Autocracy doesn’t have to be America’s mortal enemy

In the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, President Joe Biden declared to the nation and world: “We are engaged anew in a great battle for freedom. A battle between democracy and autocracy.”

On her trip to Taiwan, Speaker Nancy Pelosi echoed Biden: “Today, the world faces a choice between democracy and autocracy. America’s determination to preserve democracy here in Taiwan

and in the world remains iron-clad.”

But is this truly the world struggle America is in today?

Are autocracy and democracy in a climactic ideological crusade to determine the destiny of mankind?

For if that is the future, it is surely not America’s past.

Indeed, in the two-century rise of the United States to world preeminence and power, autocrats have proven invaluable allies.

When the fate of the Revolution hung in the balance in 1778, the decision of an autocratic French king to enter the war on America’s side elated Gen. George Washington, and French intervention proved decisive in the 1781 Battle of Yorktown that secured our independence.

In World War I in 1918, the U.S. sent millions of troops into battle in France. They proved decisive in the victory over the Kaiser’s Germany.

Our allies in that Great War?

The British, French, Russian, Italian and Japanese empires, the greatest imperial and colonial powers of that day.

In our war with Japan from 1941 to 1945, our foremost Asian ally was the autocrat Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek of China.

In our war with Hitler’s Germany, America’s crucial ally who did more fighting than any other to ensure victory, the USSR’s Joseph Stalin, was the greatest tyrant of his age.

During four decades of Cold War before the collapse and breakup of the Soviet Empire and Soviet Union, autocrats were allies of the United States. During that Cold War, India was the world’s largest democracy and sided most often with Communist Russia rather than the United States. Autocratic Pakistan was our ally.

Across the Arab and Muslim world during the Cold War, many of our foremost friends and allies were kings, emirs and sultans — autocrats all.

This recitation is not to argue that autocracy is superior to democracy, but to demonstrate that the internal politics of foreign lands, especially in wartime, have rarely been America’s primary concern.

The crucial question, and rightly so, is usually this: Is this autocrat enlisted in the same cause as we, and fighting alongside us? If so, the autocrat has almost always been welcome.

And there is a historical question about the Biden-Pelosi description of the global struggle for the future between autocracy and democracy.

When did the internal political arrangements of foreign nations — there are 194 now — become a primary concern of a country whose Founding Fathers wanted it to stay out of foreign quarrels and foreign wars?

America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” said Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. “She is the wellwisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

And so it once was, long ago.