Why do democracies pretend to be powerless?

Democracies must define 21st century power — for themselves, and for Ukrainian victory

**The following is adapted from remarks delivered to the Future of Democracy Forum in Vilnius on 7 November 2024, on the topic of why it is that democracies, with more economic and military might, hold back in the fight against autocracy.

It seems like a particularly good week to talk about the future of democracy, near the end of a year of what feels by now like too many elections. And it is a good day to remember, really, that democracy is the greatest force ever to exist on the planet. Not strongmen, not dictatorship — but democracy. Inclusive systems that can disproportionately mobilize human will.

And will, actually, is the point — and for me, it has always been the answer to this question about what democracies can do to better use their disproportionate power to push back against the rise of autocratic powers.

In June, I was having dinner in Kyiv with a friend detailed to an embassy there. We were arguing about whether or not more could have been done to stop the full-scale invasion from happening, and I cited a casualty number as evidence that we should have done better. My friend dismissed this number and countered that it was probably ten times lower — a number that I don’t even believe covers the civilian losses in Mariupol. I responded with a short list of actions I believed could have been taken to actually deter the full-scale invasion.

Well yeah, my friend responded, but we were never going to do any of those things.

In essence — we were never going to stop the war.

We were never going to stop the war that Putin had painstakingly justified in a 10,000 word essay about how there is no Ukraine — and no Belarus — even though we understood that from the moment of the full-scale invasion’s initiation, it would achieve its goal of scattering part of the Ukrainian nation to the wind, separating Ukrainians from their land, their language, and their heritage. It would leave hundreds of thousands of other Ukrainians in graves, and at least tens of thousands — but likely hundreds of thousands — of children stolen from Ukraine’s next generation, slowly indoctrinated to become soldiers against their own nation. From the moment it began, the full-scale invasion achieved key objectives for the Kremlin. And we knew.

This summer was the 30th anniversary of President Bill Clinton’s first trip to the newly re-independent Baltic States. He went to Riga on July 6, 1994, where the Baltic presidents all gathered — of course all three together, the B3, as these three very different states have always acted since they won their freedom — to welcome him. I was curious, so I looked up Clinton’s speech*. It was a classic Clintonesque address, very well written, lots of references to the unique history of the Baltic states and their resistance movements, how they never surrendered their statehood even under occupation, how many Balts found their way to American shores and now bound our nations together.

But even then, in the second to last paragraph, were already the fruits of five years of warming relations between Washington and Moscow, the planting of the seeds of this idea that really it was Moscow that would be the force for good and for stability in these new and transitional states that Moscow had occupied for decades, and these “breakaway republics” were the dangerous ones, the “nationalists.” Clinton told the Baltic people they needed to find their own “better angels” and treat the former occupiers still living among them with justice and equality.

It’s a powerful reminder that for 30 years, we’ve been letting Russia frame its own narrative for us. For 30 years, we’ve been wrong about Russia — which means for 30 years, we’ve been wrong about ourselves, and about our understanding of power. And our failure to have to adapt during this whole arc of time is why we now absolutely suck at conceptualizing how to use power creatively.

The 20th century was one of careful symmetry. The 21st century is fundamentally asymmetric. And we have failed to see it.

I teach a lot of courses about whatever we want to call Russian hybrid warfare, and in it I use these 8 words to try to get my students to understand how Russians understand power. Asymmetry. Chaos. Informality. Deniability. Risk. Cynicism. Capture. Guerrilla (the use of irregular forces).

These are Russian strengths because of Russian weakness. They have to do these things. And these are areas where democracies are extremely uncomfortable operating.

For 30 years we’ve gotten Russia wrong. And during this time, they have sculpted our threat perception of them. They have sculpted how we viewed this region and how we viewed its possibilities — and thankfully the Baltic states ignored all the advice to wait and be patient and instead to push for first NATO and then EU membership, otherwise they too would still be waiting in a line. Russia has sculpted Ukraine’s perception of itself, and how we see Ukraine, too.

We are still trapped in this narrative box. And now it affects how we see ourselves.

Yes — autocracy is fast and decisive, and democracy is typically slow.

Yes — we had a generation of desert wars that made both the political class and the electorate reluctant and cautious in regard to new commitments for the use of force.

Yes — the economic upheaval of the pandemic lingers and clouds judgement and makes us think maybe these existential threats can continue to wait while we sort ourselves out at home.

