Is democracy vs. autocracy a Cold War for the 2020s?

“He may be an SOB, but he’s our SOB.”

So said President Franklin D. Roosevelt of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, and how very American. From its first days, America has colluded with autocrats when the national interest demanded it.

George Washington danced a jig in 1778 when he learned that our diplomats had effected an alliance with France’s King Louis XVI. The alliance, he knew, would be indispensable to an American victory.

In April 1917, the U.S. went to war “to make the world safe for democracy” in collusion with four of the world’s greatest empires: the British, French, Russian and Japanese. All four annexed new colonial lands and peoples from the victory for democracy we were decisive in winning.

In World War II, we gave massive military aid to Joseph Stalin’s USSR, which used it to crush, conquer and communize half of Europe.

Yet, President Joe Biden has defined the global struggle as between democracy and autocracy and said, “Democracy will and must prevail.”

But is this an accurate depiction of great power rivalry today? Are we really in an ideological war with Vladimir Putin’s Russia today, as we were during the Cold War with Stalin’s USSR?

Putin’s objections to us are to our policies, not our democracy.

Back in the 1950s, Nikita Khrushchev had boasted that America’s grandchildren would live under communism. When has Putin proclaimed any such grand ideological Kremlin goal?

Is our quarrel with China ideological in character? China is a great and growing economic and military power, with quarrels with most of its neighbors. But with the exceptions of Taiwan and Hong Kong, which it claims as sovereign Chinese territory, Beijing has not pressed any nation to adopt a political system similar to that of China’s Communist Party.

It coexists with communist Vietnam, autocratic Myanmar, theocratic Afghanistan and democratic India, Australia and

Japan.

Beijing’s quarrel with us is not that America is “a democracy.” China’s objections are that we block its ambitions and back the nations of South Asia and Southeast Asia that thwart its strategic goals.

The quarrel is not ideological, but political and strategic.

Why, then, turn it into a war of systems? Where is the evidence that Beijing is trying to communize her neighbors, or change their political systems to conform to her own?

However, there is considerable evidence to demonstrate that the United States actively seeks to subvert the rule of Putin in Russia. Though Putin’s Kremlin is accused of having hacked the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016, even if true, how would that compare with U.S. interference today in the internal affairs of Russia?

Are Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe objective and neutral in their coverage in Russia? Do the many nongovernmental organizations and the National Endowment for Democracy take a hands-off approach to the internal politics of Russia?

Where did America acquire the right to interfere in the internal affairs of other nations to get them to conform to our own? Is this not the essence of ideological warfare? And who, then, is the aggressor in this new ideological war?