A powerful but anxious Chinese regime is now engaged in an aggressive effort to make the world safe for autocracy and to corrupt and destabilize democracies. Democracy promotion may be out of style in U.S. foreign policy, but democracy prevention is very much at the heart of Chinese strategy today.

Since ancient times, contests among great powers have often involved contests of ideas. The Peloponnesian War was not simply a clash between a regnant Sparta and a rising Athens, but also pitted a liberal, seagoing protodemocracy that saw itself as the “school of Hellas” against a militarized, agrarian slave state. The ideological threat that revolutionary France posed to the European order was just as serious as the military one. In the run-up to the Second World War, fascist powers and democracies squared off; during the Cold War, the superpowers divided much of the world along ideological lines.