We have things to lose, yes — and we don’t want to lose them. We think by not fighting, they can’t be lost. It’s a lovely idea, but unfortunately our desire not to lose things has been weaponized against us. Our adversaries make the right noises about taking things from us because they know no politician in a democratic system wants to deliver that message.

And actually this is a remarkable thing about President Trump. He is very good at convincing people with a hell of a lot to lose that really they have nothing to lose. And this becomes transformative.

So I’m going to offer four points.

First, relative strength is about will. Will is about decision-making, and in democracies there are consequences for decision-making that an increasingly careerist political class mostly is unwilling to face. And an increasingly online electorate expects to be able to mete out consequences with their thumbs if not at the ballot box.

Democracies have problems generated by billionaires with “I can go live in space”-level wealth, and democracies have problems adapting to technology — and obviously, those two things are heavily intertwined.

Democracies have not adapted to the speed of this century, and as long as we fail to meet this challenge, political forces that bring autocratic tactics to democratic systems will continue to win elections.

Speed and decisiveness are what autocracies — and private business — have that democracies usually do not. They are out-competing democracy, and increasingly they are moving toward the same unified endpoint.

Second, there is no future for democracy — any of our democracies — if we are not willing to hold Russians accountable for their illegal war of aggression in Ukraine, which is based on genocidal intentions, and do it for as long as it takes.

To the extent that we have had 70 years of relative democratic-led peace, it was because of international human rights law. Moscow has never viewed itself as accountable to the idea of international human rights law, which was established from the trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo. They view themselves as outside this system. And if we are not willing to end Russia’s role as chief disruptor of this framework, it is done.

Either we put Russia on trial in a generational justice initiative for all the war crimes they have committed in Ukraine since February 2022 — and use this as a vehicle to document the century of crimes for which Moscow will never stand trial — or we admit that we are too tired to defend the rules-based order any longer, and accept the century of chaotic nonlinearism that will come.

It will be ideal if some of the first to stand up for this idea of putting Russians on trial for as long as it takes were not just the Balts and Ukrainians, but the Russians and Belarusians whose own history has also been stolen from them. I think a lot about this exchange of letters between Karagodin and the granddaughter of his grandfather’s executioner*, and an unknown history that leaves victims and executioners in one family. The security state will always rule Russia while its history remains obscured.

Third, we need to understand that everything is now about information dominance, the counterbalance of which is psychological defense. We must be comfortable operating in both of these spaces as modern democracies.

Finally, we need to break free from this 30 year old box of smoke and mirrors. We must end the idea of Russian sanctuary — the idea that we cannot touch Russia — which absolutely poisons our analytical abilities. We need to define strategies for 21st century war termination that also confront hybrid wars.

And this also, of course, begins with how we end Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine.

Our only chance comes from Ukraine — from how we win in Ukraine, and what can be born from the revitalization of order that comes after Ukraine.

Otherwise, it’s just gonna be chaos monkeys all the way down.

Why were we never going to do any of those things? Why were we never going to try to stop the full-scale invasion? If we do not ask ourselves this question every day while Ukrainians are dying for us — why were we not willing to use our power to prevent this barbarism and the spiraling instability carried outward from it — then we don’t understand the costs of our inaction, and we still do not see what must be done. We still don’t see the box we have been in for too long.

Earlier this year, not far from here, at the Vilnius Security Forum, Lt Gen Ben Hodges (ret), former commander of US Army Europe, detailed the incredible will and leadership that was needed to get an America dead-set on not getting involved in Europe — an America with the 14th largest military in the world, smaller then than the Italian army at the time — from Pearl Harbor to victory in WWII*. It was a powerful reminder that we can do anything we choose to do.

A reminder that we too, as the West, have “go live in space”-level money and the technology to get there — if we choose to.

But this is a matter of will.

—MM

Clinton speech: https://clintonwhitehouse6.archives.gov/1994/07/1994-07-06-president-and-latvia-president-freedom-monument-riga.html

Karagodin letters: https://www.rferl.org/a/stalin-great-terror-search-for-great-grandfather-executioners-reconciliation-russia/28131158.html

Hodges speech available via: https://twitter.com/mollymckew/status/1762008633192144976?s=46&t=EL4_YsxunSzIMapQAjHfZg