Democracy and autocracy, the current U.S. president often asserts, are in a global competition. The winner will shape the twenty-first century. Is this true? China’s government does not like such talk, and routinely ascribes it to a backward-looking “Cold War mentality.”

Mr. Biden’s assertion is plausible, at least for people of a certain age, people who do remember the Cold War. But it is not only the Chinese who question whether he has it right. The United States and China—two great powers—compete, to be sure. So do America and Russia. Perhaps Mr. Biden is trying to drape noble attire on America’s struggle to remain the world’s superpower? And even if democracy and autocracy are contending in some way, why should people who live in democracies care? How does it affect Americans if democracy is pushed back in Eastern Europe or Southeast Asia? Is the tug-of-war between two regimes just about bragging rights? Are citizens of democracies so fragile that they need constant reassurance from the rest of the world that their regime is best?

Reassurance and even bragging rights do matter, it turns out, but only as details of a much larger picture. This book argues that constitutional self-government and authoritarianism are indeed in a worldwide contest, that the contest is a matter of national interest for the great powers, and that it is not going well for democracy.        

Great powers assuredly do compete for power and influence. But each great power competes as a particular type of country—as a democracy or an autocracy. Most American leaders (and most citizens) want two things very badly: for their country to be internationally competitive, and for it to be a democracy. Chinese leaders want their country to be competitive and for it to be authoritarian, or “socialist with Chinese characteristics.” No one in this picture wants to have to choose between national power and domestic regime.

To see why this leads to a global contest between regime types, we can borrow from biological evolution. Great powers share an international environment that selects for various traits in states, including particular domestic regimes. Just as a snowy clime selects for animals with white fur, a certain kind of international environment can select for democratic states. On top of that, some organisms turn things around and modify their environment to the point where it actually selects for different traits than it otherwise would. Scientists call this “ecosystem engineering” or “niche construction.”

Great powers try to engineer their ecosystems to favor their regime type. That is why democracy and autocracy are in a great and lengthy contest. Great powers do this so that they can avoid what I call the “regime-power dilemma,” which says that if you want to be competitive, you must adapt your regime; and if you want to keep your regime, you must become less competitive. To relieve this dilemma, a democracy will do what it can, within reason, to make its environment friendlier to democracy. An autocracy faces a mirror-image version of the dilemma, and so will try to engineer the ecosystem to favor authoritarianism.

All of that is abstract, and in this book I make clear that the international environment consists of three components: the balance of power among regimes (more democracies, and more powerful democracies, means a friendlier environment); international rules and practices (trading rules that punish more opaque economies are friendlier to democracies); and information about which regime type works best. These components all affect one another. I show the United States, China, and Russia all trying to shape this environment to favor their own type.

Democracy is in trouble in the United States and elsewhere partly because it is not doing very well in this competition. The international environment is no longer selecting for constitutional self-government. The following pages unfold two large reasons why. First, the United States, along with other wealthy democracies, has made the environment more liberal since World War II, but the kind of liberalism it has infused it with over the past few decades is no longer working. Liberalism is the political doctrine that upholds individual freedom as the highest political good. It has been through three historic stages; the third, which I call “open liberalism,” has served a few people very well, but its economic and cultural faces have alienated countless communities, polarized populations, and fed anti-liberal populism. Liberalism needs reform.

Second, the two authoritarian giants of China and Russia are infusing the international environment with content more supportive of their regimes. They have put up with the liberal international order for decades, and China has done well by it. But they know that it handicaps them so long as they retain their authoritarian regimes. Indeed, Beijing and Moscow both believe that to be great powers, their countries must be authoritarian. The ecosystem that America has built is rigged to keep them down. In matters such as trade, cyberspace, human rights, and foreign intervention, they are laboring to turn the environment to favor their regime type.

The contest is on, then. That does not mean great-power war. It does mean that international cooperation will always be limited by the conflicting goals each side has for international order—goals that relate not just to ideals but to the national interest of each great power. The contest could become a long-term stalemate over the kind of international order we will have. Or, it could mean the emergence of two separate but overlapping international orders, one favoring liberal democracy, the other favoring authoritarian capitalism. But remedying the crisis of democracy requires recognizing the contest and waging it prudently.

Excerpted from The Ecology of Nations published by Yale University Press ©2023