US must exploit divisions between dictators, not bridge them

Iran's stunning rebuke of Russia earlier this week - revoking Moscow's just-announced airbase on its territory - should be an encouragement to the free world that the emergent authoritarian axis is anything but united.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and Maoist China became bitter enemies as both consolidated respective spheres of influence and no longer felt threatened by the prospect of direct US aggression, knowing that Washington would at most fight proxy wars (i.e. Vietnam), and even then relatively halfheartedly because they were a great ocean away. This same dynamic of the natural antipathy of dictatorships towards each other - they're only conveniently allied against the free world when they perceive it to be the greater common enemy - can readily be leveraged to America's advantage today, as well.

But this requires a fundamental shift in US thinking befitting the transition from the post-Cold War to the post-post-Cold War period. From 1989 to 2014, the sheer force of the supposed "end of history" made US foreign policy almost exclusively based on a conviction that free-market democracy both can and should be spread to the rest of the world through active economic and political initiative.

Since 2014, however, with Russia's seizure of Crimea and aggressive intervention in eastern Ukraine and Syria, along with China's creeping annexation of the East and South China Seas and Iran's dramatically escalated assertiveness in expanding the "Shia crescent" across Mesopotamia and the Levant, the US liberal project has been confronted with serious setbacks to which Washington's still preponderant hard power superiority (in economic and military terms) appears to have no sufficient answer. That's naturally because, as ever, these far-away affairs simply don't entail core American interests to the same degree as for the great Eurasian powers.

More recently, Turkey's assertion of autonomy from the US and NATO - striking out on its own now in northern Syria against both ISIS and the Kurds - conclusively shows that even longtime American allies feel an unmistakable need to take more proactive charge of their own security affairs, even if it means more naked pursuit of sheer Machiavellian interests that are fundamentally at odds with the progressive US worldview.

Going forward, this means US global influence will depend on skillfully playing off autocratic or autocratic-leaning regimes against each other, rather than still trying to democratize or liberalize them. The US must exploit divisions between dictators and strongmen-type democrats, not bridge them.

Of course, it's out of the question to abandon altogether the long-term goal of global free-market democratization and political and social liberalization: these are as ever worthy eventualities to pursue. But the US needs new leverage over its rivals and even friends: it can't be seen to keep retreating by drawing red lines it knows it can't enforce.

The authoritarians must be made to recognize that they're actually better off with a strong US presence in their neighborhood, so long as it's not an imperious one, because the alternative is to revert to the traditional mode of great-power confrontation and unstable systems of alliances that have dominated civilizational statecraft for millennia, and which reached their destructive crescendo in the two world wars. Not only would this benefit America from a hard-power, realist strategic perspective: it also ensures the continuation of American soft-power influence in what could otherwise devolve back into decidedly regressive and reactionary societies and cultures.