Robert Kagan’s lengthy essay is worth reading. He notes:
Authoritarianism has reemerged as the
greatest threat to the liberal democratic world — a profound ideological, as
well as strategic, challenge. And we have no idea how to confront it.
“Much more is at
risk than our privacy. We have been living with the comforting myth that the
great progress we have witnessed in human behavior since the mid-20th century,
the reductions in violence, in the brutality of the state, in torture, in mass
killing, cannot be reversed. There can be no more holocausts; no more
genocides; no more Stalinist gulags. We insist on believing there is a new
floor below which people and governments cannot sink. But this is just another
illusion born in the era that is now passing.
The enormous
progress of the past seven-plus decades was not some natural evolution of
humanity; it was the product of liberalism’s unprecedented power and influence
in the international system. Until the second half of the 20th century,
humanity was moving in the other direction.”