Is 'autocracy' really America's mortal enemy?

WND ^ | 08/22/2022 | Pat Buchanan

[Jan_Sobieski]

In the aftermath of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, President Joe Biden declared to the nation and world: "We are engaged anew in a great battle for freedom. A battle between democracy and autocracy."

On her trip to Taiwan, Speaker Nancy Pelosi echoed Biden: "Today, the world faces a choice between democracy and autocracy. America's determination to preserve democracy here in Taiwan and in the world remains iron-clad."

But is this truly the world struggle America is in today?

Is this the great challenge and threat to the United States?

Are autocracy and democracy in a climactic ideological crusade to determine the destiny of mankind?

For if that is the future, it is surely not America's past.

Indeed, in the two-century rise of the United States to world preeminence and power, autocrats have proven invaluable allies.

When the fate of the Revolution hung in the balance in 1778, the decision of an autocratic French king to enter the war on America's side elated Gen. George Washington, and French intervention proved decisive in the 1781 Battle of Yorktown that secured our independence.

A decade later, King Louis XVI would be overthrown in the French Revolution and guillotined along with Queen Marie Antoinette.

In World War I in 1918, the U.S. sent millions of troops into battle in France. They proved decisive in the victory over the kaiser's Germany.

Our allies in that Great War?

The British, French, Russian, Italian and Japanese empires, the greatest imperial and colonial powers of that day…

[Olog-hai]

Autocracy isn’t absolute power? I’ve never seen it defined otherwise, at least from the nineteenth century onwards. What’s true is that an autocrat need not be a totalitarian, but the temptation of power still requires a check.

Constitutional monarchies, where the parliament holds a check on the monarch, are not autocracies. For George VI to have been an autocrat, the parliament that Winston Churchill presided over would have had to have been a toy parliament that passed (rubber-stamped) royal decrees disguised as acts of parliament.

[who_would_fardels_bear]

It wasn’t just Buchanan who made the distinction between autocracy and totalitarianism. Jeanne Kirkpatrick wrote that famous essay which is generally well regarded throughout the foreign policy community.