Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton are interviewed by CNN's Wolf Blitzer while at the NATO "jumbo" ministerial at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, Belgium on April 18, 2012. Secretary Panetta is in Brussels meeting with various members of NATO as well as participating in a meeting with NATO Ministers of Defense and Ministers of Foreign Affairs.(DoD Photo by Erin A. Kirk-Cuomo)(Released)

“In the battle between democracy and autocracy, democracies are rising to the moment, and the world is clearly choosing the side of peace and security,” said President Joe Biden in his State of the Union address.

“This is a real test. It’s going to take time.”

Thus did Biden frame the struggle of our time as the U.S. leading the world’s democracies, the camp of the saints, against the world’s autocrats, the forces of darkness.

But is “democracy” really America’s cause? Is “autocracy” really America’s great adversary in the battle for the future?
Not all autocrats, after all, are our enemies, nor are all democrats our reliable friends.

When Ukraine was invaded, the U.N. General Assembly voted on a resolution which “deplores in the strongest terms” Russia’s “aggression” against Ukraine.

Among the 35 nations that abstained was India, the world’s largest democracy. Whose side is India on in the great struggle?
Freedom House ranks Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, all friends, partners and sometime allies of the United States, as “not free.”

Are we in a global struggle against all of these nations, all of these regimes, because all of them are autocracies?

As for America’s own wars, democracy-versus-autocracy would seem to be a misguided way to describe any of them.

In the Revolution, we were military allies from 1778 on with King Louis XVI of France, against Great Britain, the Mother of Parliaments. Our goal was not establishing a democracy, but our independence, separation, from the most democratic nation on earth.

When we declared war on the kaiser’s Germany in April 1917, we allied ourselves with four of the greatest colonial empires on earth: the British, French, Russian and Japanese empires.

When that Great War began, Germany’s Second Reich was a good deal more democratic than the czarist regime of Russia’s Nicholas II.
In World War II, we allied with the world’s largest colonial empire, Great Britain, and the USSR of Joseph Stalin. Democracy was not the cause for which we went to war, but payback to Japan for the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. Our most important ally in that Asian war was the Nationalist China of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, no democrat.

History, religion, race, culture, tribe and territory more often define the 100-plus nations of Africa, the Middle East and Asia than whether they are democracies or autocracies.

During the Cold War, we collaborated openly with dictators — Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, Chiang Kai-shek in China, Syngman Rhee in South Korea, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, the shah of Iran, Ngo Dinh Diem, and a succession of generals after his assassination, in South Vietnam.

If they stood with us against the Communists in the Cold War, we stood by them. “He may be a SOB, but he’s our SOB,” FDR said of Somoza.

Communism was our ideological enemy, not autocracy.

If you were an enemy of communism in the Cold War, autocrat or not, you were likely to be treated as a friend by the USA.
If we make global “democracy” the measure of success in the great struggle of our time, our victory or defeat in that cause depends on political decisions and internal choices of scores of nations not our own.

But when did the internal politics of other lands become either the business of the United States or the yardstick of our success as a nation?

To make global democracy our goal in this century’s great “battle” is to allow America’s success or failure as a nation to be judged and measured by what other nations, not our own, succeed or fail in doing.

America’s founding mission was not democracy, nor any other ideology. It was what we declared it to be in the document our fathers agreed to at the Constitutional Convention of 1787:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

“Democracy” is not even mentioned in the Constitution or in the Bill of Rights.

If whether other nations are democratic or autocratic is the measure by which we judge America’s success, this must lead invariably to U.S. interference in the internal affairs of those nations not our own — to ensure success in the great struggle.

To pursue global “democracy” is thus a formula for endless interventions in the internal affairs of other nations, endless conflicts and eventual war. The antidote is John Quincy Adams’ formulation:

“(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.”

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of “Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.” To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

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Comments

  1. Is Global ‘Democracy’ America’s Mission?Not really.
    The globalist Democrats and RINOs want a one World Dictatorship
    and they will get it when the AntiChrist take over as Prophesied in Revelation

  2. The answer to that is NO! Unfortunately the politicians can never understand. AMERICA FIRST! AMERICA FIRST!

  3. No, it is not the USA’s job to be the world’s police force. Even our Founding Fathers sought to stay out of military foreign entanglements and some put that in writing.

  4. We should be there for our LOYAL & like minded Allies but not the world’s police, they must learn to fight for themselves & be like minded strong & smart like Trump

  5. LISTEN UP….HOW MANY More CIVILIANS have to be KILLED to REALIZE PUTIN is OUT of CONTROL????? HE Not ONLY is a DANGER to UKRAINE but to the REST of the WORLD. WAKE UP. From SamuraiQueen. 🤔🤔🤔

  6. As the STILL most powerful country on earth, America should not be the World Police, but the one that enforces PEACE….But THAT won’t happen for as long as THIS UN-elected dementia-riddled phony is in Office, along with all of his Cronies…….!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  7. The United States is “The Whore with a hammer” sold out to the criminal international bankers in 1913, now going about the world to do their bidding. In every military exercise that the United States is involved in just “follow the money”.

  8. JESUS said when defending the adulterous woman who ever is without sin may throw the first stone. Biden, Obama, Hunter and others made Ukraine what it is to day, and
    Biden is defending his guilt and should shut
    Up and not put our beloved country into the
    Quagmire that is Ukraine. Putin has volunteered to clean up Ukraine’s corruption and we should let him clean up his country. Zelinskyy should have done this many years ago or should have declared his countries borders. You can’t accept Russia to pay your Bill’s and wipe you snotty nose and not accept Russia to sit by and let all this corruption at her border.

  9. Tony . There Trying To Enpose The Idea Of A One World Order . Which It’s Also Is What Aldof Hitler Wanted To Create A Leftist Socialist Marxism Narritive Democrisy .

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