This week, the Secretary of War and President of the United States addressed an audience of generals who were told to report to the Pentagon from all across the world for a one-day Washington reveal. The news coverage of the event paints a stark picture of America’s descent into fascism.
There is no doubt that Western democracies face many challenges in the 21st century, none more than the United States under its current administration, with a government and opposition more divided in purpose than any seen since the 1850s and the run-up to the American Civil War.
The America of today is not making any friends in the community of democratic Western states. The tariff wars, the isolationist rhetoric, the constant altering of foreign policy stances, and the invective demonstrated in speech by Donald Trump to the United Nations General Assembly, with him telling the national representatives gathered to listen, that their nations were going to hell, have further added to the uncertainty and increased the erosion of trust by democratic and non-democratic allies.
This uncertainty is further inflamed by the Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Gaza wars, not that these are the only ongoing conflicts happening around the planet. Add to this the climate change crisis, the potential threat from artificial super-intelligences, and global pandemic threats, and we have the makings for a 21st-century global disaster. If you were creating a movie script for a post-apocalyptic world, the current state of geopolitics would serve as the preamble.
So, just how far away are we from a global historical collapse of Western-style democracy? Democracy has had a good run, creating the wealthiest nations in the world over the past century. It has created multicultural societies where peaceful coexistence prevails among diverse cultures, ethnicities and religions.
Compare that to the world preceding World War II, and you can state unequivocally that contemporary democracy has succeeded where autocratic, fascist and communist totalitarian states failed. Democracies have demonstrated far greater success economically than those countries with autocracies driving top-down central planning. Democratic freedoms have created a climate of entrepreneurial success, enormous contributions to knowledge shared with all humanity. Democracies created the world-wide web. Although the headwinds have not always blown in democracy’s favour, overall, democracies have painted a remarkably successful story.
The head count of 74 nations qualifying as democratic is a remarkable achievement of the 20th century. So, democracies entering the 21st century would appear to have the headwinds blowing in their favour. What democracies have achieved includes: global agreement on how to reverse the depletion of the protective ozone layer, policies to tackle food and freshwater insecurity, global agreements to protect the oceans of the world, organized research into defeating epidemic and pandemic threats, and heading up global efforts to tackle anthropogenic climate change.
How quickly can this all end? Would anyone living in the age of Athenian democracy, or at the height of the Roman Republic, have predicted the coming descent into authoritarianism? For those living in the mid-1920s in Germany’s Weimar Republic have predicted the rise of Nazi Germany?
When are democratic institutions most vulnerable to exploitation by extremist leaders seeking to undermine and reconstitute them? Vulnerability is a consequence of uncertainty and fear. There is no doubt that the 21st century has certainly provided both.
Today, we live in a world where autocracies now outnumber democracies, with more than 40% of humanity living in non-democratic nations. These nations don’t support free and fair elections, clamp down on dissent, free expression and association, and where the judiciary and military bend to the will of central authoritarian leadership.
If you are an American reading this, do you see your country in this picture? Do you see an America, once described as the arsenal of democracy, becoming one of those nations that believe might is right and that bullies get their way? What you are seeing, unfortunately, is a disease that is spreading to other democracies, with recent signs of it in Canada, Central and South America, and in the countries of the European Union.
Will democracy survive Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Turkey’s Recep Erdoğan, India’s Narendra Modi, Poland’s Mateusz Morawiecki and America’s Donald Trump? Brazil dodged the bullet with Jair Bolsonaro’s defeat. But other democracies may not, as the choices narrow to candidates for leadership who believe in dismantling the protections and norms that sustain democracy. A rise of fascist and populist political parties can be seen in many democracies recently. Alternatives for Germany, AfD is one, the Reform Party under Nigel Farage in the United Kingdom is another. France has the National Rally, formerly the National Front. There are many more.
The 21st century will only create more threats to democratic institutions under the strain of climate change, the rise of disruptive technologies like AI and robotics, the information warfare meted out daily through social media, and the threats from autocratic neighbour nations with ambitions for geopolitical dominance.
The breaking point for democracies, I fear, could come from a conflict involving the NATO countries, Russia and China. It may grow out of the current regional wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
It may be nuclear brinksmanship by Russia’s Vladimir Putin that could lead to a single tripwire event.
It may be climate change or another global pandemic like COVID-19 that triggers non-aligned nations to abandon their trust in Western democracies to solve global challenges.
Or it could be the foolish prattle and actions of a man like Donald Trump, which fragments and weakens democratic norms, leading to the decline of free societies.
