“Beware those who once hailed ‘the age of democracy’ and now proclaim ‘the age of autocracy,’” writes the historian and Stalin biographer Stephen Kotkin in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs. The world’s authoritarian regimes seem formidable, but they are “shot through with weaknesses,” facing a “debilitating incapacity stemming from corruption, cronyism, and overreach.”
That weakness is something the world’s democracies can exploit—and for all the “warnings about the breakdown of American democracy,” Kotkin argues, the United States can still help lead the effort. This does not mean trying to replace autocratic regimes; indeed, “Washington cannot directly bring down nuclear-armed authoritarian adversaries such as China and Russia without risking Armageddon,” he writes. But a reenergized United States can certainly “make it harder for the authoritarians to marshal their strengths and easier for their weaknesses to hold them back.”
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