resources, may allow nondemocratic regimes to co-opt an economic middle class that relies on government patronage and rents. However, one does not need to accept Stanford University professor Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, in which liberal democracy and Western capitalism mark the endpoint of political order, to expect that economic development may create a political opening in nondemocratic countries.
From push to pull: conditional benefits and wedge strategies
Two real-world policy implications follow from these theories. First, US foreign policy should continue to offer nondemocratic countries incentives to engage in democratic reform. But the strategy needs a facelift: Washington should rely more on pull than push, offering conditional economic and security benefits rather than relying primarily on coercive threats and liberal interventionism. For such approaches to lead to sustainable democratization, there must already be sufficient domestic political support, which may not exist. Too many examples in history show that imposing democratic reform where there is insufficient domestic political support is likely to end in failure.
Washington should rely more on pull than push, offering conditional economic and security benefits rather than relying primarily on coercive threats and liberal interventionism.
This does not mean that the occasional gentle or not-so-gentle push is never an option. But a push policy should be pursued judiciously. The successful democratic transformation of Eastern European countries after the end of the Cold War, and their subsequent integration into NATO, can serve as a template here. Geopolitically, a widening pool of democratic countries reduces nondemocratic countries’ alliance options while offering greater alliance opportunities to the United States.
Second, the United States should consider pursuing a wedge strategy aimed at splitting nondemocratic countries from their dominant nondemocratic great-power partners. If this is perceived as unduly antagonistic, such a policy could be made conditional on nondemocratic great powers refraining from challenging the status quo. However, nondemocratic powers often see broad support for democratization as a threat to regime stability and survival, raising their risk tolerance. The risks and benefits of such a policy must therefore be carefully calibrated. For instance, it may not have been a coincidence that Moscow launched its full-scale war against Ukraine not long after Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka faced mass protests over his fraudulent reelection in 2020. This may have raised concerns in Moscow about the spread of demands for political liberalization in Russia, not unlike the pressures unleashed in Europe around 1989 or in the case of the so-called color revolutions in Russia’s periphery.
Democracy as a strategic opportunity
Democratic values are often invoked by policymakers to justify their foreign policy. In some cases, they are undoubtedly used and abused as an ideological cudgel to deflect criticism and mobilize domestic support in pursuit of a desirable geopolitical goal. But this should not detract from the fact that the spread of democracy may have important geopolitical implications, offering strategic opportunities to the United States. The more prevalent democratic regimes become, the greater the pressure nondemocratic powers will face, geopolitically and domestically.
In the most optimistic version of this approach, the democratization of the United States’ geopolitical antagonists would strengthen the US position and weaken that of nondemocratic great powers. The postwar democratization of Germany and Japan, for instance, created stalwart US allies. Granted, the Cold War may have pushed them closer, but those alliances survived the immediate post–Cold War era, when geopolitical threats were far less acute.
Consider the most immediate implications. A democratic Iran would likely seek some form of geopolitical rapprochement with Washington. As the late Henry Kissinger observed, “there are few nations in the world with which the United States has less reason to quarrel or more compatible interests than Iran,” were it not for ideological differences. The democratization of North Korea could open a path toward reunification and the emergence of a more democratic, US-aligned Korea. Even if a liberal-democratic Russia were opposed to Ukraine joining the European Union and NATO, it would almost certainly face stronger domestic constraints against fighting a costly war over the issue. A democratic China might still seek to strengthen its geopolitical position and assert its expanding interests. But it would likely be more amenable to managing geopolitical friction through negotiation and compromise. US policymakers might also find it more difficult to mobilize domestic support for a hawkish policy toward a liberal-democratic China.
Any of the above would help strengthen the geopolitical position of the United States while weakening the position of authoritarian great powers. Last but not least, according to democratic peace theory, the spread of democracy would make armed conflict less likely, at least among the expanding number of democratic countries.