The Real War: Autocrats Versus Democrats

Seventeen years after the Soviet breakup, why has Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbayev never run a fair election? Why is Russia's leadership the subject of a selection as opposed to an election? Why, for that matter, is China so successful as a Communist state?

According to Robert Kagan, this is the natural order of things. The last two decades have been an anomaly, and we are now seeing a revival of real ideological balance, he says in, "The Return of History and the End of Dreams."

For O and G readers, here is the best paragraph in the short, 105-page, pocket-size book: "It is a mistake to believe that autocracy has no international appeal. Thanks to decades of remarkable growth, the Chinese today can argue that their model of economic development, which combines an increasingly open economy with a closed political system, can be a successful option for development in many nations. It certainly offers a model for successful autocracy, a blueprint for how to create wealth and stability without having to give way to political liberalization. Russia's model of 'sovereign democracy' is attractive among the autocrats of Central Asia. Some Europeans worry that Russia is 'emerging as an ideological alternative to the EU that offers a different approach to sovereignty, power and world order.' In the 1980s and 1990s, the autocratic model seemed like a losing proposition as dictatorships of both right and left fell before the liberal tide. Today, thanks to the success of China and Russia, it looks like a better bet."

A cottage industry is under way of books dissecting how we started out with a peace dividend from the fall of the Soviet bloc, and ended up with a hyper-charged war atmosphere. Today's New York Times, for instance, reviews America Between the Wars, by Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier.

The books are part of the current electoral atmosphere -- while McCain and Obama battle for the White House, wonks are girding for a place in one or the other's foreign policy superstructure, including senior spots in the National Security Council and the State Department.

This is perhaps Kagan's current aim. With that in mind, he takes aim at Francis Fukuyama, who in 1992 argued in The End of History and the Last Man that liberal democracy was the final stage of governance.

For those unacquainted with him, Kagan is a long-time provider of intellectual heft for neoconservatives. In this book, he puts on a show of shedding his ideological past. Indeed the first two thirds of the book -- through page 82 -- is a bracing and sweeping display of knowledge and analysis of his argument that the world has returned to a competition between democratic and autocratic states. And that that -- and not a struggle between the West and Islam -- is the main geopolitical contest to which the world will be treated in the years ahead. Militant Islam, he says, will fall by the wayside to this more robust rivalry.

But then Kagan reverts to his past as a factory of neo-con ideological thought. For instance, other reviewers have asserted that, with this work, Kagan loses his embrace of Iraq and the transformational global change he promised in the lead up to the current war. But they apparently missed his assertion, on page 90, that Iraq remains a place that, if handled correctly, could still become a strategic boon for the U.S. "A stable, pro-American Iraq would shift the strategic balance [in the Middle East] in a decidedly pro-American direction," Kagan writes.

Indeed, he argues, unlike the criticism rendered by some major scholars, the Bush administration's foreign policy record stacks up well against its predecessors'. The Cold War resulted in "major strategic setbacks"; during the 1950s and 1960s, Egypt and Syria allied with Moscow.; and, under Jimmy Carter, the U.S. lost its crucial ally, Iran, to the uprising of Ayatollah Khomeini. "Nothing similar has yet occurred as a result of the Iraq war," Kagan writes.

One might also quibble with Kagan's characterization of one of the impulses behind Bush's foreign policy -- the same "noble generosity of spirit" that has long driven U.S. actions. In Kagan's telling, Bush's policies have dove-tailed with how Americans have been all along.

Though it might have upset his publisher, the book easily could lose 10 or 20 pages, where Kagan veers off his theme of democracy versus autocracy and into his drum-beating on behalf of the neo-con cause.

Yet I found the clear-eyed crunching of the genuine current battle worth the cover price.