Dictators vs. Democracy: The Fight for Ukraine’s Future Is Our Own

The West’s response to Ukraine could redefine the future of democracy

Image by Enrique from Pixabay

In the last week, Russia has unleashed one of its most violent missile attacks against Ukraine, and the United States and at least one other European country have given president Zelenskyy permission to use long-range missiles to attack within Russia.

Putin has also brought in North Korean troops, internationalizing the incident as if he wants to turn it into World War III. Europe and the United States both know they must stand against this.

And yesterday, reportedly, Putin launched an ICBM against Ukraine; ever since the days of the Cold War, the United States and Russia have always notified each other of ICBM launches because these are the missiles used to carry nuclear warheads. We mutually notify each other to prevent a nuclear response that could trigger Armageddon.

As Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s spokesman, Dave Pares, said:

“If true, clearly this would be another example of grave, reckless and escalatory behavior from Russia and only serves to strengthen our resolve.”

If it turns out this is an ICBM, this would be an effort by Putin to scare the West. It’s not working.

So, how could it be that the best way to ensure peace in the world is for democratic nations to occasionally go to war?

That, for example, the world’s ability to build lasting peace in Europe may well hang on how successfully the US and the EU support Ukraine’s efforts to beat back Putin, particularly since Russia has expanded this into a two-continent war by inviting in North Korean troops and now apparently using ICBMs?

There’s history here, and it’s well worth knowing.

Way back in 1795, Immanuel Kant, in an essay titled “Perpetual Peace,” argued that if dictatorships around the world were replaced by republics, it could herald an end to all war. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel built on this in the early 19th century with his “Theory of History,” outlining how humankind has continually progressed through increasingly sophisticated stages of cultural and political development, implying we could one day even reach an utopian era of world peace.

While Marx and his followers badly abused some of Hegel’s ideas and his main proposition, Kant’s and Hegel’s work experienced a major modern revival toward the end of the 20th century with the development of the “Democratic Peace Theory.” It emerged, in large part, in response to the end of the Cold War.

Democratic Peace Theory posits that when a country is truly democratic — when its leaders must answer to its people with enough regularity and transparency that leadership can’t go off in directions the majority wouldn’t agree with — a citizenry will only allow its government to go to war when that war is defensive or it’s in support of an ally nation defending itself.

The flip side of that is the secondary argument that wars are almost always started by national leaders who aren’t or don’t feel truly accountable to their people.

Thus, strengthening and expanding democracy — and defending existing democracies when they come under assault from undemocratic countries — must be a prime directive for all democratic nations.

People skeptical of Democratic Peace Theory will point to Reagan’s unprovoked attack on Grenada, GHW Bush’s taking America to war to defend the kingdom of Kuwait (and their oil), and George W. Bush’s lying us into attacking Iraq when it had nothing to do with 9/11 and Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. A similar argument can be made about then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara lying to LBJ about the Gulf of Tonkin and thus dragging America into the Vietnam War.

If anything, though, these examples (and others like Margaret Thatcher and the Falklands War, which inspired Reagan’s “little war” with Grenada) prove the thesis. While the genesis of Vietnam is a bit more complex, Thatcher, Reagan, Bush Sr., and Bush Jr. all went to war to improve their own chances of re-election. And each had to lie extensively to pull those wars off.

An important question today is if Trump will do the same when he gets in a bind (most likely because his policies provoke a recession).

British historian John Newsinger writes about Thatcher’s war against Argentina:

“In fact, the invasion was one of the most scandalous episodes in modern British history, involving lying and dishonesty on a scale that put even George Bush and Tony Blair to shame.”

The same was true with Reagan. When Iran’s Islamic Jihad division of Hezbollah attacked a US Marine barracks in Lebanon on October 23, 1983 killing 299 American marines and support personnel, Americans perceived our country as being under attack.

