What made democracies different and more restrained in warfare, according to Kant’s theory of democratic peace, was that the costs in both blood and treasure were passed along to the public, which then imposed pressure on leaders to keep wars short and low in cost.
The key feature of a non-principled, fast-alternating foreign policy is that no one knows exactly what you are going to do next. That makes it hard for your enemies to plot against you. Russian President Vladimir Putin has used a version of this strategy to great effect. Almost no one anticipated the invasion of Ukraine. Even fewer thought that Putin would seek to make Russia into a Middle Eastern player again by intervening extensively in the Syrian civil war.
The international pecking order is usually defined by economic and military might. That puts the U.S. at the top of the pile, with China gaining fast in second place. But when it comes to tackling long-term global challenges such as climate change, poverty or peacemaking, it’s also vital to identify which leaders are likely to stick around.
When Muammar al-Qaddafi came in from the cold in the mid-2000s, the “mad dog” of the Middle East embarked upon top-down reforms that were friendly to international markets, investors, the United States, and Europe. Although he became the subject of sympathetic profiles in major Western media outlets, those articles almost never emphasised the fact that the new Qaddafi continued to rule Libya as the old one did — with violence.
A quarter-century after the end of the Cold War, the world unexpectedly finds itself in a second one. This state of affairs was anything but inevitable, and it is in neither side’s interest to escalate tensions further.
“Sharp power,” as coined by Christopher Walker and Jessica Ludwig of the National Endowment for Democracy, refers to the information warfare being waged by today’s authoritarian powers, particularly China and Russia. Over the past decade, Beijing and Moscow have spent tens of billions of dollars to shape public perceptions and behaviour around the world—using tools new and old that exploit the asymmetry of openness between their own restrictive systems and democratic societies.
If you took an introduction to international relations course in college and the instructor never mentioned the “balance of power,” please contact your alma mater for a refund. You can find this idea in Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, and the ancient Indian writer Kautilya’s Arthashastra (“Science of Politics”), and it is central to the work of modern realists like E.H. Carr, Hans J. Morgenthau, Robert Gilpin, and Kenneth Waltz.
For two decades after the end of the Cold War, the direction of international influence was clear: it radiated from liberal democracies outward, as the West sought to spread its model of governance around the world. With the help of Western-led democracy promotion, the thinking went, authoritarian states would be relegated to the dustbin of history. That has changed. In recent years, authoritarian states have boldly sought to influence Western democracies.
After the stunning collapse of the Iranian regime in 1979, country risk analysts everywhere became desirous of some method to better calculate the risk of political instability in countries across the world. For many, the holy grail became some type of quantitative index that would rank countries based on their potential for instability.
Western ideas—which many in the West believe are universal—collide with the ideals of Middle Eastern societies in ways that aren’t always obvious.
