In recent years, as the great autocracies of Russia and China have risen and the radical Islamists have waged their struggle, the liberal world has been divided and distracted by issues both profound and petty. The great democracies have squabbled and jostled for the moral high ground, debated the fine points of international law, argued the relative merits of hard and soft power and commented endlessly on each other’s moral and ethical failings.

These arguments were affordable luxuries in an imagined era of international harmony, but not in the time of troubles that the world has actually entered. History has returned and the peoples of the liberal world need to choose to shape it or let others shape it for them.

In the early 1990s optimism was understandable. In a globalised economy, it was widely believed, nations had no choice but to liberalise, first economically, then politically, if they wanted to compete and survive. Their citizens would seek prosperity and comfort and abandon the atavistic passions, the struggles for honour and glory, and the tribal hatreds that had produced conflict throughout history. In the battle of ideas, liberalism had triumphed. As Francis Fukuyama famously put it: “At the end of history, there are no serious ideological competitors left to liberal democracy.”

The world was not witnessing a transformation, however, merely a pause in the endless competition of nations and peoples. Nationalism, far from being weakened by globalisation, has now returned with a vengeance. Furthermore, growing national wealth and autocracy have proven compatible, after all. Autocrats learn and adjust. The autocracies of Russia and China have figured out how to permit open economic activity while suppressing political activity. They have seen that people making money will keep their noses out of politics, especially if they know their noses will be cut off.

A majority of Russians seem content with autocratic rule. Unlike the tumultuous democracy of the 1990s, the present government has at least produced a rising standard of living. President Putin’s efforts to undo the humiliating postcold war settlement and restore the greatness of Russia is popular. His political advisers believe that “avenging the demise of the Soviet Union will keep us in power”.

The Chinese learnt from the Soviet experience, too. While the liberal world waited after Tiananmen Square for China to resume its inevitable course towards liberal democratic modernity, the Communist party leadership set about shoring up its dominance in the nation. Keen observers of the Chinese political system see a sufficient combination of competence and ruthlessness on the part of the Chinese leadership to handle problems as they arise and a populace prepared to accept autocratic government so long as economic growth continues.

In the long run, rising prosperity may well produce political liberalism, but how long is the long run? It may be too long to have any strategic or geopolitical relevance. As the old joke goes, Germany launched itself on a trajectory of economic modernisation in the late 19th century and within six decades became a fully fledged democracy. The only problem was what happened in the intervening years.

So the world waits for change, but in the meantime two of the world’s largest nations, Russia and China, with more than 1.5 billion people and the second and third largest militaries between them, have governments committed to autocratic rule and may be able to sustain themselves in power for the foreseeable future.

This is going to shape the international system in profound ways. The world is not about to embark on an ideological struggle of the kind that dominated the cold war. But the new era, rather than being a time of “universal values”, will be one of growing tensions and sometimes confrontation between the forces of liberal democracy and those of autocracy.

The presumption over the past decade has been that when Chinese and Russian leaders stopped believing in communism, they stopped believing in anything. They had become pragmatists, without ideology or belief, simply pursuing their own and their nation’s interests. But the rulers of China and Russia, like the rulers of autocracies in the past, do have a set of beliefs that guide them in both domestic and foreign policy.

They believe in the virtues of a strong central government and disdain the weaknesses of the democratic system. They believe their large and fractious nations need order and stability to prosper. They believe the vacillations and chaos of democracy would impoverish and shatter their nations and in the case of Russia already did so. They believe that strong rule at home is necessary if their nations are to be strong and respected in the world, capable of safeguarding and advancing their interests.

Chinese and Russian leaders are not just autocrats, therefore. They actually believe in autocracy. By providing order, by producing economic success, by holding their nations together and leading them to a position of international influence, respectability and power, they believe they are serving their people. Nor is it at all clear, for the moment, that the majority of people they rule in either China or Russia disagree.

For all their growing wealth and influence, however, the 21st-century autocracies are a minority in the world. The postcold war landscape looks very different when seen from autocratic Beijing and Moscow than it does from democratic Washington, London, Paris, Berlin or Brussels.

In the 1990s the liberal world led by the United States toppled autocratic governments in Panama and Haiti and made war against Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia twice. International nongovernmental organisations, well funded by western governments, trained opposition parties and supported electoral reforms in central and eastern Europe and in central Asia. In 2000 internationally financed opposition forces and international election monitors finally brought down Milosevic. Within a year he was shipped off to the Hague and five years later he was dead in prison.

From 2003 to 2005, western democratic countries and NGOs provided pro-western and pro-democratic parties and politicians the financing and organisational help that allowed them to topple other autocrats in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine and Lebanon.

Europeans and Americans saw in these revolutions the natural unfolding of humanity’s destined political evolution towards liberal democracy. Leaders in Beijing and Moscow saw them in geopolitical terms as western-funded, CIA-inspired coups that furthered the hegemony of America and its European allies.

The upheavals in Ukraine and Georgia further poisoned the Rus-sian-western relationship and helped persuade the Kremlin to complete its turnaround in foreign policy.