President Reagan didn’t want to risk taking on the Iranians (with whom he’d cut a deal to screw Carter in 1980) but without some sort of a military response he knew he’d lose his 1984 reelection (his approval numbers started to collapse after the 1982 recession and were underwater by the time of the bombing). So, instead, he decided to distract us all with a “quick war” with Grenada, a tiny Caribbean island. As Yale’s Professor Wendell Bell writes:

“Without the precipitating event of the bombing in Lebanon, the US invasion of Grenada might not have occurred.”

Similarly, George W. Bush had decided back in 1999 that if he became president he was going to have his own war with Iraq, but this one would last longer than the short three-day-war his father had, which failed to get Bush senior reelected in 1992. As Bush junior told his biographer, Mickey Herskowitz, a full year before the 2000 presidential campaign:

“One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of (Kuwait) and he wasted it.

“If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”

Thus, Bush and Cheney had to engage in industrial-scale lying to the American people to gin up support for a phony war that was really being fought as a reelection stunt in advance of their 2004 contest against John Kerry.

As the Center for Public Integrity noted, according to Yale’s Wendell Bell:

“During that time, these officials misled the American people and the world by making 935 false statements on at least 532 separate occasions in which they linked Iraq to Al Qaeda and the [9/11] attack on America or in which they claimed that Iraq was a viable threat because it possessed weapons of mass destruction….”

If anything, these examples show how difficult it can be for the leadership of a democracy to drag its people into war, and history since then (and opinion polls about LBJ and Bush) demonstrate how detested they can become when their lies are exposed.  

Dictators like Putin, Kim, or Xi can simply throw their nations into war with a command from the top. It’s a hell of a lot more difficult to do in a democratic republic.

And we see this today: Putin’s invasions of Chechnya, Georgia, Moldova, South Ossetia, and now Ukraine illustrate the danger of a major nation being taken over by an autocrat willing to use military force to expand his own wealth and hold on power.

Similarly, they highlight the vital importance of democracies defending other democracies from autocratic assaults, be they from their military or via propaganda and social media.

Donald Trump, by taking Russia’s side and condoning Putin’s slaughter in Ukraine, tells us that he has no interest in or concern for democracy and democratic nations. Throughout his last presidency he sucked up to autocrats and oligarchs while trashing our democratic allies around the world.

President Biden and Vice President Harris, through their support for Ukraine’s self-defense, showed us their commitment to democracy both at home and around the world. Sometimes, as we learned in World War II, it’s necessary to go to war to stop dictatorial madmen whose wars and territorial conquest won’t be otherwise stopped.

By 1998, when Francis Fukuyama wrote his famous essay The End of History?, the Democratic Peace Theory had won a wide embrace. The world was optimistically looking forward to decades of peace, as “peak democracy” and the “peace dividend” had set in.

At the same time, though, both President Clinton and the leaders of several European countries (most notably Tony Blair), were pushing neoliberal “reforms” onto the brand new Russian democracy; those “reforms” led that nation straight into oligarchy and then dictatorship. (I chronicle this at length in The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America.)  

The result was the emergence of Putin as a new Russian czar, Orbán taking Hungary down a very similar road, and Russia forming a coalition with China to corrupt early-stage democratic nations, particularly in Africa and South America. Democracy, as a result, has been backsliding around the world since the turn of the 21st century.

This presidential election thus offered Americans a stark choice.

Would we embrace democracy and, by correlation, world peace through a vigorous defense of Ukraine while strengthening institutions like the UN and other multilateral organizations?

So far, it looks like Trump will instead embrace Putin — particularly with his choices of Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth — which could be a disaster that both reflects his disdain of democracy and his lack of understanding international statecraft.

Will we abandon Ukraine, and thus empower Putin and Xi to start a third world war in Europe and Asia? Or will the American people speak out loudly against such disastrous folly?

Now is a good time to reach out to your elected officials; the number for the Capitol switchboard is 202-224-3121. And to show up and join your local Democratic Party and progressive groups to amplify your voice.

War and peace are on the line. And, given the destructive power of nuclear weapons, and Russia’s alleged use of ICBMs, possibly the future of humankind.

The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My newest book, The Hidden History of the American Dream, is now available.