Why not encircle Russia? I can’t remember which ones, but several of my podcasts have brought up the point recently that liberal democracy is essentially a proselytizing ideology — that is, it views no other form of government besides itself as legitimate, and seeks to replace them with itself. This is the core thing we’re constantly being told that Russia and China fear about the West, right?
To which I say… well, okay, why the hell not?
We liberal democracies have been bouncing back and forth on this question for decades. We bumble into these big, catastrophic “wars for democracy” like Vietnam and Iraq, and then we spend the interim until the next one flagellating ourselves for engaging in evil imperialism, unbefitting our liberal democratic values.
Well… those wars were evil imperialism. Wars for democracy are bad unless they’re existential like WWII, duh.
But fear of that shouldn’t stop us from encircling every autocracy on the planet with a cooperating alliance of democracies, whose explicit mission isn’t “West vs. Russia” or “West vs. China”, but “All Democracies Everywhere Are Evangelists To Their Neighbors”.
Thus far, we’ve been pretty bad at proselytizing for liberal democracy. As noted, our wars for democracy rarely manage to actually install it. And when we’re not mired in one of those boondoggles, we prop up autocracies left and right in the name of “stability”, while we idly sit by watching them undermine us, compromising our moral legitimacy.
So, I say we encircle them. Peacefully. Expand NATO. Expand the EU. Create a Congress Of Democracies to supplement and eventually supplant the ineffectual UN. Create a “democracies-only” free trade block. Announce a “Monroe Doctrine For Democracies”: We will vigorously defend any democracy with every means necessary and possible, short of starting a nuclear war.
Let murderous psychopaths like Putin know what it really feels like to be “encircled”.
It's worth trying. Since there are different forms of liberal democracy, it isn't even a one-size-fits-all problem. On another note (since Ukraine is so prominent in at least some of the thinking behind this article), here is a link: https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/03/05/i-ll-be-depressed-and-i-ll-cut-costs?utm_source=email&utm_medium=briefly&utm_campaign=2022-03-08. If you scroll down you can sign up for it.
Yay democracy! Most wars aren’t about democracy though. I mean Vietnam was about stopping the tide of communist expansion, but that was more about preventing another country from aligning with the Soviets and China than about the expansion of democracy. For decades the west was fine with supporting illiberal nations as along as they were against the communists (and then against Islamic extremism).
It’s really a two step process, step one make sure nation isn’t actively fighting us or our allies (I don’t care about which side of the political spectrum you are if your shooting at me). Once war stops then you talk about democratization. War for democracy feels like a misnomer, unless you’re in a world war and whole nations are being swallowed up and governments toppled. I think the struggle is that democracy comes from the people, and as such it’s hard to have a democracy imposed by a foreign power if the people don’t push for it or acquiesce in some way( an example of this would be post-war Japan, in light of atomic bombs and occupation, Japanese leadership wasn’t in much position to quibble about become a more democratic nation).
Differentiating between a war for democracy and a war against aggression can be difficult, but it would seem that Putins states aims are squarely anti-democratic and should be seen as such.