The world has become normal again. The years immediately after the end of the cold war offered a tantalising glimpse of a new kind of international order, the hope that nations might grow together or disappear altogether, with ideological conflicts melting away, and cultures intermingling through free commerce and communications. That, however, was a mirage – the hopeful anticipation of a liberal, democratic world that wanted to believe the end of the cold war did not end just one strategic and ideological conflict but all such conflict.

The world has not been transformed: nations remain as strong, as ambitious, as passionate and as competitive as ever. While the United States is the only superpower, international competition among great powers is back. The United States, Russia, China, Europe, Japan, India, Iran and others vie for regional predominance. It is a time not of convergence but of divergence of ideas and ideologies.

The old competition between liberalism and absolutism has reemerged, with the nations of the world increasingly lining up between them or along the fault line of tradition and modernity – Islamic fundamentalism against the West.

The Islamists’ struggle against the powerful and often impersonal forces of modernisation, capitalism and glo-balisation is a significant fact of life in the world today, but oddly this struggle between modernisation and tradi-tionalism is largely a sideshow on the international stage. The future is more likely to be dominated by the ideological struggle among the great powers than by the effort of radical Islamists to restore an imagined past of piety.

The enduring ideological conflict since the Enlightenment has been the battle between liberalism and autocracy. That was the issue that divided the United States from much of Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and divided Europe itself into the 20th.

It seemed plausible in the 1990s that the death of communism would bring an end to disagreements about the proper form of government and society, when both Russia and China were thought to be moving towards political as well as economic liberalism. Many hoped the end of the cold war might herald a genuinely new era in human development.

But those expectations proved misplaced. China has not liberalised but has shored up its autocratic government. Russia has turned away from imperfect liberalism decisively towards autocracy.

Many assume that Russian and Chinese leaders do not believe in anything and therefore cannot be said to represent an ideology. But that is mistaken. The rulers of China and Russia do have a set of beliefs that guide them in both domestic and foreign policy. They believe autocracy is better for their nations than democracy. They believe it offers order and stability and the possibility of prosperity. They believe democracy is not the answer and that they are serving the best interests of their peoples by holding and wielding power the way they do.

This is not a novel or, from a historical perspective, even a disreputable idea. The European monarchies of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries were thoroughly convinced of the superiority of their form of government. They, too, disdained democracy as the rule of the licentious and greedy mob. Only in the past half century has liberalism gained widespread popularity around the world.

Even today some American thinkers exalt “liberal autocracy” over “illiberal democracy”. If the world’s two largest powers share a common commitment to autocratic government then autocracy is not dead as an ideology.

This has implications for international institutions and American foreign policy. It is no longer possible to speak of an “international community”. The term suggests agreement on international norms of behaviour, an international morality, even an international conscience. This idea took hold in the 1990s at a time when the general assumption was that the movement of Russia and China towards western liberalism was producing a global commonality of thinking about human affairs.

By the late 1990s it was already clear that the international community lacked a foundation of common understanding. This was exposed most blatantly in the war over Kosovo, which divided the liberal West from both Russia and China and from many other nonEuropean nations. Today it is apparent on the issue of Sudan and Darfur. In the future, incidents that expose the hollowness of the term “international community” may proliferate.

As for the United Nations security council, after a brief awakening from the cold war coma, it has fallen back to its former condition of near paralysis. The security council on most major issues is clearly divided between the autocracies and the democracies, with the latter systematically pressing for sanctions and other punitive actions against Iran, North Korea, Sudan and other autocracies, and the former just as systematically resisting and attempting to weaken the effect of such actions.

American foreign policy must be attuned to these more critical ideological distinctions. It is folly to expect China to help undermine a brutal regime in Khartoum or to be surprised if Russia rattles its sabre at pro-western democratic governments near its borders. There will be a tendency towards solidarity among the world’s autocracies as well as among the world’s democracies.

For all these reasons, the United States should pursue policies designed both to promote democracy and strengthen cooperation among the democracies. It should join with other democracies to erect new international institutions that both reflect and enhance their shared principles and goals – perhaps a new league of democratic states to hold regular meetings and consultations on the issues of the day.

Such an institution could bring together Asian nations such as Japan, Australia and India with the European nations – two sets of democracies that have comparatively little to do with each other outside the realms of trade and finance – and would complement, not replace, the United Nations, the G8 and other global forums.

In time, such a signal of commitment to the democratic idea may become a means of pooling the resources of democratic nations to address issues that cannot be addressed at the United Nations, able to bestow legitimacy on actions that liberal nations deem necessary but autocratic nations refuse to countenance – just as Nato conferred legitimacy on the conflict in Kosovo even though Russia was opposed.

Robert Kagan is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund Andrew Sullivan is away

Times Recommends

• Preening populism has put us off democracy
• In 2009 as in 1931, debts must be repaid
• Here’s where all the women get off