Stephen Kotkin is one of America’s best historians. His magnificent biography of Josef Stalin (the third and final volume is due out in 2026) is the gold standard in historical writing and interpretation. But when the subject is global geopolitics, his academic instincts can cloud his judgment. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his recent essay in Foreign Affairs on authoritarianism. Kotkin, who one senses knows better, divides the globe into democracies versus authoritarians and suggests that the United States is, or should be, engaged in a global struggle against the world’s two largest and most powerful authoritarian regimes. That’s not how geopolitics works.
Throughout its history, the United States has fought against some authoritarian regimes and benefitted from its alliances and partnerships with some authoritarian regimes. Geopolitical circumstances, not typological formulas, dictate U.S. interests. For four years during World War II, we benefitted from an alliance with Stalin’s Soviet Union, then for 45 years thereafter that same autocracy was our principal enemy. In Korea in the early 1950s, we fought China’s communist regime, but twenty years later we formed a de facto alliance with that same Chinese autocracy to help contain and defeat the Soviet Union in the Cold War. For almost a decade in the 1960s and 1970s, we fought against the North Vietnamese autocratic regime, yet some 50 years later, that same autocracy is our partner in efforts to contain China in the Indo-Pacific. Indeed, we won our independence from Great Britain in part due to our alliance with France’s autocracy.
Presidents of both political parties have seen fit to partner with or at least aid authoritarian regimes when they believed it was in our interests to do so: Somoza in Nicaragua, the Shah in Iran, Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan, Franco in Spain, Marcos in the Philippines, Pinochet in Chile, South Africa’s various apartheid regimes, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein (during his war with Iran), Saudi and other Arab autocrats. The list is almost endless. Kotkin references Juan Linz, Hannah Arendt, Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski in his explication of authoritarianism. Noticeably absent from his essay is any mention of Jeane Kirkpatrick’s seminal article “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” which distinguished between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes and exposed the folly of a foreign policy (Jimmy Carter’s) based on hostility to authoritarianism.
Kotkin rightly points out the vulnerabilities of authoritarian regimes, but that doesn’t mean that the United States should always and everywhere exploit those vulnerabilities. Kotkin understands that. “[C]ombating authoritarianism,” he writes, “. . . does not entail overthrowing every such regime or, indeed, any of them.” “The United States,” he continues, “can topple weaker authoritarian regimes, but it cannot ensure their replacement by a better alternative.” That was precisely Kirkpatrick’s point. Kotkin also understands that U.S. power is not unlimited and that we must, echoing Walter Lippmann, align our commitments with our resources. Yet, Kotkin suggests that we treat China and Russia the same, even though it would make more geopolitical sense to ease tensions with Russia and encourage division among the two Eurasian powers.
We are not in a new Cold War with authoritarianism. We should not be in a new Cold War with Russia. We are, however, in a new Cold War with China. Kotkin, reminiscent of the early-mid 1950s outlook, sees us in conflict with a Sino-Russian bloc allied to Iran and North Korea. And he denies that U.S. and Western policies had anything to do with facilitating the formation of that bloc. His emphasis on combating authoritarianism muddies his geopolitical analysis.
Kotkin writes that to effectively combat authoritarianism “requires that democracies get their own houses in order.” The “elephant in the room,” Kotkin writes, is President Trump, who he claims has “authoritarian wishes and methods,” a “pathetic envy of strongmen,” has engaged in “brutal enforcement of immigration law,” and conducted a “performative deployment of National Guard units to urban areas, bullying, and epic self-dealing.” Kotkin assures us, however, that “even at his picaresque worst, Trump’s presidency has not placed the United States on some irreversible slide to authoritarianism.” Kotkin also blames some of Trump’s opponents who, with Trump, “feed off and contribute to the country’s extreme distraction and its resulting inability to craft a robust strategy of national renewal that would put the authoritarians on the back foot.”
Kotkin ignores the fact that President Trump is leading the country toward “national renewal” by finally controlling our borders, revitalizing the Monroe Doctrine to enhance hemispheric security, insisting on fair trade with allies and adversaries, promoting needed burden-sharing with allies who had effectively become protectorates, and strengthening our force posture in the Indo-Pacific. Trump and his top national security officials, like Kotkin, understand the limits of U.S. power, and have focused our resources and strategy on promoting, preserving and pursuing America’s interests. That Trump is doing so using the full extent of his Article II powers does not make him an autocrat any more than it made Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon autocrats.
The United States has authoritarian adversaries and authoritarian allies, and it should conduct it foreign policy on the basis of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Echoing Lord Palmerston, its leaders must recognize that America has no permanent allies and no permanent adversaries, just eternal interests. And it is not an eternal interest of America to combat authoritarianism abroad. As our wisest Secretary of State John Qunicy Adams once observed, America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”