Putin feared the examples of Ukraine and Georgia could be repeated in Russia. They convinced him by 2006 to control, restrict and in some cases close down the activities of international NGOs. His worries may seem absurd, or disingenuous, but they are not misplaced. In the postcold war era, a triumphant liberalism has sought to expand its triumph by establishing as an international principle the right of the “international community” to intervene against sovereign states that abuse the rights of their people.

International NGOs interfere in domestic politics; international bodies like the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) monitor and pass judgment on elections; international legal experts talk about modifying international law to include such novel concepts as “the responsibility to protect” or a “voluntary sovereignty waiver”. In theory, these innovations apply to everyone. In practice, they chiefly provide liberal nations with the right to intervene in the affairs of nonliberal nations.

This has become one of the great schisms in the international system. For three centuries international law, with its strictures against interference in the internal affairs of nations, has tended to protect autocracies. Now the liberal world is in the process of removing that protection, while the autocrats rush to defend the principle of sovereign inviolability.

The war in Kosovo in 1999 was a more disturbing turning point for Russia and China than the Iraq war of 2003. Both opposed Nato’s intervention and not only because China’s embassy was bombed by an American warplane and Russia’s distant Slavic cousins in Serbia were on the receiving end of the Nato onslaught.

When Russia threatened to block military action at the UN security council, Nato simply sidestepped the UN and took it upon itself to author-ise action, thus negating one of Russia’s few tools of international influence. Years later Putin was still insisting that the western nations “leave behind this disdain for international law” and not attempt to “substitute Nato or the EU for the UN”.

The Russians and Chinese were on solid ground legally. At the time, no less an authority than Henry Kissinger warned that “the abrupt abandonment of the concept of national sovereignty” risked a world unmoored from any notion of international legal order. The United States, of course, paid this little heed – it had intervened and overthrown sovereign governments dozens of times throughout its history. But even postmodern Europe set aside legal niceties in the interest of what it regarded as a higher morality.

The conflict between international law and liberal morality is one that the liberal democracies have not been able to finesse. As Chinese officials asked at the time of Tiananmen Square and have continued to ask: “What right does the US government have to . . . flagrantly interfere in China’s internal affairs?”

What right, indeed? Only the liberal creed grants the right, the belief that all men are created equal and have certain inalienable rights that must not be abridged by governments, that governments derive their power and legitimacy only from the consent of the governed and have a duty to protect their citizens’ right to life, liberty and property.

To those who share this liberal faith, foreign policies and even wars that defend these principles, as in Kosovo, can be right even if established international law says they are wrong. But to the Chinese, Russians and others who do not share this world view, the United States and its democratic allies succeed in imposing their views on others not because they are right but because they are powerful enough to do so. To nonliberals, the international liberal order is not progress. It is oppression.

This is more than a dispute over theory and the niceties of international jurisprudence. It concerns the fundamental legitimacy of governments, which for autocrats can be a matter of life and death. China’s rulers haven’t forgotten that if the liberal democratic world had had its way after the events at Tienanman Square in 1989, they would now be out of office, possibly imprisoned or worse.

American and European policy-makers constantly say they want Russia and China to integrate themselves into the international liberal order, but it is not surprising if Russian and Chinese leaders are wary. Can autocrats enter the liberal international order without succumbing to the forces of liberalism?

Afraid of the answer, the autocracies are understandably pushing back and with some effect. Rather than accept the new principles of diminished sovereignty and weakened international protection for autocrats, Russia and China are trying to promote an international order that places a high value on national sovereignty and can protect autocratic governments from foreign interference.

Russia and China need to make the world safer for autocracy. They are succeeding, as one would expect. They may no longer actively export an ideology, but they can and do offer autocrats somewhere to run to when the liberal democracies turn hostile. The Chinese provide unfettered aid to dictatorships in Africa and Asia., undermining the “international community’s” efforts to press for reforms – which in practical terms often means regime change – in countries such as Burma and Zimbabwe. Russia’s model of “sovereign democracy” is attractive among the autocrats of central Asia.

In fact, a global competition is under way. According to Russia’s foreign minister, “for the first time in many years, a real competitive environment has emerged on the market of ideas” between different “value systems and development models”. And the good news, from the Russian point of view, is that “the West is losing its monopoly on the globalisation process”.

This competition is not quite the cold war redux. But it is worth contemplating what the world would look like, what Europe would look like, if democratic movements in Ukraine and Georgia failed or were forcefully suppressed and the two nations became autocracies with close ties to Moscow. It is worth considering what the effect would be on east Asia if China used force to quash a democratic system in Taiwan and install a friendlier autocracy in its place.

It may not come to war, but the global competition between liberal and autocratic governments will likely intensify in coming years. The future international order will be shaped by those who have the power and the collective will to shape it. The question is whether the world’s liberal democracies will again rise to that challenge.

© Robert Kagan 2008

Extracted from The Return of History and the End of Dreams by Robert Kagan, to be published by Atlantic Books on Thursday at £12.99. Copies can be ordered for £11.69, including postage, from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585

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