“Democracies are rising to the moment,” U.S. President Joe Biden said in his State of the Union address, as Russian President Vladimir Putin unleashed his vicious war on Ukraine. Francis Fukuyama leads a band of commentators claiming that the “spirit of 1989” is back and we are about to witness globally a “new birth of freedom.”
Such rhetoric, usually intoned by men who lived through the heady last days of the cold war, is dangerous. It could yet again make Western countries misread the world and their own power to shape it.
Today’s geopolitical realities are even messier than they were during the cold war, blurring any neat moral opposition between democracy and autocracy. Turning to Venezuela and possibly even Iran to alleviate pressure on oil prices, the United States is already hollowing out its “alliance of democracies.” China, a reliable anti-Soviet partner in the 1970s, seems to have concluded that a close association with the West is neither desirable nor viable. It is presently amplifying Russian propaganda and censoring anti-Putin voices.
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