Authoritarianism Without Ideology

America is joining a new world order where power trumps principle.

(Photo by Gabe Ginsberg via Getty.)

“This is not about Ukraine at all,” said Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov a month after the invasion in early 2022, “but the world order.” For nearly three years, the United States took Lavrov’s declaration seriously. Washington worked with European allies to impose severe sanctions on Russia, while NATO doubled the number of forces on its eastern flank and welcomed two new members: Finland and Sweden. The United States authorized $175 billion in aid to Ukraine. President Joe Biden often argued that Ukraine was the front line in a global battle between democracy and autocracy, which was an animating principle of U.S. foreign policy.

That all came to an end on January 20, when Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office. The idea of upholding certain rules and norms in the international system is foreign to Trump. After he and Vice President J.D. Vance berated Volodymyr Zelenskyy during an Oval Office meeting in February, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declared that the Trump administration’s foreign policy “largely aligns with our vision.” When Lavrov declared that the war was about building a new world order, he couldn’t have known that the United States would soon be such a willing participant in this process.

Deals, Not Ideals

But what will that new order look like? While China and Russia want to undermine liberal democracy, they don’t offer much in the way of an ideological alternative. During the Cold War, Soviet communism was an expansionist ideology that purported to be a replacement for liberal capitalist democracy. Beyond the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe, there were communist or Marxist governments everywhere from Southeast Asia to Africa to South America. The Soviet Union fought proxy wars with the United States around the globe and sought to install communist governments as widely as possible. This ideological conflict finally ended once it became clear that the cumbersome and authoritarian Soviet system simply couldn’t compete with the democratic West economically, politically, or culturally.

Today, by contrast, plenty of states have friendly relations with Beijing and Moscow, but these relationships are largely transactional. When China builds infrastructure across Asia and Africa as part of its Belt and Road Initiative, it doesn’t expect partner governments to adopt Xi Jinping Thought or emulate the Chinese political system. Other countries aren’t capable of replicating the unique Chinese model, which combines a partial market economy with heavy state control and an increasingly totalitarian form of government.

Meanwhile, although Putin wants to reconstitute as much of the Russian Empire as possible, he realizes that the populations of other countries aren’t clamoring to live under their own decaying petro dictatorships. When Lavrov announces the dawn of a new world order, he isn’t talking about a grand plan to remake the world in Russia’s image. Unlike the Soviet Union, Moscow doesn’t have a positive or coherent vision for how the world should be organized—its ideological project is built entirely around opposition to the U.S.-led international order. Putin is bitter that former Soviet states across Eastern Europe lined up to join the Western system of political, economic, and security organization after the Cold War. This is why he has special contempt for “globalism” and constantly demands a return to a world order that respects “sovereignty”—never mind that he is waging the largest conflict in Europe since World War II to destroy Ukrainian sovereignty.

China and Russia are part of a loose but increasingly consolidated authoritarian axis, which includes Iran, North Korea, and other anti-Western dictatorships like Venezuela, Belarus, and Zimbabwe. In her book Autocracy, Inc., the historian Anne Applebaum demonstrates how the various members in this nexus of autocracies support each other financially and politically. China provides diplomatic support to Venezuela and imports oil from the country; North Korea sends Russia weapons (and now soldiers); China provides a vital export market for Russia while enabling Moscow to circumvent sanctions and import military components and technology.

Applebaum explains that these relationships are “cemented not through ideals but through deals—deals designed to take the edge off sanctions, to exchange surveillance technology, to help one another get rich.” Like other transactional authoritarian leaders, Trump doesn’t believe the United States’ relationships with other countries should be based on shared values or the maintenance of international institutions—he thinks those relationships should be conditional and impermanent like business agreements. This is why he says allies should treat the United States like an “insurance company.”

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Sins of the Father

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Trump’s recent scattershot tariffs are a perfect example of his transactionalism. Beyond the fact that these massive tariffs—the most significant attack on global trade in a century—ignore basic economic principles like comparative advantage, they also target the United States’ closest allies and partners. The Trump administration dramatically overstated the tariffs other countries have imposed on the United States, and developed an arbitrary formula to produce stratospheric rates that will have a crippling economic impact on many of America’s closest friends. There’s nothing “reciprocal” about these tariffs, which were imposed as a form of economic coercion, not as a good faith attempt to maximize the value of trading relationships. While the administration wages economic warfare on the United States’ allies, Russia was conspicuously exempted from the tariff list.

Trump’s transactionalism is particularly dangerous because he has such a narrow and distorted conception of what’s in the United States’ interests. For example, he’s pushing for closer relations with Moscow while intentionally alienating the United States’ traditional allies by abandoning security arrangements and waging economic warfare on them. Trump administration officials have told European leaders that they will have no say in negotiations to end the war while simultaneously demanding that they provide the “overwhelming share of future lethal and nonlethal aid to Ukraine.” This isn’t just a reassessment of the United States’ traditional alliances—it’s a conscious effort to undermine them.

Twilight of Ideology

This shift away from America’s oldest allies and toward its most implacable enemy makes no sense economically: Russia has a $2.2 trillion economy while the EU economy is worth $20 trillion. And it makes no sense geopolitically: Russia has long sought to expand its own sphere of influence by force, which inevitably means shrinking the Western sphere of influence that grew because free countries across Europe chose to join. There’s no explanation for this shift apart from Trump’s desire to dismantle the liberal international order that the United States helped to build after World War II.

But the reason so many countries agreed to be part of the global order America helped to build after World War II is that this order has always been based on ideals, not just deals. Over the past 80 years, we have become so accustomed to those ideals that they have faded into the background. We take it for granted that the idea of Germany and France fighting a war is almost impossible to imagine, even though this status quo is one of the greatest political achievements in European history. We assume that the Western victory over Soviet tyranny in the Cold War was inevitable, even though that victory looked far from assured right up until the moment the Berlin Wall collapsed. We barely register the fact that war in Western Europe became obsolete while global GDP (adjusted for inflation) increased nearly 16-fold after World War II.

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In one sense, the post-ideological age of authoritarianism is a great historical concession to liberal democracy. Soviet communism was an expansionist ideology because the leaders of the USSR believed they offered a superior form of economic and political organization to Western capitalist democracy. By the end of the Cold War, this illusion had been shattered. Today’s authoritarian governments sometimes repeat the ideological slogans of an earlier era—the Chinese Communist Party is still in charge in Beijing, even though the country’s great escape from poverty and explosion of economic growth was due to market reforms after the horrors of Maoism. But to the extent that China or Russia have a state ideology today, it’s not communism—it’s nationalism, an ideology which by definition isn’t available for export.

Trump agrees with Putin and Lavrov that the world order should be one in which countries no longer care about democracy, human rights, or any other value beyond national self-interest or the raw exercise of power. But it will soon become clear that sacrificing America’s principles and alliances also means relinquishing its power. Trump is exchanging the values and institutions that made other countries want to cooperate with America for threats and coercion—the fickle form of power exercised by Russia and other aggressive dictatorships. By the time Americans realize what a disastrous deal this is, it may be too late to rebuild an order that has served the United States well for 80 years.

Matt Johnson is an essayist and the author of How Hitchens Can Save the Left: Rediscovering Fearless Liberalism in an Age of Counter-Enlightenment.

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